Building Romanticism: Literature and Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Britain (review)

Why did so many authors from the Romantic period turn to the architectural detail, the spatial metaphor, or the idea of place as a defining feature of their literary works? Nicole Reynolds sets out to answer this question by unearthing the ways in which the built environment influences literary representations of public and private spaces and how literature imaginatively influences the concrete social spaces of nineteenth-century Britain. In her examination of real and imagined spaces, Reynolds argues that this symbiotic relationship between the concrete and the written place helped authors and architects tackle the shifting notion of identity, as defined by gender, society, and nation.

In her first chapter, Reynolds focuses on the window, specifically the casement window, in John Keats's poetry. She first explains the nostalgic, almost romantic, architectural revival of the medieval and Gothic casement window in the early decades of the nineteenth century and the abandonment of the more utilitarian and pragmatic sash window. In turn, she examines how Keats returns to the casement again and again in his 1820 volume of poems in order to explore the tension between the desire for and subsequent inability of the imagination to achieve transcendence, being limited to some form of transformation only. The casement window in Joseph Severn's portrait of Keats serves as a fitting close to this chapter, allowing Reynolds to speculate that the casement, which had symbolically figured as a transitional space between the mortal and the spiritual world in his poetry, now prefigures the posthumous consumption of a new product—Keats the dying poet.

Reynolds moves indoors in her next chapter to construct a literary history of the boudoir. After her etymological unpacking of the word, she goes on to examine its representation in the increasingly proliferating architectural treatises and manuals and in novels ranging from Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1801) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1861-62) to George Eliot's Middlemarch (1872). While the boudoir as a private female room was often figured as a threatening space catering to and inspiring female desire, it was also, as evidenced from architectural discourses, portrayed as an accepted and desired place in the home not only for the elite but also for those of the middling classes. This tension plays out in the nineteenth century with novels such as Belinda both highlighting and then containing the dangers of the boudoir by mitigating its position as a private and exclusively female space. In the Victorian novels that Reynolds examines, she sees the position of the boudoir shifting to help negotiate ideas of marriage and women's public roles.

From architectural features and particular rooms, chapters 3 and 4 branch out to examine the whole house. Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, the notorious "Ladies of Llangollen," attempted to control the public response to their unconventional romantic friendship through selectively welcoming members of the public to Plas Newydd (New Hall), their cottage in Wales. Reynolds unpacks the heteronormative virtues that the Romantic period attached to cottage architecture and demonstrates how the two ladies relied on these associations to escape public censure of the homoerotic overtones of their living arrangements. She focuses in particular on the careful deployment of Gothic architecture, the literary representations of the cottage's library as a locus of female intellectual life, and the seemingly deliberate decision to make the house available to public scrutiny.

From the rural retreat of New Hall, Reynolds moves to the streets of London and John Soane's house-museum. As architect and author, Soane responded to his son's Gothic narrative of their estrangement in print and in stone. Reading his "Crude Hints towards an History of My House" alongside the spatial dynamics of the museum's Gothic basement leads Reynolds to conclude that nostalgia governs both projects. In particular, she depicts Soane as engaging with nostalgia as a personal homesickness and nostalgia as a...