Introduction 5
when asked why he had volunteered for the army in July 1915, aft er the fi rst crushing
casualty reports had dispelled any illusions, and at the otherwise immune age of 38,
he bent down, scooped up a handful of dirt, and said, ‘Literally, for this’.^17His poems register the connection and collision of the natural world and war
- ‘the birds voice / Speaking for all who lay under the stars, / soldiers and poor,
unable to rejoice’ – and the impact of men’s absence from the countryside during
and aft er the war.^18 In the poem ‘As the team’s head brass’, ‘only two teams work
on the farm this year’ and the death of the speaker’s friend in France has directly
impacted on the natural world for ‘if / He had stayed here we should have moved
the tree. / And I should not have sat here. Everything / would have been diff er-
ent. For it would have been / Another world’.^19 While Th omas is not featured
in this collection we mention him because he so beautifully articulates the
nuances of the countryside within the context of the historical moment of the
First World War. Also, the way in which he engaged with, witnessed and under-
stood the rural environment provides a perfect example to those of us looking to
open up discussion of ruralities, for as Sacks describes, his poems ‘tread a series of
paths’ through rural landscapes ‘each one distinct, each bringing the reader some
unforeseen fi nd, usually beyond the margin of the road’.^20
Concurrent with the multiple shift s within rural environments at this time
were the successive shift s in gender relations throughout the period. As Victo-
rian Britain debated a host of ideas around what was broadly termed ‘the woman
question’ – encompassing such issues as the ideal of femininity, fallen women
and prostitution, women’s place in the home and at work, women’s education
and their political and economic status – rural environments fi gured as par-
ticular sites of interaction with these discourses, and served to off er diff erent
iterations of key issues. Models of ideal femininity, as Karen Sayer identifi es,
took unique shape in ‘the myth of rural femininity in which the most perfect
of women lived an industrious and honest life, in an English country cottage’.^21
Th is myth – an ideolog y arising largely in the works of middle-class male writers
outside of the rural sphere – played an important role in shaping the percep-
tion, representation and experience of rural spaces as well as ‘contributing to the
production of the wider defi nition of domesticity in the nineteenth century’ and
thus, as Sayer’s study demonstrates, represents an important site of analysis in
understanding rural gender relations.^22 Yet the reality of gendered experience
and representation was of course much more varied, and the essays in this collec-
tion demonstrate a wide range of ways in which rural femininity and masculinity
were understood, both in the rural context and in terms of how this contributed
to wider discursive shift s in the era. Women played an important role in the rural
workforce and the fi gures of ‘women in the fi eld’, the dairymaid and farmer’s
wife occupied central sites of discussion for writers such as Th omas Hardy and
Richard Jeff eries, as explored in Roger Ebbatson’s essay in this collection. But