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The chapter discusses novels that have Puritanism as a central theme. Typical traits possessed by a Puritan are also explored in the chapter. Carlyle portrays the Puritans in his novels as those who exhibit religious fundamentalism, those who tend to exaggerate religious beliefs to other people. The provincial life of several characters in the novels of Emily Brontë, George Eliot, and other novelists are also described in the chapter.

This chapter covers the women writers who made successful careers writing in and about the provinces. This includes a group sometimes called the provintsialki—the provincial ladies—who were for several decades among Russia's more widely read authors. The provintsialki were well-educated and had connections in the capitals, but in general they were forced by circumstances to live in the provinces. While some abhorred their environment's coarseness and intellectual poverty, others made their peace with provincial life, even embraced it. Moreover, these writers typically refused to assign more semiotic weight to the metropoles than to other places, and they often actively figured themselves—or they were figured by readers and the literary establishment—as provincials, or as authors explicitly if not exclusively identified with provincial places and themes.

William Gershom Collingwood, Ruskin’s secretary and friend, moved to the Lake District with his wife Edith in 1883. They gave up the comforts and financial stability of the city in favor of a rural and provincial life, which was at times precarious and meager in materials terms. But the move put them at the center of the growing Arts and Crafts movement in the region. Their household became the setting for a domestic version of the culture of sufficiency, dedicated to artistic and skilled work of many kinds. Collingwood celebrated the arts of everyday life in his historical novel, Thorstein of the Mere, about the early Viking settlers in the Lake District. Collingwood wrote books, taught, and gave lectures; he and his wife both painted and sold their work. They tried to spend as much as possible of their income on quality goods such as custom furniture built by their artisan friend, Arthur Simpson. Critics felt Ruskin’s theories were economically unsound and might lead to a harsh and austere way of life. But as a painter, archaeologist, scholar, teacher, fell-walker, novelist and family man, Collingwood fully embraced the virtues of the simple life.

Dusklands consists of two novellas, ‘The Vietnam Project’, a confession by an army psychologist, and ‘The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee’, a ‘memoir’ of a Dutch explorer, in South Africa in 1760; both narrators are complicit in barbaric activities and their voices represent a compulsive deception. ‘The Narrative’ is presented as an authentic document of an Afrikaner ancestor, recovered in a pseudo-scholarly edition by ‘the author’s father’ and translated by the novelist, or one who bears the same name. The novella’s larger concern is with ideas of narrative/authorial voice, especially in traditions of fictional realism and historical writing, in particular the representation of Africans. That concern, rooted in Coetzee’s own academic work in linguistic and textual study (notably, of Beckett), translation and anthropology, becomes central to much of his fictional career, especially in his experiments in the confessional genre. Its personal origins are explored in the trilogy, Scenes of Provincial Life.