Includes bibliographical references (pages 240-244) and index.
Contents:
Introduction: The house as hero -- A triumphant illusion: Horace Walpole's The castle of Otranto (1764) -- The bewildered house: Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814) -- Bridging two worlds: Walter Scott's Waverly (1814) -- A plague on both your houses: Emily Brontèˆ's Wuthering Heights (1847) -- Dark romance: Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851) -- Tomb for the living: Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852-53) -- Kitchen table society: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's cabin (1852) -- Bachelor lair: Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes (1887-1927) -- Household gods: Henry James's The spoils of Poynton (1896) -- Property: John Galsworthy's The Forsyte saga (1906-21) -- Anchorage: E.M. Forster's Howard's End (1910) -- Colossal illusion: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The great Gatsby (1925) -- The queerest sense of echo: Virginia Woolfe's Orlando (1928) & Vita Sackville West's The Edwardians (1930) -- Sheer flapdoodle: Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm (1932) -- House of secrets: Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1938) -- A household of the faith: Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead revisited (1945) -- The sorcerer's tower: Dodie Smith's I capture the castle (1948) -- Vast shambles: Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast (1947-59) -- Deep roots: J. R. R. Tolkien's The hobbit (1937) & The lord of the rings (1954-55) -- Castle of ancient magic: J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter (1997-2007) -- Afterword -- Gazetteer.
Summary:
Novel Houses' visits unforgettable dwellings in twenty legendary works of English and American fiction. Each chapter stars a famous novel in which a dwelling is pivotal to the plot, and reveals how personally significant that place was to the writer who created it. We discover Uncle Tom's Cabin's powerful influence on the American Civil War, how essential 221B Baker Street was to Sherlock Holmes and the importance of Bag End to the adventuring hobbits who called it home. It looks at why Bleak House is used as the name of a happy home and what was on Jane Austen's mind when she worked out the plot of Mansfield Park. Little-known background on the dwellings at the heart of Emily Brontèˆ's Wuthering Heights, Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast and Stella Gibbon's Cold Comfort Farm emerges, and the real life settings of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca and E.M. Forster's Howards End, so fundamental to their stories, are shown to relate closely to their authors' passions and preoccupations. A winning combination of literary criticism, geography and biography, this is an entertaining and insightful celebration of beloved novels and the extraordinary role that houses grand and small, imagined and real, or unique and ordinary, play in their continuing popularity.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.