Romantic Suburbs

Drawing on novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte Smith, and their contemporaries, Romantic Suburbs argues that in an era before public health and urban planning policies, Romantic-period women took matters into their own hands.

Through access to healthy neighbourhoods and medical care, and through choices in home furnishings, gardening, sociability, and child-rearing, women counteracted early suburban sprawl’s devastating environmental and social effects. Through a combination of literary criticism, spatial analysis, and historical context, this book shows that women cast the suburban home as a “cultural fix” (Loughran). Women created spaces that enabled self-cultivation, intimacy, sociability, access to nature, and democratic impulses, all hallmarks of Romantic ideology, even within the sometimes cramped, mundane, or precarious confines of the suburban home and garden. Women novelists of this period imagined a new suburban world where women, their families, and communities could thrive.

Romanticism and women’s fiction, therefore, help shape the story of suburban development – a phenomenon that continues to influence twenty-first-century life globally.