Review of ‘House of Fiction’ by Phyllis Richardson

I bought this book from the British Library a couple of years ago and suddenly decided it was about time I read it! The subtitle is From Pemberley to Brideshead, Great Houses in English Literature.

Book cover of House of Fiction by Phyllis Richardson, showing a plan of a house with a row of book spines in the background.

The book is ideal for readers interested in both literature and architecture. The style is not particularly engaging but the content is well-researched and provides some fascinating insight. The authors included are: Laurence Sterne, Horace Walpole, Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, E M Forster, John Galsworthy, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, Ford Madox Ford, Daphne du Maurier, Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, J G Ballard, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan and Alan Hollinghurst. Obviously the more of these you know, the more you’ll get out of the book. I skim-read some chapters but read others closely. There are a generous number of photographs and at the back there is a list of the featured houses and who owns them if you wish to visit.

Published by Unbound, 2017.

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