This project engages with space in the British novel, specifically anxieties around dispossession, dislocation, and homelessness that many women writers express. While conduct manuals and polemical writing sought to locate middle- and upper-class women within domestic space by arguing that it was most conducive to happiness and social order, depictions of the home in British fiction are overwhelmingly negative: women are marginalized and often face threats of expulsion from the domestic sphere if they appear to have transgressed the authority of men or patriarchal surrogates. I explore the way women subvert these dynamics to reorder domestic space in Jane Collier's An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting, Frances Burney's The Wanderer, Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Charlotte Bront�'s Villette, and Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South. I focus on the relationship between female subjects and their material worlds in order to reimagine what feminine subjectivity and agency can look like. By looking at the ways female characters recognize the agency of non-human things and how they negotiate materiality, I demonstrate that women may enact ingenious and creative resistances to their marginalization.