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Lives of Houses
A group of notable writers--including UK poet laureate Simon Armitage, Julian Barnes, Margaret MacMillan, and Jenny Uglow--celebrate our fascination with the houses of famous literary figures, artists, composers, and politicians of the past
What can a house tell us about the person who lives there? Do we shape the buildings we live in, or are we formed by the places we call home? And why are we especially fascinated by the houses of the famous and often long-dead? In Lives of Houses, a group of notable biographers, historians, critics, and poets explores these questions and more through fascinating essays on the houses of great writers, artists, composers, and politicians of the past.
Editors Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee are joined by wide-ranging contributors, including Simon Armitage, Julian Barnes, David Cannadine, Roy Foster, Alexandra Harris, Daisy Hay, Margaret MacMillan, Alexander Masters, and Jenny Uglow. We encounter W. H. Auden, living in joyful squalor in New York's St. Mark's Place, and W. B. Yeats in his flood-prone tower in the windswept West of Ireland. We meet Benjamin Disraeli, struggling to keep up appearances, and track the lost houses of Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen. We visit Benjamin Britten in Aldeburgh, England, and Jean Sibelius at Ainola, Finland. But Lives of Houses also considers those who are unhoused, unwilling or unable to establish a home--from the bewildered poet John Clare wandering the byways of England to the exiled Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera living on the streets of London.
With more than forty illustrations, Lives of Houses illuminates what houses mean to us and how we use them to connect to and think about the past. The result is a fresh and engaging look at house and home.
What can a house tell us about the person who lives there? Do we shape the buildings we live in, or are we formed by the places we call home? And why are we especially fascinated by the houses of the famous and often long-dead? In Lives of Houses, a group of notable biographers, historians, critics, and poets explores these questions and more through fascinating essays on the houses of great writers, artists, composers, and politicians of the past.
Editors Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee are joined by wide-ranging contributors, including Simon Armitage, Julian Barnes, David Cannadine, Roy Foster, Alexandra Harris, Daisy Hay, Margaret MacMillan, Alexander Masters, and Jenny Uglow. We encounter W. H. Auden, living in joyful squalor in New York's St. Mark's Place, and W. B. Yeats in his flood-prone tower in the windswept West of Ireland. We meet Benjamin Disraeli, struggling to keep up appearances, and track the lost houses of Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen. We visit Benjamin Britten in Aldeburgh, England, and Jean Sibelius at Ainola, Finland. But Lives of Houses also considers those who are unhoused, unwilling or unable to establish a home--from the bewildered poet John Clare wandering the byways of England to the exiled Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera living on the streets of London.
With more than forty illustrations, Lives of Houses illuminates what houses mean to us and how we use them to connect to and think about the past. The result is a fresh and engaging look at house and home.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published March 24, 2020
About the author
Kate Kennedy
5 books2 followersKate Kennedy, a writer and broadcaster, is the Associate Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing and a Research Fellow in Life-Writing at Wolfson College, University of Oxford.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
July 18, 2025
Certainly no better than a three star rating.
I think the book should have been more interesting than it was. The contributors were mostly academics and very often did not stick to the overall topic. For instance, early in the book is a chapter on a colonial house in Roman Morocco. There is no known owner and it is strictly an archaeological study. Interesting but off topic.
I tended to enjoy the less academic discussions of homes of authors and artists whose contents show something about the owners which might come as a surprise given their professional lives. In particular i enjoyed the chapters on Benjamin Britten, W. H. Auden (two different homes—two different chapters) and Jean Sibelius.
Some houses no longer exist and some are museums. I don’t usually go out of my way to visit shrines of writers and artists so I was suprised to find one here that was included. It is the Soames House Museum in London. Part of the suprise is that I’d never have classified it as a home, although he did live in it a number of years. It was obviously a purpose built museum to house his collections. Visitors don’t see the private parts of the house and it only reflects his maniacal collecting habits and didactic nature. Oof, his poor wife. “No, John, not another mummy!”
The book is such a mixed bag. Some pieces A+, some are dull as dishwasher.
I think the book should have been more interesting than it was. The contributors were mostly academics and very often did not stick to the overall topic. For instance, early in the book is a chapter on a colonial house in Roman Morocco. There is no known owner and it is strictly an archaeological study. Interesting but off topic.
I tended to enjoy the less academic discussions of homes of authors and artists whose contents show something about the owners which might come as a surprise given their professional lives. In particular i enjoyed the chapters on Benjamin Britten, W. H. Auden (two different homes—two different chapters) and Jean Sibelius.
