Caroline Rody
Abstract Part III of the book, “After the Great House Era: Contemporary English and American Texts,” opens with Chapter 12, “Contemporary English Great House Fiction,” which attributes the ongoing popularity of English country house fiction and film in the modern and contemporary eras to its remarkable capacity to adapt the great house with the times. Especially when declining, crumbling, satirized, or repurposed, the literary great house continues as a richly ambivalent emblem of a changing nation. The chapter opens by recounting the early twentieth century’s widespread destruction of English country houses as vividly displayed in a museum exhibit and catalogue, and the restoration of many such houses through the popular, controversial phenomenon of heritage tourism. It then examines novels by three writers of the post–great house era: Evelyn Waugh, who laments the passing of aristocratic great house life, and Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan, who, looking back with irony at antiquated social hierarchies and behavior codes, update the subgenre of the country house mystery, exposing the suffering caused by moral failings that the prestige of the house long concealed. A reading of Atonement’s startling great house library sex scene is followed by a consideration of an essay by an early-twentieth-century disassembler of country house libraries. Finally, two feminist departures from mainstream modern English great house literary tradition are discussed: Dodie’s Smith’s tale of a girl who boldly aspires to get a castle in writing, and Helen Oyeyemi’s postcolonial Gothic rendering of an inhospitably racist English guest house.