Episode 117: The Thing About Barton Cottage

The Dashwood ladies have moved to Devon, and everyone seems to have an opinion on their new digs. This episode we discuss cottages, in all their many permutations.

Exterior of Barton Cottage as depicted in the 2008 miniseries

If you have ever had to listen to someone brag about the house party they organized, this episode is for you.

Endsleigh Cottage, country retreat of the Duke of Bedford, is probably closer to what Robert Ferrars has in mind when he waxes on about a cottage.

Selected Sources:

• Aslet, Clive. The Story of the Country House: A History of Places and People. Yale University Press, 2021.

• Hardy, Barbara. “Properties and Possessions in Jane Austen’s Novels.” In A Reading of Jane Austen. Athlone Press, 1975. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-03100-9_5.

• Jones, Hazel. “‘Within Four Miles Northward of Exeter’: Landscapes of the Mind and Map in Sense and Sensibility.” Persuasions On-Line 43, no. 1 (2022). https://jasna.org/publications-2/persuasions-online/volume-43-no-1/jones/.

• Le Faye, Deirdre. Jane Austen: The World of Her Novels. Frances Lincoln, 2003.

• Malton, James. An Essay on British Cottage Architecture: Being an Attempt to Perpetuate on Principle, That Peculiar Mode of Building, Which Was Originally the Effect of Chance: Supported by Fourteen Designs, Their Ichnography, or Plans, Laid down to Scale, Comprising Dwellings for the Peasant and Farmer, and Retreats for the Gentlemen, with Various Observations Thereon: The Whole Extending to Twenty-One Plates. Hookham and Carpenter, 1798. http://archive.org/details/Malton040347.

• Maudlin, Daniel. The Idea of the Cottage in English Architecture, 1760-1860. Routledge Research in Architecture. Routledge, 2015.

• McMordie, Michael. “The Cottage Idea.” RACAR: Revue d’art Canadienne / Canadian Art Review 6, no. 1 (1979): 17–27.

• Nicolson, Nigel. The World of Jane Austen. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991.

• Park, Julie. “‘A Small House in the Country’: Cottage Dreams and Desires in the Eighteenth-Century English Imagination.” In At Home in the Eighteenth Century: Interrogating Domestic Space, 1st ed., edited by Stephen G. Hague and Karen Lipsedge. Routledge, 2021. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429297267.

• Peck, Catherine Jane. “The Country Cottage in Nineteenth-Century Literature.” Doctoral Thesis, University of Surrey, 2023. https://doi.org/10.15126/THESIS.900874.

• Rhodes, Idone F. “The Cottage as Metaphor: Perspectives on Marianne Dashwood’s Improvement.” 2022 Essay Contest Winning Entries: Jane Austen Society of North America, 2022. https://jasna.org/publications-2/essay-contest-winning-entries/2022-essay-contest/rhodes/.

• Walker, John. A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language. London, 1791. http://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_a-critical-pronouncing-d_walker-john_1791.

• Worsley, Lucy. Jane Austen at Home. St. Martin’s Press, 2017.

As mentioned in the episode: Zan’s chart measuring the frequency of the word cottage (and variants) in Austen’s works

Other Relevant Episodes

• Episode 04: The Thing About Marianne’s Dead Leaves

• Episode 10: The Thing About Box Hill

• Episode 100: The Thing About Jane Austen’s House with guest Lizzie Dunford

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