‘Going Out, Going Alone’ 71
modernist writing more generally. As the critical framework adopted by Gan and
Parkins demonstrates, a more plural and more gender-aware understanding of the
ways in which women understood themselves in their changing times is needed
to contextualize and account for the lived experience of modernity outside of the
familiar story told by white and male metropolitan writers. Scotland’s distinct
topography and literary and cultural heritage intersected in defi nite and precise
ways with the material productions of modernity and its economic and cultural
eff ects. As such, the rural is never fully distinct from the urban in early twentieth-
century writing, leading both to the forms of rural modernity imagined by writers
like Gibbon and Shepherd in the interwar years, and the ambivalent responses to
the promises of the urban seen in the Findlaters’ works. In Crossriggs, the progres-
sive woman fi nds herself immobilized and monitored across varying terrains, both
urban and rural. While the city off ers her a wage and recognition in return for her
skills and labour, the rural off ers her greater freedom to move unimpeded by dress
or codes of behaviour, and the privacy and invisibility to retreat and refl ect on
her position in the world, with the ultimate reward being the space it gives her to
imagine and pursue new and modern forms of selfh ood and experience. ‘Th e Pic-
tures’ takes a more pessimistic stance on the rural, acknowledging that traditional
labour patterns and a lack of education and opportunities for rural women make
them incapable of grasping the more esoteric and intellectual gift s of natural
spaces. However, the promises of modernity off er only intellectual and imagina-
tive stultifi cation in a diff erent tempo, and with no heightened capacity to judge
and refl ect, the working woman is promised not full and free subjectivity but
insubstantial thrills as a distraction from labour. Writing at a time of transition
when incursions of modernity were being felt and perceived in rural communi-
ties, the Findlaters’ works gave voice to their own anxieties and concerns, and so
too do they refl ect on the hopes and ambitions of women living in what could be
seen as the peripherals of modernity. Th eir careful delineations of these changes
in the lives of women from diff erent social and economic backgrounds and in
disparate regions of Scotland form an important chapter in the chronicling of
modernity, demonstrating that the meaning of the ‘new’ to women was bound
up in freedoms and forms of subjectivity not dependent on urban stimulations,
but available in rural locations that aff ord opportunities for privacy, freedom of
movement and thought, and self-determination.