Robin Hyde's yearning for what she terms ‘a home in this world’ is a longing that many settler novelists share. Like Hyde, writing in the 1930s, nineteenth-century settler writers conceive of home in a variety of ways. At the most basic, literal level, ‘home’ is a physical, domestic place, the ‘four walls and a roof on top’ that Hyde describes. In settler fiction, home, or ‘Home’, is also a cultural space, the point of origin from which settlers move outwards to the new world, look back towards with nostalgia, try to replicate in the new land, and return to when possible. Home is also a metaphorical and ideological concept bound up with complex feelings of belonging and identity. For settler writers such as Jessie Weston, who is at the centre of this discussion of fictional representations of antipodal domesticity, home is ultimately about finding the place, or space, in which one can feel and be ‘at home’. In Weston's fiction the individual home, the physical space that settlers occupy, acts as a symbolic microcosm of the nation.