Historians are compulsive revisionists. The characterization of interwar urban-industrial Britain as universally depressed underwent a major reassessment in the later twentieth century. It was only a matter of time before historians turned their attention to the agrarian economy and the countryside. In 2002, the Interwar Rural History Research Group, an interdisciplinary body of researchers, met at Dartington in Devon—a highly significant location in the circumstances—to revisit and challenge some of the gloomy orthodoxies of their subject. The present volume of essays is a record of their deliberations. The revisionist case is prosecuted on four fronts—society, culture, politics, and economics—and the book is sectionalized along these lines. Alun Howkins argues for an approach that “recognises that the countryside is not only about agriculture” (15) and makes a case for the impact of the “new countrymen and women of the 1930s” (25), who came from the towns to live or recreate themselves in the countryside and underpinned the “rebirth of rural England” (24). For Jeremy Burchardt a key factor in rural revival was the intervention of voluntary organizations and in particular their promotion of the movement to establish village halls, “seen as an essential step towards … the creation of a ‘new rural civilization’” at whose “core lay the concept of community” (30). The movement to establish village colleges, investigated by Caitlin Adams, was part of an “attempt to regenerate the countryside through new democratic and inclusive institutions” (52), while Lynne Thompson turns the spotlight on agricultural education, exploring a range of initiatives and finishing with a case study of the peripatetic model adopted in Devon.

Culture is tackled in a group of five essays. Three focus on image and representation. Marion Shaw examines the rural novel and draws an important distinction between the “earth” authors, such as Mary Bane and Sylvia Townsend Warner, with their elemental, mystical, and pessimistic vision, and the more practical “land” novelists, such as Constance Holmes and Winifred Holtby. Henry Williamson's decision to restore a farm in Norfolk in the late 1930s was in one sense highly practical, but his semifictional account, The Story of a Norfolk Farm (1941), demonstrates, as Mark Rawlinson argues, that the enterprise had a far deeper meaning: “the decline and regeneration of England, and the decadence and redemption of the self” (90). Christopher Bailey shows how “the products and images of rural industry worked both to support a picture of the countryside as England's lost past, and, when the occasion required it, as a seedbed of reinvention and regeneration” (132). Practical efforts to stimulate rural culture are explored in Mike Wallis's study of village drama and theater and in David Jeremiah's lucid account of the iconic Dartington Hall project, begun in 1925, whose moving spirit, Leonard Elmhirst, believed that “through research and experimentation the country house estate could achieve a programme of social and economic regeneration that would be a model for the nation” (117). Three chapters examine the political context. The broad parameters of agricultural and rural planning policy are surveyed by John Sheail; the perspective of the left, surprisingly accommodating to the farmers, is unravelled by Clare Griffiths; while the rural politics of the right is the subject of Nicholas Mansfield's multifaceted study of farm workers and the “hegemony of the conservative party” (184) in interwar Shropshire. The final group of studies turn to economics. Roy Brigden provides a case study of Leckford, a Hampshire estate bought and completely reorganized by the retail magnet John Lewis in 1929. The first of Paul Brassley's two essays reveals that though the middle years of the period were ones of declining farm income, the early 1920s and the late 1930s saw rises, while the other turns to the state of the rural craft sector and discovers a gap between the pessimistic vision of the literary evidence and the more optimistic quantitative evidence drawn from a study of Devon. A conclusion by the editors adeptly summarizes the arguments in the previous papers.

This is an attractively presented, well-researched, and stimulating collection of essays, with a clear and important case to make. By and large it is a persuasive thesis, though one that does prompt several queries. First, does the evidence of the essays entirely support the bold conclusion that “the English countryside between the wars is better characterised by growth and innovation than by stagnation or decline” (235)? Sometimes it seems more finely balanced than that, as say in the case of farm incomes where “over the whole period the lean years far outweighed the fat” (198), or in the example of rural Shropshire where the impact of new culon rests on interventions from above and outside by a maze of voluntary organizations and paternalistic individuals; what is less clear is the response being generated from within the indigenous rural community and the extent to which ideals are being turned into reality. Third, a striking feature of many of the essays is the extent to which rural revival depended upon town-based professionals, such as academics and public servants, and on rising urban demand for specialist foodstuffs, crafts, suburban residences, and country recreations. Paradoxically and ironically, given the antiurbanism in much rural writing and propaganda, it was the town and urbanization that was proving the countryside's most effective savior. Whether the revisionist case developed so cogently in this fine collection is an example of rural revival or urban appropriation remains a question to ponder.