Finding room and a place: G.B. Stern and the politics of the family house

Through this essay I explore G.B. Stern’s depiction of place though the demarcation of boundaries within houses and neighbourhoods and vying claims to ownership. I reveal how distinctions formerly marked out by class and income were eroded in the twenties and thirties as lifestyle marketing usurped social aspiration in three English novels. Through her fiction Stern explores the politics of domestic space in the unravelling of a life in Bohemian city flats, or the precarious existence of dependents squeezed into an already-full family house. Her characters are the victim of back-biting in a boarding house or the stressed-out city-dweller seeking refuge in a thick-walled cottage lacking in conveniences. At a crisis in their lives her characters migrate to the home shires or to the sea-side, or run away on the GWR train to Cornwall, or, her favourite, take refuge in the south of France and Italy. She wrote about the effect of place on identity in her characters’ lives returning again and again to the same locations in her novels as she iteratively plays with their meaning. The move never solves the difficulties of the relationship, but like shaking a kaleidoscope it changes the pattern. Gladys Bronwen Stern (1890-1973) is little-known now but was a household name in her day. She was a prolific writer of novels and short stories for the burgeoning interwar story magazines and adapted fiction for the screen in the thirties and forties. In the fifties she appeared on the television review programme The Bookman. Her appearances at the first night of her own and her fellow writers’ plays were recorded in the picture newspapers and her whereabouts was the subject of comment by journalists. It was newsworthy when she stayed with the authors, W. Somerset Maugham, Rebecca West and Sheila Kaye-Smith and when her friends came to her Italian house. The papers reported when she passed through London on her business trips to America or took her holiday in Cornwall with playwright Noel Coward and published pictures of her at the Riviera with the actress Gertie Lawrence and her young pals.