Housing, Class and Gender in Modern British Writing, 1880–2012

Domestic interiors and housing environments have historically been portrayed as a framing device for the representation of individuals and social groups. Drawing together a wide and eclectic collection of well known, and less familiar, works by writers including Charles Booth, Octavia Hill, James Joyce, Pat O'Mara, Rose Macaulay, Patrick Hamilton, Sam Selvon, Sarah Waters, Lynsey Hanley and Andrea Levy, the author reflects upon and challenges various myths and truisms of 'home' through an analysis of four distinct British settings: slums, boarding houses, working-class childhood homes and housing estates. Her exploration of works of social investigation, fiction and life writing leads to an intricate stock of housing tales that are inherited, shifting and always revealing about the culture of our times. This book seeks to demonstrate how depictions of domestic space - in literature, history and other cultural forms - tell powerful and unexpected stories of class, gender, social belonging and exclusion.

Introduction; 1. Slums: reading and writing the dwellings of the urban poor; 2. Boarding and lodging houses: at home with strangers; 3. Unhomely homes: life writing of the postwar 'scholarship' generation; 4. Estates: social housing in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and culture; Conclusion: housing questions.

Emily Cuming is Research Fellow in the School of English at the University of Leeds.