In the first chapter, the emphasis is placed on how Elizabeth Taylor’s Palladian manifests a wide range of themes related to domestic life – gender, erotic and maternal love and sexuality – as well as social changes and power relations through the imagery of food. In the second chapter I focus on neodomesticity in Atkinson’s novels, in which received notions of domestic life are revised and subverted. I aim to investigate how Behind the Scenes at the Museum and Human Croquet depict and demystify crucial concepts humans build their lives on – love, family, and home – by exploring the treatment of traditional ideas of femininity, and other concepts related to the domestic sphere. Ruby, the protagonist of Behind is still a young child when she announces: “sometimes it's hard to be a woman” (257); even at this early age suspecting that many of the hardships waiting for her will be connected to her womanhood. I argue that through exposing to critique the closely related themes of marriage, obligatory sexuality, motherhood and housekeeping Atkinson creates a neodomestic environment, where I shall explore how the novels portray these painful experiences connected to the “drudgery of domestic life.” Thus, the body of my thesis is divided into two chapters which intend to provide close readings of the texts. In the first chapter I focus on Elizabeth Taylor’s portrayal of food and domesticity in Palladian, while the second chapter is devoted to analysing domesticity and concepts related to it in Kate Atkinson’s first two novels: Behind the Scenes and Human Croquet.