Open to the Public: the Modernist Country House Novel
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Open to the Public: The Modernist Country House Novel The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Trout, Teresa. 2019. Open to the Public: The Modernist Country House Novel. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:42029702 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Open to the Public: The Modernist Country House Novel A dissertation presented by Teresa Trout to The Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of English Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2019 © 2019 Teresa Trout All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Deidre Lynch Teresa Trout Open to the Public: The Modernist Country House Novel Abstract My dissertation begins with a literary and cultural history of the country house and country house touring, and the chapters that follow the introduction are arranged as a tour: we move first to view (1) portraits in the portrait gallery, next (2) books in the library, and finally, (3) theatricals in the drawing room. Throughout my project, I “read” the country house alongside the country house novel, incorporating observations and photographs that I gathered from over forty site visits to illustrate and interpret the texts. When modernists and late modernists were writing, economic strains and wartime requisitioning imperiled hundreds of country houses. In the 1940s, the National Trust began to save many of these buildings by opening them to the public. In doing so, they claimed the power structures of the elite as heritage sites for everyone; at the same time, the late modernist period produced country house novels that were especially attuned to the material conditions of their setting. Thus, I use the material-cultural and architectural histories of the portrait gallery, the library, and the drawing room to analyze the literature that represents these settings. Each of my chapters converges on a different late modernist author—Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth Taylor, and Elizabeth Bowen—as I explain how these writers engage the rooms and objects of the country house and Big House both to interrogate social history and position their works in literary history. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS TITLE PAGE ................................................................................................................................. I COPYRIGHT ................................................................................................................................II ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................. III TABLE OF CONTENTS .......................................................................................................... IV LIST OF FIGURES ...................................................................................................................... V DEDICATION ........................................................................................................................... VI ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..................................................................................................... VII INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1 .................................................................................................................................35 CHAPTER 2 .................................................................................................................................99 CHAPTER3................................................................................................................................ 151 CODA ......................................................................................................................................... 214 WORKS CITED ........................................................................................................................ 234 iv Figures Figure 1 Mytens’s pendant portrait of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel ................................ 37 Figure 2 Mytens’s pendant portrait of Aletheia Talbot, Countess of Arundel .......................... 37 Figure 3 Devis’s “Robert Gwillym of Atherton” ......................................................................... 47 Figure 4 Photograph of the Brown Gallery at Knole .................................................................. 47 Figure 5 Batoni’s portrait of Sir Matthew Fetherstonhaugh........................................................ 53 Figure 6 Batoni’s portrait of Sarah Lethieullier, Lady Fetherstonhaugh .................................... 53 Figure 7 Julia Margaret Cameron, “Sister spirits” ........................................................................ 68 Figure 8 Lionel and Edward Sackville by de Neve ....................................................................... 73 Figure 9 Burton Constable long gallery ....................................................................................... 111 Figure 10 Boots circulating library interior ................................................................................... 119 Figure 11 Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico ............................................................................................ 162 Figure 12 Woolf’s Monk House album, Bowen’s Court visit...................................................... 183 Figure 13 Details of Jane Austen’s House Museum’s Red Album.............................................. 217 Figure 14 Newspaper clipping from the Sphere ............................................................................. 222 Figure 15 Photo of the opening ceremony of the Jane Austen’s House Museum .................... 231 v To my parents, Steve and Patty Trout, because I owe you one. vi Acknowledgements I am grateful to the Royal Oak Foundation for funding my research with the Attingham Summer School, and for the many teachers and colleagues I met during Attingham who have influenced this project with their expertise, reading suggestions, and wise advice. I am equally grateful to the Jane Austen Society of North America’s International Visitor Program and the curators and staff of the Jane Austen’s House Museum and Chawton House Library who have enriched this project by showing me wonderful archival material, letting me serve as a tour guide, work in the library, and repair rare books. Maureen Stiller, the secretary of the Jane Austen Society, generously showed me Austen’s Hampshire on what was undoubtedly my favorite day of research. I am indebted to the National Trust and the National Portrait Gallery for kindly letting me use their images in this dissertation, and for answering various queries throughout my research. I could not have written this dissertation without the thorough and thoughtful feedback, enthusiasm, and support from my committee members—from my chair, Deidre Lynch, and from David Alworth and Katie Trumpener. Suzanne Smith has been instrumental in helping me to see the forest for the trees. Vikki Addona’s and Evander Price’s friendship, wisdom, and willingness to work anywhere, even Italy, has pulled me through to important deadlines. I feel lucky to have been a part of the Harvard English Department’s only (so far) all-women cohort, and I am thankful for the ways we have empowered each other throughout graduate school. I am grateful to Don and Josh Trout for building me up; to my father, who talked it all out with me at the diner; and to my mother, who never denied me a book. To the architect, Nick Jölli, who makes real country houses and still listened to this dissertation with infinite patience: thank you. I remain in awe of Luna, who has been with me since the very beginning. Finally, I am thankful for Dan Albright, who told me that I live in the light. vii Introduction: This House is Open to the Public He was rather glad that they were all out; it was amusing to wander through the house as though one were exploring a dead, deserted Pompeii. What sort of life would the excavator reconstruct from these remains; how would he people these empty chambers? There was the long gallery, with its rows of respectable and (though, of course, one couldn’t publicly admit it) rather boring Italian primitives, its Chinese sculptures, its unobtrusive, dateless furniture. There was the panelled drawing-room, where the huge chintz-covered arm-chairs stood, oases of comfort among the austere flesh-mortifying antiques. There was the morning-room, with its pale lemon walls, its painted Venetian chairs and rococo tables, its mirrors, its modern pictures. There was the library, cool, spacious, and dark, book-lined from floor to ceiling, rich in portentous folios. There was the dining-room, solidly, portwinily English, with its great mahogany table, its eighteenth-century chairs and sideboard, its eighteenth- century pictures—family portraits, meticulous animal paintings. What could one reconstruct from such data?1 Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow In the passage above, Denis Stone, who has published one book of poetry and aspires to write a novel, has come to