The archetype of the English country house is put under scrutiny in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. Recently re-bought by a rich American, the novel is set at Darlington Hall, a country manner where Stevens works as the butler. The story is told in flashbacks where he remembers the events of the 1920s and 1930s, when the house, under his old master Lord Darlington, hosted Nazi sympathisers. His dogged allegiance to Darlington also means his attraction to the housekeeper Miss Kenton remains tragically unfulfilled.
The second in Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy, Transit tells the story of a writer, Faye, who, having left her husband, finds herself undertaking a flat renovation which even the estate agent had told her was not worth the trouble. Faye sits in the darkness watching her other neighbours, a perfect nuclear family, barbecuing outside. With Mr and Mrs Twit-esque neighbours downstairs giving her grief for every noise she makes, the flat becomes a metaphor for Faye's own life, something which, against all odds, she is trying to rebuild.
Fatigued and disenchanted by everything her life has to offer, the nameless heroine of Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, decides (with the help of prescription medication) to go to sleep for a year. The smart apartment on the Upper East Side is paid for by the heroine's inheritance (both her parents are dead). The bland property becomes the background for the heroine's loneliness and disassociation, as well as her increasingly colourful sleeping activities.
The Hours, Michael Cunningham’s 1998 novel is a reworking of Virginia Woolf’s modernist classic Mrs Dalloway. A story told in three strands – around a 1950s housewife and Virginia Woolf’s late life – the third strand, set In late 1990s New York, Clarissa Vaughn is also planning a party, in this case to celebrate the literary life of her AIDS-afflicted friend. Granted, Clarissa spends the day outside, buying the flowers herself. Yet whilst Clarissa finds a sense of liberation in her ambling around New York, her novelist friend, whom she visits ailing in his apartment, finds himself tragically entrapped.
Hanya Yanagihara’s follow up to A Little Life, was influenced by Michael Cunningham and also takes place in New York City. Via one house on Washington Square, it explores the city's past, present and future, from its opulent, 1890s heyday to 2070 when the building has been divided up into functional flats.
Shirley Jackson is a master of psychological horror. Claustrophobia comes to the fore in her final novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle in which two sisters, one of whom is agoraphobic, and their invalid uncle are holed up in the house they have lived in alone since the mysterious deaths of their entire family over dinner one night. Increasingly isolated from the outside world, the family setting becomes anything but homely.
Virginia Woolf was deeply inspired by Talland House, her childhood summer home in St Ives, counting her time there as her most happy. Echoes of the house come through in many of her novels, such as The Waves, Mrs Dalloway and Jacob's Room but most of all in To The Lighthouse, a novel about the Ramsay family's summer home in a rocky Scottish coastal town. With a narrative that shifts between subjectivities and explores the strange passage of time, the house, and the nearby lighthouse, stay as a constant.
‘For a long time, I went to bed early.’ So opens Swann's Way, the first volume in Marcel Proust's epic autobiography In Search of Lost Time. The first novel focuses on the author's childhood country home in Combray, Normandy, with his hazy impressions and memories of parties hosted by his high society parents. He also includes description of the hawthorns and apple trees that led to the residence of the eponymous, but unattainable Swann, which obsesses the young narrator.
Perhaps the most famous “big house” story ever, this novel tells the story of middle-class Oxford graduate Charles Ryder and his relationships with the aristocratic inhabitants of Brideshead Castle. Filled with arches and broken pediments, it is thought to have been inspired by Madresfield (featured in the June 2014 issue of House & Garden), though in the subsequent TV adaptation of 1981, Castle Howard in Yorkshire stood in for Brideshead, and did so again when the a film version was released in 2008.
Peculiar Ground focuses on four centuries of activity at Wychwood, a 17th-century Oxfordshire estate. Much is made of the garden, designed by a visionary landscaper but subject to change over the years, so that the novel incorporates the history of garden design.
Do we need to explain this one? Jay Gatsby, the self-made millionaire eccentric at the heart of Fitzgerald’s best known novel, lives in a New England mansion on the headland of West Egg, and it is strongly implied that he only ever built the house at huge expense to try to win back his former love, Daisy Buchanan. It doesn’t work. West Egg, home to those from “new money” in contrast to the East Egg summer mansions of the long-established New York elite into which Daisy has married, becomes a symbol of the fact Gatsby will never be accepted into society, no matter how rich he becomes. His splendid, decadent house is little more than – that’s right – a gilded cage.
The houses of Pride & Prejudice are not simply conspicuous symbols for social prestige, they are also a means of better understanding Austen’s characters. It is when Elizabeth Bennet sees Pemberley for the first time that she truly begins to consider Mr Darcy in a favourable light. So while the studio flat you are currently holed up in might not be as ‘lofty and handsome’ as the rooms of Pride & Prejudice, you can, at least for the duration of the book, imagine you are spending your life wafting around in a bonnet in a capacious Georgian pile.
A fragmentary, complicated fantasy novel that was one of few contemporary works of fiction to earn the praise of notoriously sniffy cultural critic Harold Bloom when it was published in 1981, Little, Big focuses on the Drinkwater family, whose massive house north of New York City, named Edgewood, may have been the site of a deal between a Drinkwater ancestor and the fairies that live in the woods around it. The house, of course, is a portal to another realm and a byzantine maze of corridors, attics and empty, dusty rooms, supposedly built in manifold different architectural styles to protect its own secrets; it proves the starting point of a deeply idiosyncratic cult novel.
A wealthy widower and his unnamed new wife live at Manderley, the gothic house previously inhabited by the husband and his first wife, Mrs de Winter. Her ‘ghost’ is ever-present in the claustrophobic house and looms over the new relationship, along with the strange figure of Mrs Danvers.
The story opens with Cassandra Mortmain sitting in the kitchen sink. ‘I have found that sitting in a place you have never sat before can be inspiring’ she writes. ‘I wrote my very best poem while sitting on the hen-house.’ You too could create your very best spreadsheet from atop your laundry basket or perched on the bathroom basin, though in fact Cassandra lives in a crumbling Sussex castle with her eccentric family, who are somewhat down on their luck – and this is her story. It is a novel about growing up, heartbreak and understanding the world around you for the first time.
The Pickle and the Lamb families, due to economic circumstances, must share a house in Perth, Australia. The mad and bustling pile is the site of deaths and births, affairs and marriages, all of which are defined by the ramshackle location.
A coming-of-age story set in Florence – with an excellent adaptation starring a young Helena Bonham-Carter as ingénue Lucy Honeychurch with Maggie Smith as her chaperone - as the title suggests interiors and exteriors play an important role. Whilst in Florence the heroine marvels at ‘the lights dancing in the Arno and the cypresses of San Miniato, and the foothills of the Apennines, black against the rising moon’ whilst the realities of life beckon to her at Windy Corner – a stultifying house in the Surrey Hills with heavy curtains and dour Victorian furniture.
Four siblings decamp to their crumbling inherited family home in rural Devon for the summer holidays. The house forms the backdrop to their conversations and tensions; just as the building begins to crumble, so do the family’s bonds.
This series of novels by Elizabeth Jane Howard is something of a Trojan Horse. Though there are moments of happiness and levity, tragedy and shrewd observations on the human condition creep in at every turn. Beautifully written and endlessly witty, these books explore the changing fortunes of the Cazalet family, with much of the action happening at Home Place, their sprawling Sussex house.
