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.
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.