Cripping the Pastoral: Rural Modernisms and Sylvia Townsend Warner's The True Heart

Expanding on recent work on rural modernisms, sexuality, and disability history, this essay situates Sylvia Townsend Warner's The True Heart (1929) in the context of developments in disability policy and eugenic thought in the aftermath of the Great War as well as Warner's own interventions on behalf of disabled people. While the novel can be read in relation to a postwar wave of rural retrenchment and the Anglocentric turn of interwar modernisms, it ultimately espouses progressive values and more inclusive modernisms. Imagining future love, reproduction, and community for characters with disabilities and alternative sexualities, Warner worked through issues facing Britain's social and sexual outsiders in her fictions and her public life.