The Promise of the Suburbs

When Sarah Bilston argues that Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife ‘rais[es], only to unsettle and complicate, stereotypes of the suburbs and the suburbanite’ (p. 156) she perfectly describes her own book. Bilston challenges the persistent stereotype of suburban life as ‘crushingly dull and tasteless’ (p. 1), a stultifying environment of mindless repetition. Her book uncovers instead ‘a counter discourse ... about the suburbs as places that facilitated creative self-expression and enabled new communities formed around shared interests rather than birth networks’ (p. 3). As its subtitle suggests, the book constructs a history that brings literature and culture together and grants them equal weight, paying as much attention to gardening and interior decoration manuals as to the fictions of writers as well known as Wilkie Collins and as little known as Bertha Buxton. The book moves dialectically between positive and negative images of suburbia. In Chapter One, readers are introduced

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