A Room in Chelsea: Quentin Crisp at Home
Quentin Crisp's 1968 autobiography The Naked Civil Servant was adapted to considerable success in Jack Gold's 1975 television film, with John Hurt in the role. Crisp would identify himself as ‘bohemian’ as much as queer, and in his writings he traces a life in which London bedsits and rooming houses are home to those, like himself, whose wilful social otherness meant a rejection of domestic mores. Crisp's anarchic attitude towards domesticity and homemaking would become highly quotable, and the image of his Chelsea room enculturated as a quite singular provocation of ‘good’ domesticity. Crisp's room would correspond with cultural representations of the bedsit as a marker of liminal identity, and the media fascination to which it was subject reveals not only the political motivations of journalists often blind to the very rich life of The Naked Civil Servant, but also that they were oblivious to Crisp's performative tendencies and his own hyperbole about his room as a place of exile.
House Haunting: The Domestic Novel Of The Inter-War Years
In this article we attempt to historicize and address the literary manifestations of the meaning and idea of home culture in the English domestic novel of the inter-war years. During this period, the cult of domesticity was avidly promoted by the government and popular magazines. We discuss how both houses and novels furnish a dwelling place that invites the exploration of private and social relations. In their turn to domestic space and the domestic interior, domestic novelists of the inter-war years inaugurated a turn to interiority, feminine subjectivity and the everyday.
Reading the House: A Literary Perspective
What good is a view of the ocean unless one views it every day for many, many days out of the corner of one’s eye—while hanging clothes, setting the table, picking up toys from the porch? Who can tell what a house is like unless one lives in it, knows its middle-of-the-night creaks, becomes familiar with the geometric patterns made by doors, window frames, light coming through drawn bedroom shades? —Eng 1960, 69