Empty Home

Housekeeping

Marilynne Robinson · 1980

Two sisters in a small town in Idaho are raised by a succession of relatives in a house that keeps emptying, and finally by an aunt who does not really believe in furniture. Robinson writes better than anyone about a building slowly losing its purpose — the rooms that stop being used, the things nobody puts away, the way a house without enough people in it starts to feel like weather rather than shelter. Strange, luminous and not quick, and worth every page.

Solitude

Anthony Storr · 1988

Storr was a psychiatrist who got tired of the assumption that a life is only well lived if it is full of close relationships, and wrote this to argue the opposite case: that the capacity to be alone is a genuine achievement, and that a great deal of what people make and understand happens in an empty house. It will not fill your kitchen. What it will do is stop you treating an empty one as evidence that something has gone wrong with you.

Hotel du Lac

Anita Brookner · 1984

Edith Hope, a romantic novelist, is sent to a quiet Swiss hotel out of season after doing something her friends consider disgraceful. She writes letters, watches the other guests and decides what she actually wants. Brookner is the great chronicler of the well-furnished solitary life, and she is neither self-pitying nor falsely cheerful about it, which makes her unusually good company when the house is quiet.

A Book of Silence

Sara Maitland · 2008

Maitland raised a family, then found herself living alone, and then went looking for silence on purpose: forty days in a cottage in Skye, a stretch in the Sinai desert, finally a small house on a Galloway moor. She is honest that the first weeks were awful and that some of what surfaced frightened her. Useful precisely because she is not romantic about it, and because she distinguishes between silence chosen and silence arrived at by default.

Elizabeth and Her German Garden

Elizabeth von Arnim · 1898

Elizabeth escapes her household and her husband into a neglected garden in Pomerania and writes about it for a year. She is funny, faintly subversive and entirely unapologetic about preferring her own company to almost anybody’s. It is here because it is the earliest and cheeriest argument on this list that a woman on her own in a large quiet house is not a problem to be solved, and might in fact be having rather a good time.

The Art of Solitude

Stephen Batchelor · 2020

Thirty-two short chapters written over a year of deliberate aloneness, moving between Buddhist practice, Montaigne, art and a good deal of walking. Batchelor is interested in the difference between solitude and isolation, and his answer is roughly that solitude is aloneness you are on speaking terms with. Short pieces, no argument to sustain, easy to pick up and put down — which suits the evenings this page exists for.

Winter Solstice

Rosamunde Pilcher · 2000

Elfrida is alone in a Hampshire village with a dog and not much else when a series of events puts five broken people into one large cold house in Scotland at Christmas. Nothing dramatic happens on purpose: they cook, they walk, they leave each other alone. It is here as the counterweight to everything else on this list, because houses do fill up again, and they usually do it by accident rather than by plan.