Beyond the City

by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

First published 1891

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3.2(243)

Three neighbouring households in a newly built London suburb—the Denvers, the Walkers and the Westmacotts—become entangled through friendship, courtship, money and family expectation. Their settled routines are particularly unsettled by Mrs Westmacott, an outspoken advocate of women’s independence whose opinions challenge several of the assumptions held by the people around her.
The story uses domestic comedy and romance to examine the changing social world of the late nineteenth-century middle class. Marriage, financial insecurity and ideas about the proper roles of men and women repeatedly collide beneath the apparently quiet surface of suburban life.