Women and Rurality in British Modernist Prose: Towards an Environmentalist Ethics of Care

My project focuses on women's modernist prose during the early twentieth century, examining how rural spaces and communities are evoked in order to develop an environmental consciousness centred around notions of care.

This epoch bore witness to the emergence and flourishing of socio-cultural organisations surrounding rural environmentalism with resolute female participation; notably, the National Trust (1881), the Women's Institutes (1915), and The Council for Preservation of Rural England (1926).

The project's fundamental aim is to unearth the intricacies of how these environmental concerns, enmeshed within the convictions and actions of rural women, found expression in modernist prose.

I argue that women's rural modernism intuited environmental care ethics centred around interconnectivity and relationality, critiquing the anthropocentric imperatives of mainstream interwar rural conservation.

In developing their own unique environmental ethics within a specifically rural context, I analyse how modernist women used prose to both formulate and deconstruct notions of gender, place-making, and heritage.

This examination of earlier depictions of rural preservation will be essential to understanding the origins of the present environmental crisis.