The Country House Revisited

Variations on a Theme from Forster to Hollinghurst

Tereza Topolovská

• Publisher: Karolinum Press, Charles University
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9788024642321
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

From Howard's End to Brideshead Revisited, this book explores the leitmotif of the English country house in twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction, with a focus on the works of E. M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Iris Murdoch, Alan Hollinghurst, and Sarah Waters. Integrating wider social and cultural contexts with contemporary architectural developments, Tereza Topolovská reveals that the variety of literary depictions of the country house reflects the physical diversification of buildings that can be classified as such, from smaller variants to formerly grand residences on the brink of physical collapse. Within the scope of contemporary fiction, architecture, and poetics of space, the country house—with its uniquely integrating and exceptionally evocative qualities—accentuates different conceptions of dwelling. Consequently, literary portrayals of the country house can be seen as both prefiguring and reflecting the contemporary practice of living.

1. Introduction:
The Country House Revisited

And suddenly a new and secret landscape opened before us.

(Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, 39)

More than the work of the great architects, I loved buildings that grew silently with the centuries, catching and keeping the best of each generation, while time curbed the artist’s pride and the Philistine’s vulgarity, and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman. In such buildings England abounded, and in the last decade of their grandeur, Englishmen seemed for the first time to become conscious of what before was taken for granted, and to salute their achievements at the moment of their extinction.

(Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, 260–1)

The standing of the house as a literary symbol, setting, motif and subject reflects its vital role in human life. The focal point of this monograph is literary renditions of a typical English variant of this phenomenon, the country house, in twentieth and twenty-first century fiction. Both its contemporary standing and previous development are studied in the wider historical, cultural, philosophical and literary contexts. The diversity of the literary portrayals, which feature stately homes as well smaller, less ostentatious forms such as ancient converted farms, reflects the resonance of the country house in English culture. Whereas the opening of this work traces various theoretical approaches to the house in general, be it through architecture, philosophy, spatial poetics, history or literature, the following sections evolve exclusively around the country house. First, it is interpreted from the perspective of attempts at authentic dwelling in the countryside performed in two different novels, namely E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) and Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea (1978). Although these works herald current, post-millennial ecological anxieties, it is the following part of the book that revolves around contemporary variations on the theme, such as Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger (2009), Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child (2011), and Sadie Jones’s Uninvited Guests (2012), stressing predominantly the various types of decline and transformation of the country house as well as their firm, intertextual ties with their literary predecessors.

A number of publications and monographs concerning various aspects of country houses, predominantly their cultural, historical or artistic significance, is published every year. Nevertheless, works dealing specifically with country house fiction and the relationship between the country house and English literature are relatively scarce. No systematic theoretical study has been published since Malcom Kelsall’s 1993 contribution, The Great Good Place: The Country House and English Literature. However, both the country house and country house fiction have been discussed by prominent authors, such as Raymond Williams in his seminal work on the conception of rural and urban existence within the English tradition, The Country and the City (1973). There he marked the country house as an exclusive, temporary answer to the conundrum of human existence, the choice which needs to be made between “necessary materialism and necessary humanity” (Williams, 293–4). This dilemma tends to materialise in many ways: as the difference between the working week and the weekend, between work and leisure, or between the city and the technological processes associated with it and the countryside and its natural way of life. Despite the fact that some country houses originally were purely functional regional, feudal centres, the majority of them have offered a solution to the existential struggle between isolation and society, nature and technology, or, last but certainly not least, the country and the city. This conception elucidates the massive popularity of these places amongst the aristocracy and, later, nineteenth-century capitalists who either bought the residences from the impoverished gentry or built their own versions of stately homes.

Moreover, this type of settlement partly echoes Williams’s insistence on the necessity of perceiving the country and the city as complementary parts, whose permanent division inflicted a wide range of negative effects on both of them. Hence, the country house, merging the advantages of both rural and urban existence, has inspired a number of imitations: from country cottages and semi-detached or detached suburban villas inspired by the aestheticism of the great country houses, to the emergence of Metroland, built on the premise of mobility and allowing an easy fusion of idealised countryside and fast-paced city centres. Despite Williams’s rather reductive description of the country house as a settlement attempting to solve the existential struggle, in all its possible permutations the country house stands out as a unique phenomenon, which has inspired, besides a wealth of literary creation, a considerable amount of all kinds of artistic endeavours over the centuries, ranging from architecture and interior and landscape design, to painting and sculpture.

This monograph delineates the manifold results of the transformation of the conception of the country house and its twentieth and twenty-first literary representation, country house fiction. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the idealised, mythical form, which symbolised orderly relations between the aristocracy and their tenants, was replaced by an understanding of the country house that highlights its abstract meaning as the embodiment of history as well as its role in the formation of national identity. Nevertheless, the contemporary stately home is a symbol under siege, struggling to find a place in the modern world, no longer satisfied with its publicly ascribed role as pure relic from the past or imitation of a socially and economically superior lifestyle.

