Katherine Spear Smith had no need to work for her living but, growing up in a liberal, academic household in the early twentieth century, she felt a need to find a vocation in life. Influenced by Wordsworth and Ruskin, she constructed a persona based on sensitivity and responsiveness to nature and sought to express this by becoming a painter. Art, however, proved fraught with anxiety and disappointment and she fell back on her identification with nature, shot through with religious promptings. The functions of ruralism in helping Spear Smith construct an identity, but also the potentially isolating and even illusory character of this identity in her case, are the principal themes of this chapter.