Housing the past: Victorian houses in neo - Victorian fiction

Abstract

As argued, among others, by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space (1958), a house which has been inhabited over a period of time becomes a composite of its physical structure and the mental space created by its residents’ thoughts, dreams and memories. This article analyses two contemporary novels in which houses as tangible manifestations of temporally remote experience provide a link to the Vic-torian past. Lauren Willig’s That Summer (2014) and Kate Beaufoy’s Another Heartbeat in the House (2015) represent the same type of neo-Victorian fiction: their plots are composed of two strands, one set in the modern age and the other in the nineteenth century, and in the course of each story parallels and conver-gences are revealed between the two ages and the two casts of characters. The article argues that both novels are also typical “romances of the archive” – as defined by Suzanne Keen (2001) − in which the ma-terial legacy of the past triggers a personally motivated inquiry, leading contemporary characters to un-cover certain bygone mysteries, and, crucially, to recognise the past’s continuing appeal and relevance.