56 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
focus on female mobility and social transformation, a more precise understand-
ing of the meaning of rural space for Scottish women in the early twentieth
century emerges, along with a clearer sense of the opportunities the countryside
aff ords for invisibility, freedom of movement and self-determination.
Physical or imaginary escape to urban spaces and modernized societies may
have promised to satisfy women’s needs for career advancement and intellectual
and fi nancial independence, but in works by the Findlaters, rural space permits
women moments of privacy and liberty – moments of transcendent invisibil-
ity – impossible in the crowded city. Such invisibility may be cause for elation,
as women momentarily escape the confi nes of gendered behaviour to achieve
moments which approach the expression of an ‘authentic’ self on the peripheries
of gender and class norms, as shall be seen in the Findlaters’ Crossriggs. How-
ever, isolation in natural environments is also represented with deep bitterness,
as in Jane Helen Findlater’s short story ‘Th e Pictures’ (1921), in which a young
woman’s cravings for the stimulations of modernity make her blind to visions of
natural beauty which might otherwise inspire moments of self-refl ection and the
potential for redetermination and renewal. Meticulous in their delineations of
the ways in which women’s lives are circumscribed by gender privilege and class,
the rural is acknowledged as the context of the continued exclusion, domesti-
cation and exploitation of women, at the same time as it holds the promise of
providing a valid site for the creation of new and modern forms of selfh ood.
Ambivalence, as suggested above, is an attitude persistently adopted in the
writings of the Findlaters. In his analysis, Douglas Giff ord attributes this ten-
dency to their experiences as educated women in Scotland during the transition
from Victorian to post-War values. For Giff ord, they ‘exemplify the profound
and paralysing internal debate concerning sexual and gender freedoms’ for
women ‘caught between two diff erent worlds’.^3 As I hope to show here, their
female characters do indeed yearn for, even occasionally achieve, a modern
female subjectivity defi ned by relative freedom of mobility and access to privacy,
but their rural location, both distant from and out of sync with the pace of urban
life, can mean that they face distinct disadvantages in the battle for agency and
independence that was so central to women’s struggles in the 1900s to the 1920s.
Th at is not to say that the rural was without its unique advantages for women
too; as attention to the distinct dimensions of the rural in these works will show,
the oft en assumed binary between rural/urban and traditional/modern is fre-
quently diffi cult to uphold. Th is is due in part to the insights gained from Gan’s
recent attention to the meaning of privacy in early twentieth-century women’s
lives. Gan asserts that, dull though it may seem in contrast to frenetic and popu-
lous representations of urban modernity by male writers from Charles Baudelaire
to T. S. Eliot, the occupation of a room – not the busy space of the family home,
but a private room of their own – was central to women’s ‘sense of self as a sub-