ABSTRACT
The turn to the countryside in the culture of the 1890s and the early twentieth century is a significant phenomenon within modernity. This chapter focuses on how the transformation took place for two women in the early 1930s. One of them is Valentine Ackland. In a decade when the representation of the working class focused on industrial workers and their families, Ackland published a series of articles on rural economy in the influential small magazine, Left Review , followed by Country Conditions. The second woman is her lover, Sylvia Townsend Warner, whose response to living in the country with Ackland was to write Summer Will Show , an important if often overlooked work of modernist fiction. The first half of the novel is set on a country estate in England during the 1840s, the latter part in Paris during the February and June revolutions of 1848.
