Introduction 11
cultural representation of women’s fi eld labour in the later nineteenth-century
writings of two men, Richard Jeff eries and Th omas Hardy. As two of the most
signifi cant writers of rural aff airs in the late-century period, these literary repre-
sentations aff ord valuable evidence about the rural economy during the Great
Depression; but their classed and gendered perspectives also raise issues about
the politics of authority and representation and, Ebbatson suggests, remain tied
to a predominantly hegemonic paternalistic viewpoint. Th e work of Richard Jef-
feries features again in Chapter 2, ‘“Between Two Civilizations”: George Sturt’s
Constructions of Loss and Change in Village Life’, in which Barry Sloan looks
at the themes of loss and change in rural village life. Focusing on George Sturt’s
Change in the Village (1912), as well as Sturt’s journals, A Wiltshire Village by
Alfred Williams (1912) and Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora Th ompson (1939–
43), Sloan looks at the experience of being ‘between two civilizations’ in these
writings. Taking us just beyond the scope of this collection, Sloan’s essay use-
fully identifi es the ongoing perseverance of the theme of modernity and change
as a key motif in rural representation, extending from the nineteenth-century
worlds depicted in these works and persisting on into the twentieth century as
an enduring concept of the period.
In Chapter 3, Gemma Goodman explores Charles Lee’s little-known novel
Cynthia in the We s t (1900) and the iterations of gender and class within the
peripheral location of the Cornish coast during a moment of economic and cul-
tural change. Two class-bounded groups – the indigenous fi sher-folk and the
incoming artists – occupy, negotiate and do battle, even, within the fi shing vil-
lage. It is the spaces of the beach and the cliff -top in particular where traditional
gender categories and identities are subverted.
In Chapter 4, ‘“Going out, Going Alone”: Modern Subjectivities in Rural
Scotland, 1900–21’, Samantha Walton discusses Crossriggs (1908), a novel by
Scottish writers Mary and Jane Findlater and ‘Th e Pictures’ (1921), a short story
by Jane Findlater, and how these works explore the interactions between rural
and urban locations in the early twentieth century. Th is essay is useful in help-
ing us to advance critical understandings of the meaning of modernity in rural
places and to better understand the interactions between town and country
that shaped rural women’s lives. Walton suggests that the characters’ responses
to rural space in these works reveal the emotional and material frustrations of
rural women’s lives in early twentieth-century Scotland, but also realize the rural
as a space of possibility for women. Th e imaginative possibility of rural spaces
is also a theme of Chapter 5, ‘“Drowned Lands”: Charles Kingsley’s Hereward
the Wake and the Masculation of the English Fens’, in which Lynsey McCulloch
explores the power of mythologies of Englishness and masculinity in the his-
tory and representation of rural spaces. In Charles Kingsley’s 1866 Hereward the
Wa k e, McCulloch identifi es the familiar construct of the controlled, cultivated
landscape as coded feminine, yet she problematizes the extent to which the por-