Mrs Beeton’s Household Book
Edited by Kay Fairfax
Orion £20, 288 pages
FT bookshop price: £16

The Housewife’s Handbook: How to Run the Modern Home
By Rachel Simhon
Bloomsbury £18.99, 368 pages
FT bookshop price: £15.19

The Gentle Art of Domesticity
By Jane Brocket
Hodder & Stoughton £25, 256 pages
FT bookshop price: £20

44 Things: My Year at Home
By Kirsty Gunn
Atlantic Books £15.99, 336 pages
FT bookshop price: £12.79

FamilyLifeStyle: Home
By Anita Kaushal
Thames & Hudson £19.95, 256 pages
FT bookshop price: £15.95

Did you know that you shouldn’t keep butter in the fridge? It goes rancid. Maybe lots of people already know that, but it came as a revelation to me. Suddenly I realised why the fridge mysteriously smells bad when I have half-finished packets of butter hanging about. And then I found out that bread goes stale faster in the fridge. Awesome. Rachel Simhon, who offers these gems in her modern manual The Housewife’s Handbook, is trying to reintroduce some old housekeeping lore to those of us who’ve forgotten how useful white vinegar and bicarbonate of soda can be.

Once I started thinking about butter, I remembered that in the 1970s many people kept their butter in a covered dish. And everyone had a bread bin. These were things I once knew. But I hid them at the back of my mind – as clever, privileged schoolgirls do when they skip over home economics to study Latin and physics, and joyfully realise we’re never going to darn socks or conjure miracles with leftovers. What nobody told us back then was that one day we’d have to keep a home as well as earn a living. But that’s old news. The new threat to women on the suburban block is an odd, reactionary one. We may be empowered at work and in the external world, but suddenly the physical and spiritual importance of our homes has been elevated. There’s the stylish-home-as-sanctuary as seen in dreamy women’s magazine “interiors” spreads. And there’s also the more general, fuzzy concept of a home – warmth, smiles, baking and clutter – which has returned as the backdrop for a new wave of “mummylit” fiction that has stay-at-home-mothers as its protagonists.

So it’s no surprise that the next step is for domesticity itself to have become a publishing trend. The home is the focus as never before. You wouldn’t have seen books this reactionary 10 or even 30 years ago. Though each book has a different take on the meaning of domesticity, all are aimed squarely at women. And while many men now help out at home, apparently only women must polish up those derided domestic skills. Is feminism dead? Or maybe something far more worrying is going on.

With a shudder, I turn to Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, first published in 1861 by one of Britain’s most famous cookery writers. Sensing a receptive public, this has now resurfaced as a “best of” compilation. Mrs Beeton’s Household Book is gripping in a morbidly fascinating way: “Thursday and Friday, in a laundry in full employ, are usually devoted to mangling, starching and ironing.” The book is a nicely presented reminder that servants did all domestic chores in a Victorian household, and the bulk of the book deals with these tasks – and the people who should perform them. The wife concentrated on the full-time business of managing the home: “Let her conduct be such that her inferiors may respect her and let her prove herself, then, the happy companion of man.”

Most women today have set aside the central aspiration of domesticity for the Victorians – that a wife must create a happy home. Feminism has allowed even domesticity to be redefined. It is now about self-fulfilment – we choose to be domestic because we don’t want to live in squalor, or because we want to show off our beautiful homes to friends. It’s not necessarily about our partners or children at all. There’s also a parallel post-feminist shift in these new domestic books – the expectation that a woman must be sole nurturer of human relationships has been replaced by the woman as sole keeper of the home as an object of beauty.

In an affluent society, modern domesticity is about objects as much as people. In the houses of the super-rich there’s a “third way” of home life, an odd hybrid of Victorian and modern domestic perfection. The leafy avenues of wealthy neighbourhoods often conceal wives who don’t work but instead manage endless building projects aimed at perfecting their homes; meanwhile a housekeeper oversees the cooking and cleaning, and a nanny gets the children into bed. A wife can greet her returning breadwinner with freshly applied lipstick and a hearty meal (cooked by someone else).

For those who still have to do their own chores, Rachel Simhon’s The Housewife’s Handbook is an extraordinary book. It’s an old-fashioned tome on how to keep house, but aimed at busy people who work. It’s full of the sort of tips that mothers used to pass down to teenage daughters but now don’t because the mothers are at work and the daughters – and sons – are busy having virtual lives. Simhon is the only author here who makes an effort to include men in her audience – and she rightly criticises women for cutting men, and their differently targeted domestic efforts, out of the household equation: “‘I’d like to help,’ a man once confided to me, ‘but whenever I try to do something, she watches and criticises, so in the end I give up.’”

I now consult my new oracle every time I need to do a household chore – I am following her advice on ridding the wardrobes of clothes moths, on how to wash up effectively (cold-water soaking only for pans of pasta and porridge), and on how to iron better (keep garments super-taut). It’s addictive.

