Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London

by Sharon Marcus

In urban studies, the nineteenth century is the "age of great cities." In feminist studies, it is the era of the separate domestic sphere. But what of the city's homes? In the course of answering this question, Apartment Stories provides a singular and radically new framework for understanding the urban and the domestic. Turning to an element of the cityscape that is thoroughly familiar yet frequently overlooked, Sharon Marcus argues that the apartment house embodied the intersections of city and home, public and private, and masculine and feminine spheres.

Moving deftly from novels to architectural treatises, legal debates, and popular urban observation, Marcus compares the representation of the apartment house in Paris and London. Along the way, she excavates the urban ghost tales that encoded Londoners' ambivalence about city dwellings; contends that Haussmannization enclosed Paris in a new regime of privacy; and locates a female counterpart to the flâneur and the omniscient realist narrator—the portière who supervised the apartment building.

Genres: History, 19th Century, France, Victorian, Nonfiction, British Literature, Cities

333 pages, Hardcover

First published February 8, 1999

About the author

Sharon Marcus is the Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is a founding editor of Public Books and the author of the award-winning Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton) and Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London.

Reviews

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

For European social history completists.

[Alex Csicsek · Rating 5 out of 5]

The introduction of apartment living in early Victorian Paris challenged and changed conceptions of the domestic in a rapidly expanding urban environment: home, family, and the relationship between the public and private. Drawing on contemporary literature, architectural criticism, and public debate in the newspapers, Marcus expertly looks at these issues, and contrasts the development of dense apartment living in Paris with Londoners' adherence to the terraced house as the ideal [compromise:] form of home for big cities.

Apartment Stories is an interesting read not only for what it has to say about the Victorians' reaction to the metropolitan boom, but also for what those reactions reveal about the English and French characters.

[Annie]

Really interesting first chapter, but then went downhill from there. Way too much literary analysis without grounding it in non-fictional representations. The biggest drawback is the lack of a conclusion.

[Rock · Rating 5 out of 5]

brilliant and unique fusion of urban studies and comparative literature.