Just as the 2016 referendum results had spiralled into a full-blown crisis, it became increasingly clear that Britain’s push to leave the European Union (EU) concealed another crisis: a “Brexit within”. This term refers to the entries, exits, and enclosures that course through a dominant narrative of English national identity: countryside versus city life. Drawing on Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (1973), this article argues that the rural and the urban serve as a template to diagnose other forms of division in Britain – racial, social, cultural, and economic – that the Brexit vote brought to the fore. The reading is based on two works of fiction published in the immediate aftermath of the referendum: Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016) and Amanda Craig’s The Lie of the Land (2017). Both narratives continue a larger literary tradition of Condition-of-England novels, as they map out new sites of marginalization and precarity in the post-imperial nation.