ABSTRACT
One of the many working titles for Virginia Woolf’s novel The Years (1937) was Other People’s Houses and, indeed, a striking aspect of the narrative is the representation of living spaces, in particular women’s living spaces; from the Pargiters’ grand family home to the slum housing of Colonel Pargiter’s mistress Mira and the run-down lodgings of Delia, Maggie, Sara, and the servant Crosby.2 Woolf’s novel is an appropriate one with which to conclude because of its use of the boarding house genre to document the history of women’s experiences in the interwar period. It makes the vital connection between the wider cultural, economic, and political situation of the period and the implications for women and their accommodation. This final chapter will consider Woolf’s depictions of the alternative domestic spaces occupied by single women and examine how conceptions of the ‘other’ and ‘foreignness’ can become mapped onto the boarding house and its inhabitants.
