Many beloved novels have place at their heart—and often even in their title. Hardyment visits unforgettable dwellings in twenty legendary works of English and American fiction.
... 20 sparkling mini-essays ... Skilfully deploying biography, close reading and psychogeography, Hardyment creates a series of charming house portraits ... In truth, Hardyment has not found much new to say about these literary homes but, like an excellent housekeeper, she rearranges and polishes up the furniture in such a way that you find yourself inclined to linger. Nor is her job always quite as easy or obvious as you might at first think. Literary houses have a disconcerting habit of either disappearing halfway through a text, or switching places with an uncanny twin.
... agreeable ... Hardyment’s commentary jogs us along at a comfortable pace ... We may not have needed telling that the current and very well-visited residence of Sherlock Holmes on London’s Baker Street was recreated on the site of a bank, or that Henry James regarded the country house as one of England’s greatest achievements ... Surprises do occasionally emerge ... Chapters on Daphne du Maurier’s Manderley, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead and E.M. Forster’s Howards End feel a little too predictable ... Perhaps Hardyment’s decision to focus almost exclusively on Britain is meant to highlight a fearful island’s crawl toward ever greater insularity. But I did regret the absence of Colette’s influential childhood home and Lampedusa’s great Sicilian palaces. A larger study would have done more honor to Bachelard’s wonderfully suggestive arguments about the uncommon ability of houses to haunt our fiction-making minds.
... a lively literary gazetteer to great imaginative homes ... If you like nuggets about niches and gleanings about gables, you’ll love this book ... Much of the pleasure of this book lies in through-the-keyhole gawping ... If some of the chapters feel familiar, others surprise ... This is the perfect Christmas book. Curl up beside your own Lytel Fire-place and imagine yourself among the comforts of the Shire.
