In his Terminal Note to Maurice (1914), E. M. Forster writes in 1960 that his novel about a queer love story “belongs to the last moment of the greenwood”—a space of queer refuge that was “catastrophically and inevitably” brought to an end by the world wars. Rebecca West similarly writes about a cross-class romance on the idyllic, pre-war Monkey Island that cannot be returned to post-1914 in The Return of the Soldier (1918). Sylvia Townsend Warner in Lolly Willowes (1926) also depicts rural England as a space for Laura Willowes to find self-actualization away from patriarchal social structures in London, even if she must reject society and become a witch in the process. Although the rural settings of these texts are not typically “high” modernist, these authors clearly draw attention to these green spaces that are disappearing due to modernization, as well as what is at stake in their disappearance for people on the margins of society.
In this paper, I argue that Forster, West, and Warner all engage in depicting Forster’s conception of the greenwood in order to demonstrate how vital these public, unpatrolled, green spaces are for those on the margins of society. Building on the work of ecocritical readings of modernist texts (Schuster, McCarthy, Sultzbach), and in particular Bluemel and McCluskey’s Rural Modernity in Britain, this paper demonstrates how these authors present us with a model for engaging with and protecting these spaces while underscoring their importance for those who are marginalized by a heteronormative, classist, and patriarchal society. Embracing Susan Stanford Friedman’s call to examine “the planet” in “planetary modernisms,” I argue these authors and texts explore the possibilities of sustained human connection to the natural world and warn against the consequences of modernity—as well as nascent climate change—severing that connection.
