Women, Literature, and the Arts of the Countryside in Early Twentieth-Century England
Cambridge University Press, 3/25/2021
EAN 9781108491150, ISBN10: 1108491154
Hardcover, 274 pages, 25.4 x 17.8 x 2.5 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
Focusing on eight writers and artists, this book examines the centrality of the countryside to women's work, creativity, and aspirations in early-twentieth-century England. The authors introduce us to figures who should be better known today: educators, artists, novelists, poets, and memoirists. Divided into four sections, with foci on professions and education, the transformation of the countryside, arts and crafts, and dislocation and loss, this book by a literature scholar and an art historian brings an interdisciplinary perspective, providing a unique view of women's responses to such major issues of the twentieth century as war, industrialization, modernist ideology, and gender. From Mary Watts's remarkable pottery to Beatrix Potter's work as a children's author and environmentalist to Dora Carrington's haunting paintings and Vita Sackville-West's Sissinghurst Castle Garden, this book challenges readers to rethink the early twentieth century through the lens of their work.
Part I. Transforming Lives
Gardening Education, Environmental Activism, and the Professional Woman
1. Frances Garnet Wolseley and the Rise of the Professional Woman Gardener
2. Realism and Romance
Beatrix Potter's Natural Worlds
Part II. The Transformation of the Countryside
3. 'Planted . . . in the Right Soil'
Finding a Home in Two Novels by Edith Nesbit
4. To Every Field There is a History
Flora Thompson's English Countryside
Part III. The Arts and Crafts of the Garden
5. 'A Rising Stream of Life'
Nature as Ground and Spirit in the Art of Mary Watts
6. Dora Carrington's 'Phantom' Geography and the 'Crisis' of her Landscapes
Part IV. Redeeming the Waste Land
Dislocation, Loss, and Ruin
7. 'The Garden Abides'
Marion Cran and Wartime Memoirs of Life in the Garden
8. Castle and Rose
Vita-Sackville West and the Redemption of Sissinghurst
Epilogue.