The Promise of the Suburbs

“Sarah Bilston’s engaging The Promise of the Suburbs: A Victorian History in Literature and Culture rehabilitates the long-derided suburbs as a locus of creativity, upward mobility, and women’s self-fashioning. . . . This useful work contributes to both women’s history and urban studies.”—Pamela K. Gilbert, Studies in English Literature

“The Promise of the Suburbs is a well-researched, and highly readable study, with a judicious selection of illustrations.”—Nicholas Daly, English Literature in Translation

“Bilston’s book has much to recommend it . . . . [It] adroitly sketches the contradictory characterizations of suburbia as tasteless, reiterative, and aspirational in ways that both illuminate nineteenth-century discourse and gesture implicitly to its significant legacies.”—Andrea Kaston Tange, Victorian Studies

Selected for Choice's 2019 Outstanding Academic Titles List
 

“The Promise of the Suburbs reveals that, far from enforcing oppressive conformity, the suburbs offered diverse social interactions, opportunities for female professionalism, and new ideas about domestic space and urban modernity. This impressive book is a must-read for anyone interested in mid-Victorian culture.”—Talia Schaffer, Queens College, CUNY, and Graduate Center, CUNY

“No other book carries the analysis of suburban writing and writing about suburbia as far or as fascinatingly as Bilston has achieved here. I learned a lot from reading this book.”—Annette Federico, James Madison University

"Sarah Bilston’s book is a revelation, one that overturns conventional assumptions of suburbia’s sterility to reveal a site of diversity, sociability, and widened opportunities for women. It is essential reading."—Linda K. Hughes, Texas Christian University

"In this compelling account of Victorian suburbia, Bilston completely overturns our preconceptions.  The suburbs, she demonstrates, were not dull and stultifying, but a site of self-invention, social experimentation, and creativity."—Kate Flint, University of Southern California