Eric – degenerate by society’s standards – becomes the ideal pastoral subject, a prelapsarian whose goodness preserves him from society’s ills.

Yet Matless warns against the homogenisation of cultural expressions of ruralism, noting the rhetorical diversity between conservatism and progressive modernity.Despite their ideological divergence, these two political aesthetics – one invested in England’s modernity, the other in expressions of pastoral longing – nonetheless each claimed authority over landscape in the period between the wars. The preservationist movement was committed to designing a new England, structurally – in terms of architecture and land use – but also morally, through governance of the open-air leisure industry. Warner lived out her spatial politics: in 1930, she moved from London to East Chaldon in Dorset, where she began living with the poet Valentine Ackland.

Her definition of queer ‘spins the term outwards along dimensions that can’t be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all: the ways that race, ethnicity, postcolonial nationality criss-cross with these and other identity-constituting, identity-fracturing discourses’. Fortune’s Maggot and Lolly Willows (both published by NYRB Classics), The Corner that Held Them, and Kingdoms of Elfin.The description anticipates the development of her tactile relationship with the natural world; at Mr Saunter’s chicken farm at Great Mop, Laura enjoys holding hens in the crook of her arm, ‘while her fingers probed among the soft feathers and rigid quills of their breasts.

Warner's political engagement continued for the rest of her life, even after her disillusionment with communism.

Like the controversial movie Thelma and Louise, Lolly Willowes is [a] Rorschach blot that might suggest liberation to some readers and folly to others. About the empty house was the village, and about the village the hills, neighbourly under their covering of night. I wish I could understand how fluidly [ Lolly Willows] handles time and how it manages to be both utterly savage and strangely gentle at once.