A decade after the Brexit vote, tensions surrounding Englishness remain unresolved in Britain. This article examines the myth of Englishness through the motif of the country house, a site of national identity, focusing on how Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger (2009) dismantles the country-house myth by challenging the values traditionally associated with it. Waters’s critique of heritage notions of Englishness intersects with a parallel crisis of selfhood in the homodiegetic narrator, revealing a conflict between identity and desire at individual and national levels. Attending to the class dynamics underpinning this novel, the article explores how Waters’s engagement with genre hybridity—Gothic, psychological, social and historical—unsettles the rigidity of heritage values and contributes to rethinking nationhood. Through its historical resonance across a past–present interface, the novel responds to pre-Brexit identity frictions by framing Hundreds Hall as a metaphor for a nation suspended between lived reality and a mythologised past.
María José de la Torre-Moreno (Thu,) studied this question.