The great good place: the country house and English literature

Abstract

This text examines ow the ideal of the country house has grown in English literature over the centuries. It tells the story of a distinctive English tradition, made so by the poets of the Renaissance, and shaped further by the novelists of the 18th century who depicted the country house as the ideal place for the good life. It is a tradition rooted in a literary past. The Great Good Place shows how our ways of seeing are shaped by reading. It looks at houses such as Penshurst Place, Stowe and Kelmscott, made famous by writers, and reads them in the light of those writings. Van Dyck's family portrait at Wilton acquires new meaning if seen in terms of the literature of the age; even the decoration of a stove at Kedleston has resonances which carry the reader back to the classical world. In this study, there is no division between the visual arts and literature, or between high culture and the commonplace. A novel, or a National Trust guidebook, a great landscape garden or the design of a dormer window all form part of the spectrum of meaning.