Books like Happy rural seat by Gill, Richard

George Orwell’s autobiographical essay, *Down and Out in Paris and London*, chronicles his years of poverty and unemployment in the city streets and hostels of Paris and London, revealing the harsh realities of 1930s street life.

"Phyllis Richardson takes readers on a journey through history to discover how authors’ personal experiences of houses and home life helped to shape the imaginative dwellings that have become icons of English literature...Using historic sources, authors’ biographies, letters and published news accounts, as well as the novels themselves, The House of Fiction presents some of the most influential houses in Britain through the stories they inspired, while offering candid glimpses of the writers who brought them to life"--

Set in the coastal town of Dunnet, Maine, this tale follows the quiet rhythms of women’s lives amid the rugged shoreline and dense firs, exploring social customs and economic realities of small-town America.

Irish fiction, Vera Kreilkamp argues, needs to be rescued from the critical assumptions underlying attacks on the historical mythologies of Yeats and the Literary Revival. Exploring a uniquely Irish version of colonial and postcolonial literature, she charts the self-critical formulations of a gentry society facing its extinction - more often and more successfully with comic irony than with nostalgia. The result is a comprehensive study of the ascendancy novel from Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) through contemporary reinventions of the form. Her attention to Edgeworth's Irish works, the fiction of the neglected Victorian novelist Charles Lever, and the gothic forms of the Big House novel by Sheridan Le Fanu and Charles Maturin provide a historical context for later reformulations of the genre by Somerville and Ross, Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane, William Trevor, Jennifer Johnston, Aidan Higgins, and John Banville.