ABSTRACT
Take a quick glance through the fiction published in the interwar period and you will find many descriptions of rooms in temporary lodgings that mirror the one above, taken from Agatha Christie’s short story ‘The Listerdale Mystery’ first published in Grand Magazine in December 1925. From popular romance and detective novels to those works now con - sidered classics of modernist literature, it seems there is universal agree ment about what a bed-sitting room, or single room in a boarding or lodging house looks like. The cheapness, the shabbiness, the poor taste of the landlady’s furnishings, and the aspidistra reference immortalised by George Orwell in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) are recurring motifs. Indeed, these settings seem so standardised and unremarkable that they pass unnoticed, relegated to mere backdrop: but what if there were more to these rooms than initially meets the eye? Victoria Rosner has recently argued that ‘an anonymous room may wield more influence than appearances suggest’, and it is the stories behind these rooms that this book explores.2
