Suburban Fiction

Abstract

Although Victorian interest in the city has long been acknowledged, critics have only more recently recognized the suburbs as a topic of serious literary engagement (see Cunningham 2004; Hapgood 2005; Wagner 2006; Whelan 2010). Women's suburban fiction in particular has substantially escaped notice, perhaps because women's treatments of the suburbs were often, in important ways, different from those penned by male, often better-known novelists. While many authors complained about poor building practices in a time of rapid expansion, male writers were especially likely to dismiss the suburbs as dull, vacuous places lacking culture and energy. This complaint thinly disguised distaste for a landscape geographically separated from the worlds of business and commerce and associated (as Annette Federico puts it, in a discussion of Marie Corelli's fiction) "with feminine domesticity" (Federico 2000, 66). Female authors, meanwhile, tended to evoke the suburbs as unfolding, still-unmapped spaces where new lives could be imagined, new life courses explored. Opening typically with the placing of an advertisement in the Times's "Houses to Let" section, with plots turning on the confusions surrounding the arrival of a stranger, women's suburban fictions explore both what the new landscapes offered residents and how communities might be built on shared interests and experiences rather than birth networks (Bilston 2019, 55).