Conclusion

Abstract

This text has examined how interior rooms and garden buildings are portrayed in the novels of Richardson, and Burney’s Evelina, in particular, and to a lesser extent of Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless and Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph. But, this book has not only focused on the fictional domestic environment. It has demonstrated how the interior rooms and exterior garden buildings represented by these four novelists intersect with contemporary ideas about the structure and use of domestic space, the concept of privacy, and the connection between living space and the individual. The reason behind this approach is simple: central to the six novels under scrutiny in Domestic Space in Eighteenth-Century British Novels is the domestic interior; specifically, the heroine’s experience of the domestic life of her living space.