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Abstract
This study is an investigation of the English country house as a recurring motif in modern fiction from the late nineteenth century to World War II. It reviews a number of novelists, from Henry James to Evelyn Waugh, who have found in the country house an embodiment of community and who have therefore consistently employed the country house as a symbolic as well as literal setting.
This study is composed of six chapters. The first chapter, "The Quest for Community," shows why the country house must be considered a significant symbol in modern literature. While the problem of isolation has long been recognized as one of the dominant themes of modern literature, there is a genuine counter-theme— that of community or "togetherness," and modern writers have sought symbols to express a sense of community. For many novelists, the country house, representing in microcosm the structure and traditions of English society, has therefore become a viable means for symbolizing community, whether in a state of decay, transformation or renewal.
To provide historic background, the second chapter, "The Country House in Earlier English Literature," offers a brief survey of the treatment of the house in such works as Jonson's "To Penshurst," the Gothic romances of the late eighteenth century, and the novels of Scott, Jane Austen, Disraeli, Thackeray, Trollope, and George Eliot.
The third chapter, "Henry James and the English Country House," demonstrates that the American novelist repeatedly uses the country house not as a conventional setting, but as his favorite symbol for "the great good place." Following a discussion of the attitudes toward the country house that James expresses in his travel sketches and notebooks, there is a detailed analysis of the emblematic function of Lackley Park in The Passionate Pilgrim, Gardencourt in The Portrait of a. Lady, Waterbath, Poynton, and Ricks in The Spoils of Poynton, and Fawns in The Golden Bowl.
The fourth chapter, "The Country House in Transition," shows how such Edwardian novelists as H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy, E. M. Forster, and Ford Madox Ford portray the uncertain responses of the country house to the disruptive social and economic forces of the early twentieth century. In Tono-Bungav. the decline of Bladesover estate represents the failure of the aristocracy, and the fate of Robin Hill in The Forsyte Saga exposes the emptiness of middle-class aspiration; on the other hand, the survival of Forster's Howards End and Ford’s Groby Manor in Parade's End implies the possibility of continuity within change.
The fifth chapter, "The Country House Between the Wars: Satire," concentrating on the post-war writers who found in the eclipse of the country house a subject for mordant comedy, considers such representatives works as Heartbreak House. Crome Yellow. The Edwardians, Lady Chatterlev's Lover, A Handful of Dust, and The Memorial, each of which features a house doomed to, or at least threatened by, some near farcical catastrophe.
The last chapter, "The Country House Between the Wars: Elegy and Rebirth," reveals that satire was not the only response to the decline of the country house. Yeats sounded another theme by eulogizing the great house in his poems on Coole Park; and novels composed under the stress of war— Between the Acts. To Be a_Pilgrim. The Heat of the Day. and Brideshead Revisited— transformed the country house into a symbol of possible continuity and community in an age of violence.