Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840-1920

140 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920

training, and how much is native incapacity’.^30 Hirst’s blatant prejudice adds a
particular signifi cance to Rachel’s desire to read the text, demonstrating the atti-
tudes which have sustained her ignorance thus far. Sitting underneath a tree,
Rachel reads the fi rst page of the text, and feels the work to be saturated with the
‘possibilities of knowledge’:

Never had words been so vivid and beautiful – Arabia Felix – Aethiopia ... Th ey

seemed to drive roads back to the very beginning of the world, on either side of which

the populations of all times and countries stood in avenues, and by passing down

them all knowledge would be hers, and the book of the world turned back to the very

fi rst page. Such was the excitement at the possibilities of knowledge now opening

before her that she ceased to read.^31

In reading Gibbon, Rachel is attempting to penetrate and conquer a previously
unknown world of masculine cultures and institutions. Th e signifi cance of this
knowledge is so great that it establishes the world at its ‘very beginning’. In refer-
ence to the subject of Gibbon’s work, this begins with the history of the civilized
Old World. However, ‘the book of the world’ also invokes the beginning of the
world as rendered in the Old Testament, and detailed in the fi rst lines of the
book of Genesis.
Rachel’s own ‘fall’ occurs aft er she has given up on Gibbon and resumes her
walk, but unlike that of Eve, Rachel’s fall is demonstrated physically. She fi rst
stumbles on a tuft of grass, but then ‘sank down to earth’. ‘[C]lasping her knees
together, and looking blankly in front of her’ she then asks, ‘What is it to be in
love?’^ Rachel’s literal ‘falls’ are linked to her realization that she is in love with
Terence.^32 Th e allusion to the fall of Eve can be seen in the way that she receives
this news. In early draft s of the text (originally entitled Melymbrosia), Rachel’s
realization is likened to the fear of infection:

[S]he dreaded to fi nd her suspicion was right, much as a person coming from a sick

room dreads to fi nd the signs of infection. As she swung along between the trees she

fl ed from the idea, welcoming a rise in the ground, a fall over a grass tuft , because thus

the mind was silenced.^33

Th e image of the sickroom is particularly unsettling in light of Rachel’s fate. Th e
revised passage in the published version is just as ominous, but through the use
of diff erent phrases. As the knowledge of Rachel’s love dawns on her, ‘a kind of
melancholy replaced her excitement’, and ‘awed by the discovery of a terrible pos-
sibility’ she comes to acknowledge her situation and then returns home, ‘much
as a soldier prepared for battle’.^34 At this point in the text it seems clear that
Rachel is about to face a fi ght, one which the early draft implicates is for her life.
An additional reference to her mortality can be found in Woolf ’s description
of the tree just before Rachel sits beneath it, ‘having seen a sight that would last