44 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
graphical distance – its peripherality seems to prevent those writing from an
English or London-centred perspective from zooming into the required level of
detail with regards to what is going on within Cornwall. As a result particular
narratives of place dominate. Tourism too, from the second half of the nine-
teenth century onwards, seems to require and to create a homogenous and so
marketable construction of Cornwall so that it can package Cornwall to the
potential visitor in an attractive and coherent way. Yet even here there exists mul-
tiple and confl icting versions of place in operation simultaneously. Cornwall is
England but not England, wild, barbarous and dangerous while also being home.
It is remote but easily accessible by train. It is exotic and lush and also an indus-
trial ‘granite kingdom’.^17
An understanding of Cornwall as a contested and paradoxical space (or as a
series of confl icting and overlapping spaces even) provides an important context
for Lee’s novel, while the novel is also set within a microcosmic contested space
within Cornwall – that of a small coastal fi shing village. It is a site of work for the
fi sherfolk, and of play for the incoming artist set. Th ese two groups are separated
by class, culture and origin. Yet they occupy the same rural space at the same
moment in time. Cornwall has not, therefore, as Berg may have us believe, tran-
sitioned swift ly and smoothly from mining and fi shing into the tourist industry,
either economically or culturally.
Picturing Fishing
Deacon’s important article ‘Imagining the Fishing’ makes a number of points
about the fi shing and artist communities, and their relationship to each other,
which provides a useful context to Lee’s Cynthia in the West. He points out that
‘the fi shing communities of Cornwall occupy a marginal space within a margin’.^18
Th e marginal space of the coastal fi shing village is ‘discovered’ by guidebook and
travel writers from the 1780s onwards so that
from the 1780s to the 1870s a trope of fi shing ports as the proto-picturesque estab-
lished itself and then, from the 1850s to the Edwardian era, fi shing communities
began to be subjected to a process of ‘othering’ which contributed to a wider roman-
ticization of Cornwall. While the focus was initially on the landscape of these spaces,
the fi shing community also became of interest to artists and so the native inhabitants
were also subject to this process of ‘othering’ – conceptualized as ‘primitive compo-
nents of the landscape’.^19Th e incoming artists were instrumental in bringing the attention of the Eng-
lish, and in particular the urban middle classes, to the Cornish fi shing village.
From the early 1880s there was an infl ux of artists into Newlyn. Th e ‘Newlyn
School’, as it became known, included Walter Langley, Frank Bramley, Norman
Garstin, Stanhope Forbes and ‘Lamorna Birch’. It was a large group of artists