12 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
trayal of Hereward the Wake can be read as a straightforward depiction of heroic
masculinity, suggesting a rather more ambivalent handling of gender codes.
With Chapters 6 and 7 we turn to novelistic representations of rurality by
women writers of the mid-nineteenth century. In Chapter 6, ‘Wandering Like a
Wild Th ing’: Rurality, Women and Walking in George Eliot’s Adam Bede and
Th e Mill on the Floss’, Charlotte Mathieson looks at the intersections between
gender and rurality in George Eliot’s fi rst two novels, focusing on the repre-
sentation of mobility as central to the narratives of Maggie Tulliver and Hetty
Sorrel. Mathieson argues that Eliot uses mobility to delineate the particularly
acute formulation of gender codes within the rural environment, but that rural
mobility also comes to constitute a space of possibility in which Eliot recraft s
the relationship between women and rurality in a more positive light. Katherine
F. Montgomery’s ‘“I Never Liked Long Walks”: Gender, Nature and Jane Eyre’s
Rural Wandering’ also explores women’s position in relation to nature through
Charlotte Brontë’s characterization of the title fi gure of her 1847 novel. Jane
Eyre is frequently represented through images of wild nature, and Montgom-
ery sets these against Jane’s experience of nature that unfolds in her escape from
Th ornfi eld to Moor House. In doing so, she comes to contend with one of the
key gendered discourses of natural spaces, the sublime, providing an indicative
analysis of how female self-assertion plays out in a highly gendered landscape.
With Chapter 8 we move into spaces of cultivated nature with Christen
Ericsson-Penfold’s ‘Gertrude Jekyll: Cultivating the Gendered Space of the Vic-
torian Garden for Professional Success’. Exploring the work of Gertude Jekyll
(1843–1932), artist-gardener and horticultural journalist, Ericsson-Penfold
looks at how one woman created a successful career by applying her artistic vision
to the gendered, cultivated rural space of the garden, an acceptable feminine
space in which a woman could work in a largely masculine profession. Argu-
ing that Jekyll’s success was a product of her ability to manoeuvre within and
around social conventions of female behaviour, Ericsson-Penfold’s discussion
provides an indicative insight into how women could negotiate gender–space
relations on their own terms. Gardens are taken up again in the next chapter by
Karina Jakubowicz, ‘From England to Eden; Gardens, Gender and Knowledge
in Virginia Woolf ’s Th e Voyage Out’, which traverses a variety of natural spaces,
ranging from the English country garden to the wilds of South America. Jakubo-
wicz explores how these spaces provide a mode through which gender identity is
played out, through the relationship of protagonist Rachel Vinrace in response
to diff erent spaces. Here, moving out of England and into South America proves
constitutive in her development, opening up interesting refl ections on the trans-
national ideas of rurality at this time. Transnational ruralities are the subject of
the fi nal essay in this collection, Eliza S. K. Leong’s ‘Th e Transnational Rural in
Alicia Little’s My Diary in a Chinese Farm’. Th is account of an English woman’s
life on a Chinese farm between 1887 and 1907 provides a valuable narrative