Abstract

This article explores the relationship between women and domestic space in late nineteenth-century Britain, through a case study of a rare collection of photographs of domestic interiors belonging to students and staff at Royal Holloway College for Women in the 1890s. The article considers the province and construction of these photographs, assessing their uses and limitations as a source for domestic interior studies. The article places the evidence from Royal Holloway in the social and cultural context of late nineteenth-century Britain, comparing the photographs with textual representations from domestic advice manuals. The article explores these new female domestic interiors, showing how they were related to conventional middle-class homes. College women comfortably appropriated the function, if not the precise "décor" of the typical 'male' study. Incorporating some of the goods and furnishings more usually found in the drawing room, the staff study was a transitional space between parlour and study in the middle-class home. Female domestic advice writers emphasised the importance of the morning room as a private, feminine space, but few middle-class homes in this period had enough space to realise this fantasy. Like the morning room, the personal spaces of college women were both functional and feminine, allowing women both to study undisturbed and to develop their own personal taste.