Some houses no longer exist and some are museums. I don’t usually go out of my way to visit shrines of writers and artists so I was suprised to find one here that was included. It is the Soames House Museum in London. Part of the suprise is that I’d never have classified it as a home, although he did live in it a number of years. It was obviously a purpose built museum to house his collections. Visitors don’t see the private parts of the house and it only reflects his maniacal collecting habits and didactic nature. Oof, his poor wife. “No, John, not another mummy!”
The book is such a mixed bag. Some pieces A+, some are dull as dishwasher.
February 16, 2026
More so a biographical collection than an architectural study - but still some good bits, especially the section on homelessness.
August 21, 2021
Utterly delightful vignettes about some interesting people’s houses. I discovered authors and people I now want to read/read about. My favourite thing about this book was turning into a new chapter and discovering a new house; my least favourite thing about this book was particularly enjoying a person’s story and then the chapter ending!
December 9, 2023
I wanted to read this book because I thought it would give me some travel ideas on various artists houses. It does a little of that, but its raison d'etre is deeper than that. This book analyses what home means to various people, how a home can impact on a person and how the person maybe in turn leave their mark on a home. There is a particularly interesting chapter on homelessness and some curious examples of the drivers of some of the psychological aspects of this phenomenon. Good writing research material too, on the importance of a home to a life, writers take note!
December 24, 2023
This was ok but came across as bitty and all over the place.
The early chapters on "olden day" writers were boring and repetitive. This old writer moved house and was wistful. This other old writer moved house and reminisced, meh! The latter chapters were a little better, particularly the one by Alexander Masters regarding homeless individuals.
Overall though, not the greatest book. Tenuous associations and padding of details to make houses interesting. Not for me.
Off to the library for donation with this one.
The early chapters on "olden day" writers were boring and repetitive. This old writer moved house and was wistful. This other old writer moved house and reminisced, meh! The latter chapters were a little better, particularly the one by Alexander Masters regarding homeless individuals.
Overall though, not the greatest book. Tenuous associations and padding of details to make houses interesting. Not for me.
Off to the library for donation with this one.
May 26, 2020
A mixed bag of essays about houses, mostly those belonging to famous writers, composers etc, some more interesting than others. 3.5 stars.
April 10, 2020
As academic gatherings go, this must have been a fun one: a bunch of brainiacs sitting around discussing the homes of various famous writers. As a book, it’s episodic but reasonably amusing. But bottom line, knowing about a writer’s home doesn’t make his books any better.
October 24, 2020
A fascinating collection of essays about houses, of the famous and the ordinary, and their meaning for us, written by an interesting group of writers and academics. I wish I'd been able to attend the event where the authors presented these.
September 21, 2023
3.5 / 5 stars
March 20, 2021
I probably would have appreciated this book more if I was more familiar with some of the lives of the people whose homes were featured. The essays were written well, just did not hold my attention. It was one of those books I finished, but did not necessarily enjoy.
December 8, 2020
Oof. Dull.
May 24, 2022
Some interesting bits in here that I enjoyed reading but overall it did not make a compelling or cohesive book.
February 3, 2026
This book seems made for me right now. I am a (struggling) writer who spent the last year finding, buying and doing up the house that I hope will become my perfect little writer’s nest. I’ve visited many house museums over the years, spent ten years regularly visiting one (Dr Johnson’s House in Gough Square) and spent four years volunteering there. Houses have been on my mind.
This book started with a conference in 2017 entitled ‘The Lives of Houses’, which produced a number of contributions from all sorts of people. There are big name writers like Simon Armitage and Julian Barnes, fantastic biographers like Jenny Uglow and Hermione Lee, and a general smorgasbord of interesting people pitching in - yet the book is never quite as interesting as it could be.
Many of the chapters were about the house of a particular famous individual, many writers, a few composers, the odd politician but many of these chapters didn’t give much more than a potted biography of their subject through their house. The chapter on Samuel Johnson used Bolt Court to show the domestic chaos he lived in, and contrasted that with the order of the Thrale’s, essentially telling the same story as According to Queeney. There was a little about Hester Thrale Piozzi’s memoirs relating to her domestic sphere and Boswell’s Life relating to his more public-facing Bolt Court lifestyle, but it wasn’t much developed. There wasn’t much about how Johnson never owned any of those houses, and how a house could be a dangerous drain on his mental health, being both solitary and idle.
Similarly, though many of the other chapters included biographies of people I was less aware of, they didn’t do much more than present the biography through a slightly different lens. The chapter in Edward Lear’s houses chiefly felt like a slimmed down part of his biography, the WH Auden chapters revealed to me that his name was Wystan and he lived in a bizarre melange of order and chaos. I found it interesting that both Churchill and Disraeli bought houses that were out of their budget and made them beholden to others - Disraeli was bailed out by party donors, and Churchill’s house was managed by the National Trust while he was still living in it.
