HOUSEOFFICTION_PRH+copy.jpg — House of Fiction

A *Times* **Book of the Year**

Why do we enjoy reading about other people’s houses?

Is it voyeurism, curiosity about how others live? Or is it to learn about the past, to get inside not just the rooms but people’s lives?

From the Gothic fantasies of Walpole’s Otranto to post-modern tales of the English country house by Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan, House of Fiction guides readers on a tour through the buildings, real and imagined, to examine how authors’ personal experiences helped shape the homes that have become icons of English literature.

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‘Richardson’s research is formidable. Her book does much more, though, than track real architectural detail in made-up houses. It reveals key imaginative shifts in British authors’ attitudes to homes over the years.’ – The Sunday Times

The full review here

The Guardian Books here

In the RIBA Journal here

Thomas Hardy's Max Gate

E. M. Forster's Rooksnest

Norton Conyers and Charlotte Brontë

Trellick Tower and J. G. Ballard

Phyllis+author+pic.jpg — **Phyllis Richardson** is a native of Southern California and studied English literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. She moved to London in 1992 and completed an MA in Anglo-American Literary Relations at University College London. Along with ***House of Fiction*** (2017), she has written several books on design and architecture, including the highly successful **XS series**, ***Nano House*** and ***Superlight***. She has written literary reviews and on urban development and travel for print magazines and newspapers, including the *Financial Times* weekend *the Observer*, the *TLS* and other journals. She teaches and coordinates the Foundation Year in English Literature at Goldsmiths University in London.

‘With House of Fiction I was able to marry my two abiding interests in houses and English literature. I was fascinated by the way so many authors set a particular house at the centre of their story, and I discovered some surprising connections between authors and the houses they had grown up in, visited, helped build or fantasised about.

I came to a new understanding of Jane Austen’s preoccupation with marriage and property. I was intrigued by the fact that Thomas Hardy worked for the same firm of London architects that employed E. M. Forster’s father a few years later, and thrilled to find John Galsworthy’s original drawings for the house at Robin Hill (from The Forsyte Saga) in the manuscripts collection of the British Library, documents that had never before been published. (See my article in the RIBA Journal online).

I found that many novelists do really have a thing about houses. Call it a social thing, a class thing, a financial thing or, as I have found to be mostly the case, an imaginative and soulful connection, as Forster wrote so lyrically of Howards End, a house based on his childhood home of Rooksnest in Hertfordshire. Describing the difference in perceptions between the Wilcox family and Mrs Wilcox, he writes, ‘To them it was a house; they could not know that to her it had been a spirit for which she sought a spiritual heir.’

My research for House of Fiction led me into the history of my own house in North London and has set me on a new path, writing about the fate of one of its Victorian inhabitants, in particular a woman called Philadelphia, who came to London in the 1850s and witnessed a world of technological and material change, but also frustration and sorrow. I look forward to sharing her story.’