British Boarding Houses in Interwar Women's Literature

Emerging during the interwar period, literature set in the boarding house or bedsit allowed women writers from Stella Gibbons to Virginia Woolf to explore women's changing roles and complex experiences. A hybrid of the modernist and realist domestic fiction, the literature of the single room merges Modernism's interest in interior psychological states with the realism of precisely documented exterior spaces, offering a new mode of engagement with the two forms of interiority.