The better chapters were the ones that skirted around the topic a little more. There was a chapter about a Roman house in Morocco, which shed interesting light on what it may have been like being at the edge of the Roman world as it was collapsing. One chapter is a recollection of her mother’s house and how it reflected the character of her mother - something many of the more famous-focused pieces didn’t quite do. I really liked Hermione Lee’s ‘House of Air’, about visiting where famous houses used to be, and how they still stand in the works of those writers even if they are not actually standing any more.
The chapter that followed the formula of biography-through-house that I found most successful was the one about Yeats’s damp, flooding tower. This building was a project of romance and whimsy that was never really a successful house, but was a successful symbol to the writer himself. There was an interesting one about the Sir John Soame’s Museum, which I’ve visited many times but didn’t realise what a peculiar institution it is, or its bizarre relationship with other museums in general.
There was a section about the unhoused. About a writer who lived in a tent for a while (and had no permanent home after that), a really good one about a man who lived in mental institutions but yearned for the hills of his old home. The chapter where Stuart Masters interviewed a number of people at a homeless charity was interesting but felt sort of undercooked. I got the sense with a lot of the entries, that this was the work of very good writers who were knocking off some B-grade material quickly, when it had the potential to be something more transcendent. The less said about the poems the better.
So, while the book is pretty good, and in writing this review I have remembered more that I enjoyed about it than I initially thought, it feels more like an interesting enough distraction than it does something vital.
This book started with a conference in 2017 entitled ‘The Lives of Houses’, which produced a number of contributions from all sorts of people. There are big name writers like Simon Armitage and Julian Barnes, fantastic biographers like Jenny Uglow and Hermione Lee, and a general smorgasbord of interesting people pitching in - yet the book is never quite as interesting as it could be.
Many of the chapters were about the house of a particular famous individual, many writers, a few composers, the odd politician but many of these chapters didn’t give much more than a potted biography of their subject through their house. The chapter on Samuel Johnson used Bolt Court to show the domestic chaos he lived in, and contrasted that with the order of the Thrale’s, essentially telling the same story as According to Queeney. There was a little about Hester Thrale Piozzi’s memoirs relating to her domestic sphere and Boswell’s Life relating to his more public-facing Bolt Court lifestyle, but it wasn’t much developed. There wasn’t much about how Johnson never owned any of those houses, and how a house could be a dangerous drain on his mental health, being both solitary and idle.
Similarly, though many of the other chapters included biographies of people I was less aware of, they didn’t do much more than present the biography through a slightly different lens. The chapter in Edward Lear’s houses chiefly felt like a slimmed down part of his biography, the WH Auden chapters revealed to me that his name was Wystan and he lived in a bizarre melange of order and chaos. I found it interesting that both Churchill and Disraeli bought houses that were out of their budget and made them beholden to others - Disraeli was bailed out by party donors, and Churchill’s house was managed by the National Trust while he was still living in it.
The better chapters were the ones that skirted around the topic a little more. There was a chapter about a Roman house in Morocco, which shed interesting light on what it may have been like being at the edge of the Roman world as it was collapsing. One chapter is a recollection of her mother’s house and how it reflected the character of her mother - something many of the more famous-focused pieces didn’t quite do. I really liked Hermione Lee’s ‘House of Air’, about visiting where famous houses used to be, and how they still stand in the works of those writers even if they are not actually standing any more.
The chapter that followed the formula of biography-through-house that I found most successful was the one about Yeats’s damp, flooding tower. This building was a project of romance and whimsy that was never really a successful house, but was a successful symbol to the writer himself. There was an interesting one about the Sir John Soame’s Museum, which I’ve visited many times but didn’t realise what a peculiar institution it is, or its bizarre relationship with other museums in general.
There was a section about the unhoused. About a writer who lived in a tent for a while (and had no permanent home after that), a really good one about a man who lived in mental institutions but yearned for the hills of his old home. The chapter where Stuart Masters interviewed a number of people at a homeless charity was interesting but felt sort of undercooked. I got the sense with a lot of the entries, that this was the work of very good writers who were knocking off some B-grade material quickly, when it had the potential to be something more transcendent. The less said about the poems the better.
So, while the book is pretty good, and in writing this review I have remembered more that I enjoyed about it than I initially thought, it feels more like an interesting enough distraction than it does something vital.
