The Promise of the Suburbs: A Victorian History in Literature and Culture by Sarah Bilston (review)

Sarah Bilston's welcome study, The Promise of the Suburbs: A Victorian History of Literature and Culture touches only lightly on the building of housing stock on the outskirts of London, focusing instead on representations of nineteenth-century suburbia and on the practices (including decorating and gardening) associated with it. Bilston makes a strong case that we have long thought about the suburbs in terms of the men who commuted in and out of them rather than the women who were tasked with homemaking within them. In large part, she suggests, this is because the predominant detractors of the suburbs have been men, decrying suburban triviality and tastelessness by associating them with women's ideas, lives, and preoccupations. This potent observation motivates her rereading of the suburbs through a recentering of texts aimed at, featuring, and/or written by the suburban woman. One of the great strengths of Bilston's work is that its conclusions distill an impressively wide range of material, which includes gardening books, decorating manuals, autobiographies, novels, developers' ads, and stereotypes of the suburbs that became punchlines in periodicals.

Another strength is the author's ability to connect these texts, the architecture and settings of the suburbs, and the identities supported therein through a careful attention to evolving gendered norms. She offers particularly fascinating observations on "the intimate relation between Queen Anne Revival style and the women's movement" (105). She argues that decorative advice books created real opportunities for women to be taken seriously as they fitted up their suburban homes, ultimately paving the way for women to become professional interior decorators by century's end. And just as home decorators overcame the domestic tyranny of the "demon-builder" who did not understand the needs of actual families, so suburban gardening texts "do not just examine feminine power, they hand power over to reading and gardening women" (138).

Suburban-facilitated trajectories toward greater independence and careers for women (including as writers) are accompanied, throughout Bilston's work, with careful attention to the persistent fact that imaginatively, the "suburbs appear monotonous, featureless, without character" (15). Bilston untangles the tropes of suburbia with nuance. On one hand, the suburb is the bastion of modernity—progressive, exciting, and full of opportunities for women. On the other, the rhetoric of the suburbs as dull bulwarks of cultural lack and bourgeois misery began as early as the 1820s, motivated in part by the threat of a locale facilitating the dominance of a growing middle class.

Each chapter of the book writes a new trajectory focused on different imperatives. For example, early moves from the countryside to the suburbs for proximity to shopping and culture—with upward mobility signaled by the shift from rural labor to gardens cultivated for aesthetics rather than food—give way to later juxtaposition of the suburbs with the city and gendered separate spheres for work. Bilston also argues that the suburbs transformed from a space of artistic expression and realization for women into a space in which women largely disappeared into the "private" realm, as men came home to get away from their cares in the city (34). That the book is organized around tropes, rather than offering a linear historical account, can be occasionally confusing: as, for example, when discussions of women disappearing from public view prefigure two full chapters which argue that decorating and gardening powerfully facilitated women's entrance into professions.The careful reader will be rewarded, however, by this study's ability to tease out multiple ways of thinking about the suburbs simultaneously.

Bilston's overarching argument is that the suburbs, "already packaged in popular culture as terrible, stereotyped productions of a modern industrial and commercialized era," were in fact a place of opportunity for women (138). Suburbia allowed them to leverage control over their domestic spaces to assert the vitality of women's work even beyond the home...