Great Houses in Modern English Fiction

Abstract Chapter 6, “Great Houses in Modern English Fiction,” observes developments in the genre from the late nineteenth century to the aftermath of World War I. English modernists loved their country houses, while well aware of modernity’s threat to all they represented. This chapter treats a venerable literary canon set amid the economic, social, and political tumult of the century’s turn, including the coming of world war. These transitionally modern great house texts—by Henry James, E. M. Forster, George Bernard Shaw, and D. H. Lawrence—are a strikingly ambivalent lot, their cynicism and satire about stagnant social formations tinged strongly with sorrow at the loss of something truly fine that such houses are seen to have embodied. Forster’s Howards End, centering on the refuge from modernity offered by a beloved, old-fashioned English country house somehow inextricable from English nature, includes an oddly tragicomical death by falling country house bookcase, bringing riddling complexity to the great house library motif.