This Blessed House

by

Jhumpa Lahiri

This Blessed House Study Guide

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Jhumpa Lahiri's This Blessed House. Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Brief Biography of Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri was born to parents who immigrated to London from the West Indian state of Bengal. Her family moved to the United States when she was three years old; Lahiri identifies as American. She went to Barnard College before attending graduate school at Boston University, where she earned four degrees: MA degrees in English Literature, Creative Writing, and Comparative Studies in Literature and the Arts, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. Her first collection of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. The title story won the O. Henry Award. Four years later, she published her debut novel, The Namesake, which was chosen that year by the National Endowment for the Arts as one of their Big Read books, meant to bring communities across the country together through a shared reading experience. The Namesake was turned into a successful film that was released in 2006. She has gone on to receive several prestigious awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Humanities Medal. In addition to her two short story collections, two novels, and dozens of essays in English, she has published a novel, a collection of poems, and two collections of essays in Italian. She currently serves as the Director of the Creative Writing Program at her alma mater Barnard College.
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Historical Context of This Blessed House

According to U.S. Census data, between 1980 and 2000, the foreign-born population living in the United States more than doubled, jumping from 14 million to 31 million. The number of immigrants from India increased five times in the same period, in part due to Congress eliminating the national quotas that restricted immigration to mostly European countries in 1965. Indians have since gone on to be the second biggest immigrant population in the United States. Sanjeev, the main character in “This Blessed House” who is highly educated and works in a skilled professional job, fits within the demographic trends of Indian immigration to the U.S. Lahiri’s The Interpreter of Maladies was published in 1999, just before the rapid and significant expansion in the number of novels, short story collections, YA books, and memoirs about the immigrant experience in the United States.

Other Books Related to This Blessed House

Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction explores the emotional and psychological conflicts of immigrants, particularly Indian immigrants in America. The Interpreter of Maladies (1999), the short story collection in which “This Blessed House” appears, and The Namesake, Lahiri’s first novel, earned critical acclaim for their subtle, insightful portrayal of immigrants’ search for identity, love, and belonging as universal experiences all readers can understand. Memorable books on these themes include Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club (1989), Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), and Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991). Salman Rushdie’s 1994 collection East, West takes a different approach to similar themes by depicting the ways the East and West imagine and experience each other; the story “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers” is an especially memorable dystopian story that draws on his childhood experience of the film The Wizard of Oz and the longing for home it evoked in him. In interviews, Lahiri has mentioned multiple authors who have influenced her, including Canadian author Alice Munro and Irish writer William Trevor, two writers whose stories exemplify the kind of precise observations and uncomplicated prose style readers and critics have appreciated in Lahiri’s fiction. Lahiri’s readers would find an excellent introduction to each writer in Munro’s Too Much Happiness (2009) and Trevor’s Collected Stories (2009).
Key Facts about This Blessed House
  • Full Title: This Blessed House
  • When Written: 1999
  • Where Written: Massachusetts
  • When Published: 1999
  • Literary Period: Contemporary
  • Genre: Short Story
  • Setting: Sanjeev and Twinkle’s new home in Hartford, Connecticut
  • Climax: Sanjeev sees the silver bust of Christ that Twinkle has brought down from the attic and realizes his marriage will not change.
  • Point of View: Limited third person narrator, focused on Sanjeev’s perspective

Extra Credit for This Blessed House

Palazzos. In 1997, Lahiri earned her PhD from Boston University. Her dissertation was on Italian palazzos in plays written during the Renaissance, which shows her early interest in transcultural connections and the significance of place.

Immersion. In 2012, Lahiri committed herself to learning Italian through immersion. She stopped reading in English and moved her family to Rome. Since then, she has published multiple books in Italian that are stylistically more daring than her English writing.