I was in Mainstreet Trading Company last weekend, a glorious bookshop-cum-cafe in leafy St Boswells.

A pile of Kirsty Wark's debut novel, The Inheritance Of Elizabeth Pringle, sat invitingly on a table, and I couldn't help thinking that if there was a village where such a book was likely to go down well, this is it. To judge by an interview with the author, which sniffily described the book as "property porn", and from the comments of a friend who really enjoyed its depiction of the beautiful old building around which the plot revolves, the house plays almost as large a part as Wark's human characters.

It made me realise how many of the novels I admire and love have a house at their heart. Here, then, are a handful of my favourite literary houses, though few would be an estate agent's dream, some being as miserable as Fagin's den.

As a child I was instantly drawn to Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House On The Prairie: the thought of being able to see through the log walls to the wolves circling outside was thrilling. Even better was Mrs Beaver's cosy hut in The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, and Mr Tumnus's homely cave. The chapter where his place is destroyed by the White Witch's henchmen is still distressing. And let's not forget Mole's delightful home, Mole End, in The Wind In The Willows, with its sleeping bunks in the wall, crackling log fire and cellar filled with beer.

Evelyn Waugh's evocation of Brideshead, based on the medieval Madresfield Court in Worcestershire, is an unforgettable setting, the mansion embodying the encrusted, tortured and increasingly outdated values of the family it housed. So too Wuthering Heights. One of the eeriest fictional houses, as chilling as the moorland winds that buffet it, its comfortless mood signals all too clearly the story's unhappy end.

More deliberately gothic is Daphne Du Maurier's Jamaica Inn, whose neglected rooms and isolation mirror the blighted lives within, and the ruthless menace of its owner. Its Scottish twin, you might say, is The House of Shaws, Stevenson's ruinous mansion in Kidnapped, whose gun-toting owner, Uncle Ebenezer, is decidedly lacking as a host. To my mind though, George Douglas Brown's The House With The Green Shutters out-creeps them all, the unwelcoming house and its fanatical inhabitant melting into one in my recollection. I don't think I could bear to re-read it.

Least cheering of all, or so we are led to assume, is Dickens's Bleak House. Oddly, though, despite the clue its title holds to the people who live there, the place does not begin to match its characters for colour. Somewhere that does, however, is Mansfield Park, one of the earliest of the aspirational residences in English literature. And how brilliantly Austen conveys the snobbery, conceits and delusions that such an august edifice contains. Compare that with the country cottage the Dashwoods rent in Sense And Sensibility to see where Austen's own preferences lay.

Putting aside Mrs Beaver's den, one of the few fictional homes I would like to live in is that of Mrs Dalloway. Virginia Woolf's exquisite description of her heroine's elegant, expensive townhouse in Westminster is a quite brilliant example of bricks and mortar quietly conveying the personality of its mistress, and speaking to the reader when either she cannot, or will not.

What in Mrs Dalloway's era was a genteel, upper-class address, the quintessence of English gentrified living, would today be out of the range of all but the filthy rich. This brings me to John Lanchester's enthralling novel Capital, which is about the value of property in its most basic sense. Taking a single London street as its setting, Capital shows what happens when the inhabitants wake up to discover that, thanks to London's housing bubble, they are sitting on a gold mine. It's illuminating, is it not, that only a novel set in our own times uses a house as an indicator of fiscal insanity and greed, not of those within but of the world beyond their doors.