In the wider social context of contemporary architectural theory introduced in the first chapter, the country house is primarily understood as a house, with all the twentieth-century implications of its necessity in human life, its integrating, centring properties, and its complex historical and cultural dimensions, as well as its treatment and position within contemporary architectural theory and practice. Seen from this perspective, the country house reflects the universal artistic and practical effort to move from residing to dwelling, understood as “existing in a human manner” (Heidegger, Poetry, 154) and therefore serves as a perfect vehicle for the analysis and interpretation of the various possible forms such an effort might take. This endeavour has inspired numerous literary portrayals but it first required the redefinition of the phenomenon of the country house. No longer restricted to stately homes and manor houses, the country house has embraced all kinds of countryside dwellings ranging from old, converted farms and cottages to sea-side villas. The country house has become the subject of detailed architectural scrutiny, practically, theoretically, popularly and literarily. In fiction, the houses are renovated, redecorated and sometimes even built, and the amount of suspicion towards modernist tendencies may only be explained with reference to the surviving vestiges of the old country house ideology which promoted orderly, hierarchical relations between the house and its surroundings, the house and its tenants, and particularly the tenants and their master. Any sign of abandonment of the remnants of this traditional approach is seen as potentially disruptive and unorderly, or even ungodly; there is no place for novelties which would mean a discontinuity with the past and the best of its heritage. Some of the descriptions of country houses, e.g. that one which McEwan presents in Atonement, even emphasise the ugliness of the Victorian houses in question, as if to echo the popular interpretation of their aesthetic as fraudulent and vulgar and to accentuate their “newness” as compared to the ancient, historical sites they often replaced. On the contrary, other works, such as Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (1934) or Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child reflect the effort of some theoreticians and historians to refute such a stance and an appreciation of Victorian architecture is consequently presented as implying emotionality and sensitivity, or even traditionalism, not necessarily bad taste.

The traditional, historical form of literary creation connected with the country house, the country house poem of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with its tendency to idealise and mythicise the relationship between the house, its master and the tenants, has influenced modern country house fiction in a number of ways. For example, there is an inclination to situate the plot in summer, a typically pastoral setting partly reviving the idyll, with its eternal days of summer, or “days of peculiar splendour” (Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, 23) to quote Evelyn Waugh, a vocal admirer of these places. The guests tend to abound in country house fiction and this may also be seen as an echo of the country house poem in which guests and visitors come to the house as if to highlight its welcoming, gracious character. What is more, both types of literary portrayals are frequently written from the perspective of a guest and the outsider perspective highlights the exclusivity of the experience of living comfortably in the countryside. The perception of guests, who know that the duration of their stay is restricted, both intensifies the experience and points to the fact that not many people are entitled to such a privilege for a longer period of time. Nevertheless, this alien observer is, notwithstanding their unbecoming origin, often a central protagonist of the plot, mirroring the historical position of a poet guest visiting his patron.

The twentieth and twenty-first century depiction of the country house in fiction reflects shifts of social, cultural and economic paradigms. Great country houses of the past had been tied to the aristocracy, which, especially from the period after the end of the Second World War until the 1970s, lost most of its political and economic power and therefore a great deal of public hostility. No longer the subject of possible public criticism and resentment of the nature of their living arrangements, the aristocracy began to systematically exploit its possessions – many houses were sold, transformed, or opened to the public. Seeking new employment for spaces which, stripped of their original significance and function, became suddenly unsustainable and thus could only survive through a transformation into public spectacle: “Growing numbers of owners declared ‘open house’ and sought to profit from a gentle resurgence of popular interest in history of all kinds” (Mandler, 5).

Thus, the aristocracy’s estates acquired a new role in society and became emblems of a new social and economic order, no longer serving only as idealised representations of their owners and their social class. The nature and the relative standing of country houses within English culture have transposed them into the domain of public interest. Country houses are often imagined as symbolising the country values of “old England” (Lucas, 71), which is boosted further by the booming success of various TV series such as ITV’s well-known adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited or the recent sweeping success of the idealising period drama, Downton Abbey.¹ The former was broadcast for the first time in the gloomy years of economic recession in the 1980s and the latter, with its first episode airing in the autumn of 2010, once again coincided with the aftermath of an economic crisis. There is a multitude of possible explanations for their immense popularity. The first, most obvious one might be that they present a retreat from depressing reality. However, these pretty pictures of an orderly social hierarchy might also serve is as an ideological glamorising of subservience.

In general, country houses in the original sense of “stately home” have not ceased to fascinate the public and guarantee the existence of the National Trust.² This idealised perception may elucidate the enormous popularity of stately homes both as sights and as subjects of various artistic renditions, ranging from a multitude of fictional, as well as non-fictional accounts of its existence to TV series. Non-fiction on the subject tends to take a historiographic approach and present life in country houses in all its complexity and variety. Individual places are approached from the point of view of their architectural properties, daily routines, the collection, analysis and classification of thousands of letters produced by their inhabitants and ubiquitous guests, poems and artworks, all of which map out the range of transformations they underwent, amplifying the grandeur of their artistic inventories, and pointing to the unknown or the dark sides of their history or to the personal histories of their owners.

The existence of the country house has been logically conditioned by its situation in the countryside. Literary production that authentically represents the countryside and does not limit it to the position of an inspiring backdrop, was rehabilitated by Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City. He was nevertheless less optimistic as far as the viability of country house fiction was concerned. He described the middle-class detective story as the only possible and plausible future for the country house novel as these places tend to gather together a heterogeneous group, as does the plot of a typical detective story. The twentieth-century country house in fiction became a backdrop, an interchangeable setting for the complicated relations of its temporary inhabitants, with the focus shifting from the house and its symbolism to the untying of the knot of entangled relations. According to Williams, this literary development led to a reduction of the country house’s importance and vitality, since it only provided a suitable space for events which had been prepared elsewhere and which would be resolved elsewhere: “It is not a sad end; it is a fitting end. The essential features were always there, and much of the history that changed them came out of them, in their original and continuing domination and alienation” (Williams, 250).³ Its role, according to Williams, was reduced, both in reality and in fiction, to a purely instrumental one, which is reflected in its transition into an indifferent setting for a public school, museum, hotel, or secret police headquarters. At the same time, thei...