Retreating to the Country: R.C. Sherriff's Rural Interwar Novels & Environmental Politics

This essay contextualizes two of R.C. Sherriff's inter-war novels, Greengates (1936) and The Hopkins Manuscript (1939), within modernist debates about countryside preservation as well as noting their ongoing relevance to contemporary environmental politics. By creating characters who are both sympathetic war veterans and easily satirized figures of patriarchy and privilege, Sherriff engages complex themes of capitalist consumerism, ‘us’ and ‘them’ attitudes about land policy, and fraught impulses of pastoral nostalgia. These novels resist facile diatribe; instead, they force the reader to inhabit the emotional swings inherent in the lived experience of love and sacrifice required for environmental preservation.