The History of Ourselves: Cultural, Rural and Matriarchal Legacies

Chapter 3, “The History of Ourselves: Cultural, Rural, and Matriarchal Legacies,” shows how Dane’s essays about rural, national, and world heritage intervene in cultural debate about the health of interwar British society. Among Dane’s richest and most original work, these essays recover buried legacies and demonstrate the renovating power of literature, myth, and national legend. Dane’s treatment of national identity reflects the period’s anti-imperialist rhetoric while recognizing that nationalist literature often projects a time of peace beyond a nation’s immediate suffering. Other essays explore archetypal patterns that transcend nationalism. Like her modernist contemporaries, Dane sought in myth and archetype a still-articulate heritage connecting modernity to an ancient human past and mitigating the dominance of commercial culture. She found this heritage in high and low texts alike. A third set of essays, on English pastoral heritage, lament the destruction of rural England while endorsing sensitive records of rural people and places. And in essays positing modern women’s matriarchal heritage, Dane establishes the “birthright of liberty” that calls British women to civic and public service. Through a survey of Good Housekeeping journalism and a comparison of Virginia Woolf’s and Dane’s feminism, the chapter demonstrates Dane’s – and the journal’s -– participation in major debates about women’s postwar roles.