ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the country-house ethos as an illustrative case in point for thinking about gender, utopia and the production of space. It presents a brief exploration of its manifestation in country-house literature throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In as much as earlier visions of female spaces in texts such as Aemilia Lanyer's 'The Description of Cooke-ham' conceive of pastoral garden-states as feminized spaces to avoid the gendered spatiality of masculinist architecture, later texts such as Eliza Haywood's The British Recluse and Scott's Millenium Hall appropriate this space and redefine its metonymic meaning. The gap between representational space and representation of space, between conceived and lived space is closed in these narratives. Women have always felt the need to imagine other places and spaces which transcend their own alienation, be it social, economic or cultural.