ABSTRACT
The story of the conception and conservation of Hugo’s houses presents in a nutshell what this book is about. It shows that writers’ houses most often are not neutral spaces but media of expression and self-fashioning for the authors who design, construct and decorate them. In dedicating themselves to architecture and interior design, writers like the Goncourt brothers, Walter Scott, Pierre Loti and Henry Rider Haggard-to name but a few presented earlier in this volume-push beyond the limits of their trade. By experimenting with the arrangement of concrete matter they pursue a dream of materialising the immaterial, of giving tangible shape to their poetic or narrative imagination, driven by curiosity, by an aspiration
to versatility, or even out of sheer frustration with those very limits of their trade. In re-mediating their authorship they can create imposing works of art (Hauteville House, Goethe’s house in Weimar, Kelmscott Manor, etc.) and build houses that, like the Casa Vasari in Arezzo, Scott’s Abbotsford and Mario Praz’s “House of Life” in Rome, forge life and art in a construction that easily imposes itself as a monument to its author.
