Translocal homemaking and home unmaking in the letter memoir of Alice Lucy Hodson

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 1909 Alice Lucy Hodson’s memoir Letters from a Settlement was published. It is unique in providing an intimate first-hand account of what it meant to reside and (attempt) to settle in the women’s settlement Lady Margaret Hall in Lambeth, South London. This article considers how home was experienced, imagined, and represented by Hodson, who like many late-Victorian and Edwardian women were finding more opportunities and roles open to them at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Building on the work of geographers of home and translocal studies, I argue that Hodson’s fragmentary letter chapters show how her homemaking relied on several home imaginaries that included the settlement house, street, neighbourhood, her familial home, and Lady Margaret’s College. This was bound up with her middle-class status and wider imperial understandings of home. Yet, home making also relied on a process of home unmaking. This article will show how her fashioning of the self was dependent on how she narrativised her experiences of translocal homemaking and home unmaking.