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4 ‘GOING OUT, GOING ALONE’: MODERN
SUBJECTIVITIES IN RURAL SCOTLAND, 1900–21
Samantha Walton
Th e Findlater sisters, Mary and Jane, published much of their poetry and fi c-
tion at a specifi c interlude in the advance of modernity in Scotland, between
1895 and 1921. As attention to their co-authored novel Crossriggs (1908) and
to short stories by Jane authored in the aft ermath of the First World War will
show, their ambivalent responses to the changing times informs writing which,
although conventional in form and traditional in its focus on rural and domes-
tic settings, expresses the challenges and opportunities aff orded by new forms
of subjectivity available for women in the early years of the twentieth century.
Recent scholarship on the Findlater sisters has drawn attention to this ambiva-
lence: Sandra Kemp, Charlotte Mitchell and David Trotter describe Crossriggs
as both a ‘lightly told vignette of Scottish village life’ and a ‘despairing explora-
tion’ of one woman’s ‘lonely situation’, while Douglas Giff ord has explored how
in various ways, the Findlaters were aesthetically, politically and emotionally
‘Caught Between Worlds’ (the title of his essay on the sisters).^1 In this chapter, I
will contribute to current (and by no means extensive) scholarship on the Find-
laters by suggesting how signifi cant their characters’ responses to rural space are
in their explorations of some of the most pressing emotional and material frus-
trations of rural women’s lives in early twentieth-century Scotland. Attention
to these authors, whose works were popular and widely read in their lifetimes,
can provide a valuable contribution to wider discussions of gender and space
in this era, as well as help to advance critical understandings of the meaning of
modernity in rural places and the distinct, and oft en obscured, relationships that
formed between country and city in rural women’s lives.
Th e direction I have taken has been informed by new critical approaches to
mobility, modernity and gender developed in feminist literary scholarship. In
recent retellings of modernity by Wendy Gan and Wendy Parkins, histories of
women’s experiences have emerged as distinct from dominant male narratives
of speed, change, fragmentation and urban spectatorship.^2 Combining Gan’s
emphasis on the meaning of privacy for the modern female subject, with Parkins’s