In John Crowley’s Little, Big, the family estate is called Edgewood. It is the home of the Drinkwater family and far more than an ordinary country house: its rooms, wings, and architectural styles seem to fold into one another, creating a structure that is larger and stranger the farther one explores.
John Drinkwater, an architect, designs Edgewood as a kind of sampler of country-house styles. The building eventually becomes a threshold between the everyday world and Faerie, the supernatural realm woven through the novel’s family history. Several generations of Drinkwaters live there, and the house becomes inseparable from their relationships, memories, prophecies, and encounters with fairies.
The novel begins when Smoky Barnable travels to Edgewood to marry Daily Alice Drinkwater. By the ending, much of the family has entered Faerie, while Edgewood is left empty and gradually returns to nature. The estate’s name can be confused with the novel’s family names or with its many internal houses, but Edgewood is the single canonical answer. Published in 1981, Little, Big won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1982.