Novel Houses by Christina Hardyment review – famous fictional dwellings

From Howards End to Bag End, fictional houses can be as characterful as the people who live in them

Where, or rather what, would Rebecca be without Manderley, The Forsyte Saga without Robin Hill or Howards End without, well, Howards End? In this collection of 20 sparkling mini-essays, Christina Hardyment sets out to show how bricks and mortar make compelling fictional characters just as surely as skin and bone. Skilfully deploying biography, close reading and psychogeography, Hardyment creates a series of charming house portraits, starting with Horace Walpole’s gothic castle of Otranto (1764) and winding up with the equally crenellated Hogwarts, courtesy of JK Rowling (1997-2007). Along the way we stop off at Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and JRR Tolkien’s Bag End (1937).

You can’t help noticing that there aren’t many airy, well-lit interiors in evidence here. No one seems keen on open plan, cleaning up or putting things away in their proper place. Instead, corridors twist and turn to nowhere, paintings of fussy-looking ancestors stare from the wall and talismanic objects – books, a dagger, an out-of-place saucepan – are left lying carelessly around just waiting to make mischief. This must be because the houses that authors create in their imaginations are dragged up from the twistiest parts of their unconscious, replicating those hidden corners where neurosis and creativity do their special dance. It is also, Hardyment suggests, because authors frequently base their fictional houses on their own beloved homes, which – surprise – turn out to be hugger-mugger too.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2r01Zvt