My manuscript is completed and has been dispatched to London, so last night I actually started reading a non-academic book, the first in a year or more. I didn’t last long, between the covers and between the sheets, because I’m tired, but it was novel. The book in question was almost-academic, so it was a good transition: Novel Houses by Christina Hardyment, featuring 20 “famous fictional dwellings,” including everything from Horace Walpole to Hogwarts. This morning I read it right through: a very pleasant read with great illustrations, so I thought I would showcase some of them here. Hardyment chose novels in which the plot is dominated by a structure, so much so that the latter is almost like a character: Walpole’s Castle of Otronto, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables (of course, but is this a fictional house?), Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton, John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, E.M. Forster’s Howards End, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando & Vita Sackville West’s The Edwardians, Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter.
In no particular order: Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, Jane Austen’s ancestral home Chawton, inspiration for many of her novels, 1913 edition of The House of the Seven Gables, an advertisement for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1949 edition of I Capture the Castle, Knole, inspiration for Woolf’s Orlando, Galsworthy’s drawing of the fictional “Robin Hill” in The Forsyte Saga, the first edition of Rebecca, cool cover for Cold Comfort Farm, Hobbit houses, Beacon Towers on Long Island Sound, which might have inspired Gatsby’s mansion in West Egg.
Some chapters worked better than others for me in terms of inspirational houses: I haven’t read Peake or Conan Doyle, or The Spoils of Poynton. I think perhaps Manderley and Brideshead are the strongest house-characters. It’s difficult for me to think of the Gables as simply a fictional house, because it actually exists, but it bears remembering that it did not in Hawthorne’s time.
I would love to get some more suggestions for novels in which houses play a major role in the plot, not just the setting.
February 27th, 2021 at 1:39 pm
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson would be a great entry for this subject.
February 27th, 2021 at 1:42 pm
Oh yeah, that’s perfect!
February 27th, 2021 at 4:07 pm
Hobberty Dick by Katherine Briggs
February 27th, 2021 at 4:45 pm
Thanks!
February 27th, 2021 at 4:54 pm
Hi Donna,
Kudos on finishing your work! What an interesting read – my favorites would be REBECCA, BRIDESHEAD REVISITED, and West Egg in GREAT GATSBY.
“I would love to get some more suggestions for novels in which houses play a major role in the plot, not just the setting.” What about TARA in Gone with the Wind?
February 28th, 2021 at 10:12 am
oh absolutely!
February 27th, 2021 at 8:20 pm
I’ve always felt Thornfield (Jane Eyre) had a major part to play.
February 27th, 2021 at 8:41 pm
Oh, I so agree…Thornfield Hall, even the name, reveals the pain and pleasures Jane experienced there. My all-time favorite novel!
February 28th, 2021 at 10:13 am
I agree too. Any time there’s a FIRE in the house you’ve got to agree that it’s a major “character”.
February 28th, 2021 at 12:26 am
Howard’s End, Small House at Allington (?I hardly remember it, but read these first two the summer I was 17 & loved them both so much they are entertwined for me, but seemed twinned at the time, too.)
February 28th, 2021 at 12:28 am
[“These two”, not first two—I meant to go on with more]
February 28th, 2021 at 10:15 am
Thanks for the recommendation–don’t know Allington.
February 28th, 2021 at 6:28 am
Thank you….Donna. A must read…..what an intriguing concept.