Kevin A. Morrison is Provincial Chair Professor, University Distinguished Professor, and Professor of British Literature in the School of Foreign Languages at Henan University. He is the author of the Modern Language Association award–winning Victorian Liberalism and Material Culture (2018), as well as A Micro-History of Victorian Liberal Parenting (2018) and Study-Abroad Pedagogy, Dark Tourism, and Historical Reenactment (2019).

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsSeries PrefaceIntroduction: The Politics of Provincial Fiction 1. Sketches of Rural Character: Mary Russell Mitford’s ‘Fugitive Pieces’ 2. Sketches of Rural Scenery: Mitford’s Country Rambles 3. From Sketches to Papers: Gaskell’s Country Village 4. Landscape-Shaped Subjectivity: George Eliot’s ‘Mother Tongue’ 5. A Wider Horizon: Portable Interiority and Provincial Life Conclusion BibliographyIndex

Brilliantly discerning, Kevin Morrison tracks the ways, over Britain's unsettling century of change, that three notable women writers seized the potential of periodical and serial publication to engage the rural village with the burgeoning metropolis, by activating reflective nostalgia to image the countryside as the national home. An absorbing narrative, engagingly told.