"Our english ground": domesticity, nationalism, and the natural world, 1900-1950.

• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/d20005032

My dissertation, "Our English Ground": Domesticity, Nationalism, and the Natural World, 1900-1950 argues that many women made crucial contributions to ecological discourses of the early-twentieth century--more specifically, that they produced nuanced accounts of the relationships between humans and the natural world in their visual and textual representations of "nature," "landscape," and "the nation." Although "nature has a persistent, even adaptive, presence in modernism" (Scott 13), that presence frequently serves as a background in modernist literature. Bonnie Kime Scott, dealing with mostly canonical writers, asks "what happened to the work of writers who were more obviously centered in nature, but not classifiable as modernist?" (40). In this dissertation, I begin to account for these canonical caesuras by pulling from the academic margins work by three English women who explicitly engaged with and represented the natural world in their writing and artwork. Beginning with Edith Holden's naturalist field books (1905-1906), moving to Sylvia Townsend Warner's super-natural novel Lolly Willowes (1926), and finally to Vita Sackville-West's long poem The Garden (1946), I argue that the natural world and nationalism are inextricably intertwined in these texts. Though the women came from different geographic and socioeconomic backgrounds, they all began their careers during a shared moment of unprecedented environmental change that had major impacts on their writing.