In her introduction, Simhon admits that she came to love housework “late and of my own free will”, and this is key to the unfettered enthusiasm of this book. It doesn’t feel oppressive, or old-fashioned.

There is no joy of housework in Jane Brocket’s The Gentle Art of Domesticity. She argues that chores should be called “domestication”. Brocket says true domesticity is about feeling comfortable with the “gentle arts” of womanhood – knitting, baking, quilting and other semi-forgotten skills that have latterly come back into fashion, such as the odd craze for “scrapbooking”. This shows just how broad a term “domesticity” has become, that it can stretch from boring chores to such hobby-like activities.

Brocket’s philosophy is not that we need to be brilliant at these pursuits: “It’s the awareness of the worth of the gentle arts that counts, the ability to see that the feminists of the 1970s were misguided when they thought that teaching young girls to devalue domesticity constituted progress.”

Despite my frustration at being unable to sew anything more ambitious than a name tape, I disagree with Brocket. Like many hard-won achievements, it seems necessary, in retrospect, that well-educated girls missed out on the domestic arts at school. For women to be taken seriously by the men in charge, they need a CV that looks like a man’s. Only now that a woman can have a career – and a salary – to match a man’s (at least until she has children) can we even think of allowing our daughters to be tempted away from academic rigour by the “gentle arts”.

In the same way, only now with some distance from the greatest fights of feminism can we even bear to consider works such as this. This book swims in undreamt-of depths of domestic detail. Brocket talks of “setting out”: displays of related items in rows and patterns. Children’s displays of toys also count as “setting out”. She says: “I have often stumbled across some small and exquisitely formed design in the middle of a room and have been enchanted by the work and thought that went into its making.” (I would use “mess” to describe the dinosaurs and Playmobil people engaged in complicated carnage on the floor, but perhaps I am not thinking in the right way.)

I wanted to hate this book, with its pictures of tea cosies and the twee sentiments. But there’s some interesting prose stuffed among the lovely photos, and Brocket is right, there is something satisfying about an ordered, domestic life. And there’s a cheeringly radical undercurrent: “A modicum of practicality in the domestic space empowers us to make our own choices about what we make and eat, rather than handing over control of our home-making to profit-making companies.”

The novelist Kirsty Gunn offers not crafts, but a thoughtful take on the meaning of domesticity in 44 Things: My Year at Home. This is another beautifully packaged book for dipping into (do domesticated women have no time to read a book from cover to cover?), dedicated to “all our families”. Gunn has deliberately removed herself from the world of paid work to be a stay-at-home mother. In the introduction, Gunn explains that the work reflects her life: “It is written in the way it is because life at home is the way it is: chaotic, undecided, fragmentary. How could I ever be grandiose in intention, when the draft of a short story is fiddled with next to a plate of uneaten Weetabix?”

Some of Gunn’s “things” are too personal – the poems and fragments about her two little girls left me cold. But she also presents bits of other worlds – fiction about sisters and absent mothers and the domestic detail Gunn loves, but made general and more appealing. Giving us glimpses of compelling characters is mean on the readers and – equally meanly – I wanted to tell Gunn to pay for some childcare and get on with the writing job properly.

For the affluent, there is also a modern world beyond domesticity – the desirable state known as “lifestyle”, as displayed in FamilyLifeStyle: Home by Anita Kaushal. This book has few words, although it over-uses the usual meaningless suspects: “inspire”, “clean”, “relax”. Children frolic through landscapes punctuated by captions with POINTLESS capital letters, and sit on mini-Jacobsen chairs in nurseries with no Disney Princess merchandise or mutilated Power Rangers. They are blonde, clean and dressed in floral-sprigged clothes. You could spend £19.95 on this book but my suggestion would be to get a fix of perfect “lifestyle” by flicking through the Boden clothing catalogue. This also features sumptuous photos of smiley perfecto-families. But it’s free.

Women (and men) have long been snide about domesticity, but perhaps it’s time to reclaim the pleasure that comes only at home. I will make my confession: unalloyed joy is an afternoon making cakes with my kids, stirring and talking and icing in a kitchen that is homely but not cluttered. The small things can equal bliss. And yes, the drudge work is always with us, but the modern marvel of domesticity is that we can choose which chores we take on. I hate ironing – and nobody tuts at me because my children wear crumpled clothes. In fact the practical stuff is what makes these books acceptable, and possibly even read by some house-proud (or single) men.

What’s far more worrying – and depressing – is that the trend for domestic books shifts the female world as we know it. Suddenly it feels that our home lives – especially when they’re complicated by external commitments such as work – are not good enough to pass inspection in the new promised land of card-making, cross-stitch and plumped cushions.

Isabel Berwick is deputy editor of the FT Magazine