In his work on eighteenth-century London, architectural historian Peter Guillery reminds us that “houses are principally interesting because people lived in them.” Karen Lipsedge's first book usefully connects houses and people by comparing “real” buildings and interiors with fictional accounts of domestic space from the 1720s to the 1780s. The core of the work assesses how four novelists—Samuel Richardson, Fanny Burney, Eliza Haywood, and Frances Sheridan—wrote about rooms. Lipsedge's main interest is each author's representation of interior and garden spaces, but the book is particularly noteworthy for how it sets these literary scenes against the reality of the domestic environment. Her careful reading of literary space generates an interplay among houses, people, and social action that offers insights into the changing relationship eighteenth-century individuals had to the rooms they inhabited.

The first chapter discusses the architectural history of the polite houses that served as settings for the novels, followed by three chapters focused on fictional encounters with different rooms: public rooms such as parlors and drawing rooms, private spaces such as closets and dressing rooms, and exterior garden spaces. Rooms carried meanings that eighteenth-century audiences understood. Lipsedge identifies the 1750s as a break from older social conventions where the parlor and private closet (old) were replaced as settings by the drawing room and dressing room (new), which coincided with the increased differentiation between male and female spaces. As “real” room specialization changed and shifted, this process was revealed in the settings adopted by an earlier novelist like Richardson and a later one like Burney.

There is much to appeal across disciplines here, although this is perhaps the blessing and the curse of such a project. As a result, several interesting topics might have been developed further. First, Lipsedge is in some respects evaluating a fiction of a fiction. In her “detailed overview” (17) of “real” Palladian houses in chapter 1, the architects and theorists she discusses—Roger North, the Earl of Shaftesbury, Isaac Ware—all in their own way created fictive spaces. While many larger houses built during the eighteenth century naturally drew on these writers for guidance, well-informed master builders or regional architects often constructed smaller genteel houses that reflected but did not altogether replicate architectural pattern and advice books. In the same way that few houses today look like a decorator's magazine, it is questionable how many members of genteel society really followed the strictures of pattern book literature carefully. By not clearly delineating styles and sizes of houses, Lipsedge risks losing the nuance that would have been evident to an eighteenth-century readership. Several works dealing with architecture and interiors might have helped to illuminate her arguments, most notably John Cornforth's Early Georgian Interiors (Yale, 2005), Andor Gomme and Alison Maguire's Design and Plan in the Country House (Yale, 2008), James Ayres's books on the Georgian city and domestic interiors, and Tim Meldrum's work on servants [Domestic Service & Gender, 1660–1750: Life & work in the London Household (Pearson Prentice Hall, 2000)]. All have much to say about the core of her subject.

Lipsedge is on firmer ground in discussing the novels, and she brings a keen eye for detail to her comparison of various literary scenes with the “real” settings she discusses in chapter 1. The subtleties of whether doors were open or closed, or how characters used specific rooms in the novels, offer hints at the ways eighteenth-century people put rooms and objects into play. The persuasive examination of actual and fictive domestic spaces enables the modern reader to access the houses and gardens depicted in eighteenth-century literature. Nevertheless, there are pitfalls to this approach, as seen in Sheridan's Sidney Bidulph, a diary ostensibly “written” between 1703 and 1705 but reflecting the spatial arrangements and architecture of sixty years later. This sort of anachronistic treatment is a reminder of the limitations of reading back and forth between actual and fictional accounts.

While women in the domestic interior are the chief focus, more remains to be said about masculinity in domestic space. In the last four pages of the conclusion, Lipsedge conducts a short survey of men in the home that she readily acknowledges is inadequate. Her argument that “Men were equally central to the ‘real’ eighteenth-century home” (173), however, begs for something more than an appearance as an addendum (and, one might add, a tantalizingly provocative finish) to the book. There is a growing literature on this topic, and recent work by Karen Harvey (also absent from the bibliography) and others suggests masculine avenues of investigation, which we can hope Lipsedge will explore in the future.

Domestic Space in Eighteenth-Century British Novels is nicely, at times elegantly, written and largely free of jargon and theory, but this might have been a more handsome book. The images are well chosen and highly relevant, and it would have been satisfying to see them produced more fulsomely. An interesting discussion of A Family in an Interior Taking Tea, c. 1740 would have benefited from a larger image of the painting in question. Likewise, a dog referenced in an image on page 43 took me several moments to find, looking, without some eye-squinting observation, like a bit of carpet in the picture. The copyediting could also have been sharper. Missing or repeated words, incorrect footnotes and bibliographic citations, and transposed letters all suggest too many typographical errors for comfort.

Despite these criticisms, the book makes a significant cross-disciplinary contribution to how we understand the fictional as well as the “real” eighteenth-century interior. Lipsedge ends with a call to explore other novels of the period to see if appreciation of “real” spaces can inform our study of additional fictional interiors. That seems a sensible notion and one that would be welcomed by those working in literary studies, material culture, and social, architectural, and cultural history alike.