Gentle Windows

Gentle Windows Synopsis

What kind of homes and work spaces do women make as expressions of who they are, when able to live alone? An immersive, engaging and evocative journey through research, travel and family memoir, Gentle Windows explores how women create and curate the spaces around theme when free of societal and familial expectations? In her first book, Tender Maps, Alice Maddicott considered travel as a search for feeling and atmosphere.

Returning to the home, Gentle Windows blends social history with family history, art with literature to explore what women's spaces look like, without the conventional pressures of family - and what this tells us about society. Alice's grandmother - swimmer, actress and orphan - was raised communally by women and as Alice retraces her grandmother's steps through the Twentieth Century she encounters A La Ronde, a 16-sided cottage built by two sisters after a Grand Tour of Europe and bequeathed for the use of single women alone.

She considers other artists, outsiders and pioneers, through history, like Ithell Colquhoun, Elsie de Wolfe and Hope Bourne. She takes us back to meet Manhattan interior designers at the turn of the century to as well as teenage girls painting murals in Paris and we travel through cities and wild landscapes to meet women living alone in attics, cottages, caravans and studios - from Scotland to Devon, Paris to New York.

With curiosity, playfulness and honesty Maddicott opens the window to the joys & possibilities of unconvential living.