42 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
Carah, Cornishman (1898), Cynthia in the West (1900) and Dorinda’s Birthday
(1911), or his short stories.^8
In Cynthia the narrative is told from the perspective of Robert Maurice, a
would-be writer from London who arrives at the beginning of the novel to join
the artist colony for an extended summer in Cornwall.^9 Maurice is a thinly dis-
guised fi ctional representation of the author who replicates Lee’s own position
within the artist colony in Newlyn. While not a painter himself, as a cultured,
middle-class Londoner Lee had immediate affi nities with the Newlyn set and
began to keep company with artists such as Stanhope Forbes and Walter Lang-
ley.^10 Within the novel Maurice too is welcomed into the social world of the
artists but acts as both social participant and observer.
Th is chapter examines the fi xity and fl uidity of gender categories in relation
to the peripheral space of the coast. Th e novel at fi rst seems to read the rela-
tionship of the protagonist Cynthia to the landscape, and of the artists and the
fi sherfolk within the space of the beach, as predicated on static gender codes. Yet
it actually makes possible an alternative reading of these two culturally opposed
groups whereby those same gender codes are contested and challenged through
their specifi c negotiation with the coastal locale.
Cornish Ruralities
Before looking at Cynthia in more detail it is useful to consider the coastal set-
ting of the novel with regard to perceptions and constructions of rurality and the
implications of this within a specifi cally Cornish context. Pauline Barber et al.
recognize ‘a series of interlinked silences surrounding rurality’ and call for a new
perspective which is able to ‘identify the changing articulations of gender and
class in rural localities’.^11 Th is is certainly one of the key aims and focus of this col-
lection and also informs an approach in this chapter to unravelling the complex
classed gender codes which are being established, challenged and changed in the
moment of economic and cultural change in which the novel is set.
Th e idea of rurality as silenced is also pertinent to a Cornish context – it is
those very areas of silence that most need to be spoken of, such as how gender
and class operate within rural locales. At the same time, gendered experiences
within the rural are silenced when dominant narratives of place suppress alter-
native understandings of the rural. As a predominantly rural territory Cornwall
has in common with other rural areas that it is continually regarded as possessing
qualities which are retrogressive when compared with urban environments. Yet
this stereotypical designation is further cemented by Cornwall’s peripheral geo-
graphic location and Celtic identity. Th e remoteness of Cornwall from London
has been understood, and continues to be understood as, suggestive of a concomi-
tant disconnection from civilization and progress. While contemporary means