The Single Woman, the City, and the Country

Abstract

This chapter tracks the single woman’s experience of modernity in urban and rural spaces. It explores how urban and rural landscapes are used—both geographically and metaphorically—to evoke cultural anxiety concerning the single woman in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, vol. 3 (1921–1925), Dorothy Sayers’ Unnatural Death (1927), Josephine Tey’s The Franchise Affair (1948), Winifred Holtby’s South Riding (1935), and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926). These narratives show how literary conventions which associated the city with modernity and the country with tradition were disrupted in women’s fiction from the 1920s to the 1940s. The impact of modernity on urban and rural spheres meant that the single woman could negotiate her subjectivity in both.