ABSTRACT
Here, Young has Hannah Mole self-consciously echo Jane Austen’s famous dictum that ‘3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on’, and thus both inscribes herself in a specific tradition and writes her own poetic manifesto.1 With her two most popular novels, William and Miss Mole, Young turns her attention to the specific domestic sphere of two Bristol bourgeois homes and fastens her mocking, yet empathetic, gaze upon the dynamics of family. Interrogating the meaning of home and ‘the Good’, she mulls over alternative domesticities and proposes subtle adjustments to the domestic order. She gently ridicules hypocrisy, pretension and convention, evading the descent into melodrama and sentimentality that mars her earlier works. The symbolic (rather than heavily descriptive) representations of houses, domestic interiors and objects signal her turn to domestic modernism.
