Roses around the door and thatched roofs? The country cottage was, and still is, an icon that has carried multiple, often opposing, meanings, which have in turn shaped the way that rural housing has been designed, built and sold over a number of years. This book is a thematic, social and cultural history of the country cottage as labourer's home, as gendered space, as beau idyll, and as an icon of Englishness. Karen Sayer examines the wider issues raised by the countryside as site of nature and culture, the competition between picturesque and sublime, the emergence of new national identities, and the construction of domesticity. She also addresses the relationship between ideal, ideology and fact. This though, is not a simple matter of setting reality against image, of arguing that literature or art have failed to provide an accurate reflection of country life to a credulous, urban, middle class audience, but developing a more sophisticated understanding of the many meanings embodied within the image and reality of country life.