This story is excerpted and adapted from Phyllis Richardson’s House of Fiction: From Pemberley to Brideshead, Great British Houses in Literature and Life, published in May 2021 by Unbound. Housing in postwar Britain was anything but romantic. The necessity of building, and quickly, shelter to replace the 100,000 houses destroyed by the Blitz in London alone, meant there was little room for romance. Coming to England as a teenager in 1946, after having been raised in the Shanghai International Settlement and spending two years in a Japanese internment camp, novelist…
