Five books that explore hidden domestic lives

Lucy Worsley's latest books are a non-fiction book for adults called Jane Austen at Home, and a novel for younger readers called My Name is Victoria. At the Guardian she tagged "five volumes that help you understand the domestic lives of people in the past – and why they came to matter," including:

[D]o you have a lingering feeling that constitutional or diplomatic history is more serious, more worthy? Well the personal is the political, a point made, at the same time as Girouard [Life in the English Country House (1978)] was writing, in the wildly popular and highly influential novel by Marilyn French, The Women’s Room (1977). I cannot erase from my mind French’s astonishingly realistic re-creation of the heroine Mira’s terrible, turgid housework routine.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Women’s Room is among four books that changed Jesse Blackadder.

--Marshal Zeringue