10 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
Diverse Ruralities
In this collection, multiple ruralities emerge as nuanced spaces which are dis-
parately experienced through a range of gender–class intersections that reveal
a more complex picture of the variety of gendered codes at work, and thus the
diversity of rural experience. In keeping with this we have chosen to consider
locations that might not typically be represented in discussions of the rural, yet
which, we believe, make important contributions to understanding the nuances
and complexity of gender and rurality beyond dominant discourses: country
gardens, fi elds, forests, villages, fens and beaches – sites of work and sites of
leisure – widen the scope of how we picture the rural. For example, Christen
Ericsson-Penfold’s chapter focuses on Gertrude Jekyll’s artistic cultivation of
nature within the country garden as a gendered space, drawing out important
ideas about women as active participants in the shaping of natural spaces. It
is perhaps surprising that the garden is not already more central to our under-
standing of the rural given that garden spaces within country homes would have
been experienced by the occupants and their staff , and the country estate is the
most extreme visual demonstration of a, perhaps arbitrary, borderline between
the serried ranks of carefully constructed fl ower beds and tree-lined paths and
the wider park land. Th e domestic garden too, whether for food or fl owers, is a
small interruption to or interaction with the surrounding rural environment by
the home owner. Karina Jakubowicz also explores a range of garden locations
within Virginia Woolf ’s work, both in England and abroad and, signifi cantly,
in both rural and urban locations, thus opening up useful discussions about the
transference of ideas of nature beyond strictly rural realms as well as the relation-
ship, within rural locales, between cultivated and uncultivated nature. Th is is a
perspective which immediately challenges initial perceptions and expectations
of the rural as wild, natural and uncultivated and, while these environments are
equally important to this collection, opens up fresh perspectives for discussion.
As with any collection there are limitations to the relevant topic areas it is
possible to include and perhaps the most notable omission here is a consideration
of a more diverse range of gender and sexual identities. As Little’s work shows,
geographies of queer rurality represent an important new area of study, counter-
ing the presumed dominance of heterosexuality within the rural environment.^40
In these essays, given the time periodization on which we have chosen to focus,
it is not surprising that heterosexual structures prevail in the cultural representa-
tions of rural gender and place. Yet the essays we have included here do represent
a diverse set of perspectives on the ways in which dominant concepts of gender
and sexuality were experienced within rural environments.
Th e collection begins with rural agricultural spaces, commencing in Chap-
ter 1 with Roger Ebbatson’s ‘Women in the Field’, which explores literary and