Elizabeth Kraft, Choice Magazine (51.7, March 2014):
“Clearly written and carefully researched, this book makes an important and transformative argument. Through a lens trained on the image of ‘home,’ MacKenzie elaborates the relationship between novels and writers not usually placed in conversation with one another. Highly recommended.”
Katie Barclay, Literature and History (23.2, Autumn 2014)
“Be it Ever So Humble is a tour de force. It is intelligent, engaging and stimulating … stirring the reader to think deeply and imaginatively about the implications of its readings and its interpretation of the past.”
Frances Ferguson, “Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century,” SEL (54.3, Summer 2014)
“When I’m trying to orient new readers in the field and its current scholarship, the books I’ll tell them to start with are … 6) MacKenzie’s Poverty, Fiction, and the Invention of the Middle-Class Home.“
Adela Pinch, “Recent Studies in the Nineteenth Century,” SEL (54.4, Autumn 2014)
“The chapters of this learned and fascinating book that will be of most interest to nineteenth-century scholars are the chapters on homelessness and incarceration in the works of Ann Radcliffe and Maria Edgeworth, on the dynamics of home and homelessness in William Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain poems and Home at Grasmere, and on the situation of Scottish authors—in particular Sir Walter Scott.”
Helen Metcalfe, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (39.1, March 2016)
“MacKenzie’s study contributes greatly to histories of the home for scholars across the humanities. But for the historian seeking a perspective on the changing literary representations of ‘home’ and the period’s reconceptualisation of this space, MacKenzie’s persuasive and refreshing study is especially valuable.”