Studies of rural modernity are enriched when works about women, written by women, are considered in terms of each other and, in their numbers and popularity, as distinctive expressions of women's social and political position in post-World War I modernity. In three such works, Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes, or The Loving Huntsman (1926), E. H. Young's Miss Mole (1930) and Winifred Holtby's South Riding (1936), a middle-aged spinster presides over rural and urban landscapes. Each novel surveys a community's recovery from the war and ties its resiliency to continuity between urban and rural England, a continuity that is inscribed by the spinster's historically recent and exuberant mobility. Each protagonist is well served by her love for a rural place that she has been obliged to leave, a love that later redounds to her in the form of enriched apprehension of a landscape and an expertise that can be applied to the reconstruction of the postwar community.

These interwar spinster novels claim that the formerly pitiable spinster has been energised and empowered by her new citizenship and by her war experience, and that her insights and gifts uniquely suit her to regenerate postwar civilisation. ‘Ecstasy, power and devotion have enriched them; they have served a cause greater than their own personal advantage,’ says Winifred Holtby about twentieth-century spinsters in Women and a Changing Civilization (1935; p. 129). All human beings, she adds, feel pleasure in creation: ‘We are made sufficiently like the image of the God of Genesis that we require to build a world for our satisfaction, to rest on the seventh day and know that it is good’ (p. 126). For the first time in her history, the spinster is poised to build this world, and this happy coincidence of her talents and her opportunities places her in an English Eden. Her rural heritage is the source of the spinster's Eden – the vision that propels her to match new citizens’ gifts or needs with opportunity. The spinster in Eden's free movement and versatility are her key signature. She moves between city and country, drawing on expertise in both environments. Indeed, the facility with which the spinster in Eden travels between urban and rural environments reflects the new porousness of the rural village.