{"product_id":"mid-twentieth-century-women-writers-country-house-fiction-from-elizabeth-bowen-to-ivy-compton-burnett-9781805960102","title":"Mid-Twentieth-Century Women Writers: Country House Fiction from Elizabeth Bowen to Ivy Compton-Burnett","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn 1940, as English country estates faced requisition, neglect, and the threat of aerial bombardment, Elizabeth Bowen observed that life in the 'Big House, in its circle of trees' exerted a powerful and enduring 'spell'. That spell still shapes English literary culture, dominated by an apparently familiar landscape of imposing fictional residences - Brideshead, Howards End, Poynton, Pemberley - whose grandeur seems to promise continuity, heritage, and reassurance.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis book challenges that familiar map. It argues that a group of technically daring and prolific women novelists deliberately returned to the country house in the mid-twentieth century not as nostalgic inheritors, but as sharp-eyed anatomists of its habits, myths, and moral authority. Through close readings of works by Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Taylor, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Barbara Comyns, this book shows how the country house novel of the 1940s and 1950s became a distinctive imaginative space in which literary tradition itself could be tested and unsettled.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAt a moment when the civic, economic, and ideological foundations of the landed estate were visibly cracking, these writers transformed the stately home from a repository of lineage and cultural memory into a site of exposure. Far from offering reassurance, their fiction reveals the persistence of social hierarchies whose authority has begun to hollow out even as they endure.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Andrew Radford\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eBinding Type:\u003c\/b\u003e Hardcover\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Liverpool University Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 09\/11\/2026\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSeries:\u003c\/b\u003e Writers and Their Work\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 152\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 0.71lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 8.50h x 5.43w x 0.38d\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN:\u003c\/b\u003e 9781805960102","brand":"Liverpool University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48460503122057,"sku":"9781805960102","price":75.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0636\/9240\/6921\/files\/img_63229fea-aa0b-4b1f-ab93-ccc9bd7f530e.jpg?v=1790663970","url":"https:\/\/sonsanddaughtersbooks.com\/products\/mid-twentieth-century-women-writers-country-house-fiction-from-elizabeth-bowen-to-ivy-compton-burnett-9781805960102","provider":"Sons and Daughters Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}