ABSTRACT
When one of Young’s heroines reflects on the ‘simple pleasure she found in the sight of familiar places and people’ and ‘did not tire of the daily round’ because ‘some little thing was always happening’ (Celia: 105), she signals certain intrinsic features of the domestic novel: the everyday, the minute and the familiar. Although some domestic novelists resented the drudgery of domesticity, ‘the unspeakable fireside, the gruesome dinnertable’, others, like Young, found amusement and pleasure in the drab and the everyday.1 Setting the model for the genre in other literatures in English, the English domestic novel portrays the social relations and daily life of a contained community (house, village, urban parish, suburb), while foregrounding values and rituals that ‘comprise the modern notion of domesticity – separation from the workplace, privacy, comfort, focus on the family’ (Reed 1996: 7). Its origins lie in the eighteenth century as economic changes created the leisured middle-class woman; a remarkable number of women novelists rose to prominence (Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Ann Radcliffe), whose novels featured middle-class heroines caught in the throes of convoluted courtship plots. Encouraged by the increased accessibility of books through subscription (and later in the nineteenth century through circulating libraries), women writers gradually abandoned this residual link to the romance and the picaresque to devise fictional worlds that mirrored the lives of their readers. Women became the subject and avid recipients of a fictional world that paid realistic attention to detail and the everyday. However, as the domestic novel evolved through Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell (Cranford), Charlotte Yonge, the sensation novels of the 1860s, Anthony Trollope, Henry James and Edith Wharton, it registered an increasing sense of claustrophobia. By the early twentieth century, in domestic novelists inspired by the New Woman and the suffragette movement with its demand for equality in marriage as well as politics, the code of renunciation and submission that had characterized
the genre was under attack. Marriage became the subject of rather than the solution to the plot (Ida Leverson, The Little Ottleys; E.M. Forster, Howards End).