June 19, 2020
I am drawn to historic houses like a moth to a flame and this book mirrors my interests perfectly! Each essay explores not only the life of a particular house, but the people that inhabited it, wrote about it, created art in it, and died in it. Some of the houses are no longer there, so the essayist recreates the image in our minds: "so it is with most imaginative returns to a lost home: the excitement and interest of dreaming one's way back into the past life of the house also involve emotions of longing and missing." So it is with me. I spend hours retracing steps through the houses of my childhood, for no other reason than to recreate it in my mind like a comfortable blanket pulled up over myself. The houses in this book range from Virginia Woolf's little Sussex house called Asheham to the villa in San Remo where Edward Lear wrote his poetry. Some houses are a bit horrifying, such as W.H. Auden's New York flat where he holed up. Others reverberate with the creative spirit of the person living there, such as artist Benjamin Britten's home and studio in Alderburgh where he painted the sea.
One of my favorites is historian Margaret MacMillan's reminiscence of her childhood home in Canada where her mother took their "boring home" and turned it into something extraordinary. It had wall-to-wall bookcases and a big messy kitchen. "Our garden was exuberant and colorful and spilled over onto the sidewalk. Iris, tulips, peonies, larkspurs, roses, candytuft, poppies and chrysanthemums came and went..." and her mom painted her dark paneling a lovely light violet. Another fascinating portrait was drawn of Winston Churchill's estate at Chartwell, which he couldn't begin to afford but still, he clung to it as evidence of his aristocracy. Chartwell, the author notes, was his dream and his wife's nightmare. Houses can be like that. They play such a larger than life role in our consciousness and live with us long after we move out.
One of my favorites is historian Margaret MacMillan's reminiscence of her childhood home in Canada where her mother took their "boring home" and turned it into something extraordinary. It had wall-to-wall bookcases and a big messy kitchen. "Our garden was exuberant and colorful and spilled over onto the sidewalk. Iris, tulips, peonies, larkspurs, roses, candytuft, poppies and chrysanthemums came and went..." and her mom painted her dark paneling a lovely light violet. Another fascinating portrait was drawn of Winston Churchill's estate at Chartwell, which he couldn't begin to afford but still, he clung to it as evidence of his aristocracy. Chartwell, the author notes, was his dream and his wife's nightmare. Houses can be like that. They play such a larger than life role in our consciousness and live with us long after we move out.
August 2, 2022
The collection of essays in this book emerged from a 2017 conference titled ‘The Lives of Houses’ held at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College, Oxford.
This conference brought together scholars from different disciplines and professions, with an emphasis on British, Irish, American and European houses. As with all conferences, the speakers (particularly the ‘big names’) would have been known to each other, their areas of interest already known, and their contributions would have been rather standardized in length. And ‘big names’ there are: Hermione Lee, Margaret Macmillan, David Cannadine, Jenny Uglow, Julian Barnes. Although there were papers that broke the mould, the overwhelming impression that I took away from the book was of 19th century British writers and a peculiarly British form of being ‘the writer’ in a mixture of eccentricity and domesticity.
For my complete review, please visit:
https://residentjudge.com/2022/08/02/...
This conference brought together scholars from different disciplines and professions, with an emphasis on British, Irish, American and European houses. As with all conferences, the speakers (particularly the ‘big names’) would have been known to each other, their areas of interest already known, and their contributions would have been rather standardized in length. And ‘big names’ there are: Hermione Lee, Margaret Macmillan, David Cannadine, Jenny Uglow, Julian Barnes. Although there were papers that broke the mould, the overwhelming impression that I took away from the book was of 19th century British writers and a peculiarly British form of being ‘the writer’ in a mixture of eccentricity and domesticity.
For my complete review, please visit:
https://residentjudge.com/2022/08/02/...
April 14, 2020
I saw this book's blurb in the newspapers a couple of weeks ago and immediately ordered it. It's gorgeous looking and made a meaty read in that some of the essays were slightly dense in style. My highlights are probably Margaret MacMillan's piece about her mother's house, David Cannadine on Winton Churchill's Chartwell, Alexander Masters' essay 'The Fear of Houses' and the final essay in the collection, Julian Barnes writing about the composer Sibelius. A fascinating and varied selection that covers a lot of ground.
August 22, 2023
Mildly interesting compilation of essays on a wide range of Famous Peoples' Houses written by other famous people: Hermione Lee's general introduction asks thoughtful questions about what "home" means, as does Alexandra Harris in her essay on moving house; essays on homes of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Tennyson, Edward Lear, and Auden provides sometimes hilarious physical setting for poetic inspiration. Political figures include Disraeli and Churchill.
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December 3, 2024I read only the first half of this book, after that, it didn't quite hold my attention. But I really enjoyed the first three sections: "Houses Lost and Found," "Family Houses," and "Dream Houses." I am still planning to read the final section, "The Afterlives of Houses."
January 19, 2021
There are many charming things in this, especially the chapter on the daily routine of W.H.Auden.
May 14, 2026
Parts were charming and interesting but several times I found it dry.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews