Rural Hours
Harriet Baker
Rural Hours
Harriet Baker
1917. Virginia Woolf arrives at Asheham, on the Sussex Downs, immobilized by nervous exhaustion and creative block.
1930. Feeling jittery about her writing career, Sylvia Townsend Warner spots a modest workman's cottage for sale on the Dorset coast.
1941. Rosamond Lehmann settles in a Berkshire village, seeking a lovers' retreat, a refuge from war, and a means of becoming 'a writer again'.
Rural Hours tells the story of three very different women, each of whom moved to the country and was forever changed by it.
We encounter them at quiet moments - pausing to look at an insect on the windowsill; jotting down a recipe; or digging for potatoes, dirt beneath their nails. Slowly, we start to see transformations unfold. Invigorated by new landscapes, and the daily trials and small pleasures of making homes, they emerge from long periods of creative uncertainty and private disappointment; they embark on new experiments in form, in feeling and in living. In the country, each woman finds her path- to convalescence and recovery; to sexual and political awakening; and, above all, to personal freedom and creative flourishing.
Graceful, fluid, and enriched by previously untouched archival material, Rural Hours is both a paean to the bravery and vision of three pioneering writers, and a passionate invitation to us all- to recognize the radical potential of domestic life and rural places, and find new enchantment in the routines and rituals of each day.
Review
Joanna Di Mattia
I have a special place in my heart for group biographies, especially of women writers and artists working in the first half of the 20th century. Wonderful then to be asked to review Rural Hours, the debut book from Harriet Baker, an exploration of the lives that Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and the criminally underappreciated Rosamond Lehmann built for themselves in the English countryside at times of personal upheaval.
It’s an elegant and well-researched work that doesn’t sentimentalise England’s green and pleasant land, but explores the radical potential for genuine freedom and revival that these writers found in bolting from the city into the pastoral.
There are the facts. Woolf, who lived between country and city for most of her life, first decamped to Sussex in 1917 after a period of long illness. In 1930, Townsend Warner escaped a tiresome male lover to find a new, female one in Dorset: her tenant, who she would live with for nearly 40 years. And Lehmann arrived in a quiet Berkshire village with her two small children in 1941, reeling from her divorce and yearning for her married lover, the poet Cecil Day-Lewis (later, father of actor Daniel).
Baker presents rural life as different because the landscape demands it, including plentiful accounts of cooking, walking, gardening and other household tasks. These small, domestic activities don’t appear mundane, but as the very stuff that life is made of. Physical activity calms and opens the mind. It is here that Woolf writes her first diary entry since her breakdown two years earlier. The writer reborn.
Rural Hours is interested in how these three writers embraced the mess and mud of country living and in turn revitalised their creative lives. Perhaps there is little that is especially new or surprising here – there is already so much research and archival material available about Woolf – but as with the most absorbing group biographies, the true magic exists in how what might seem like wildly frayed and disparate threads are woven together into a beautiful, coherent fabric. Baker has produced a rich and textured study – a real pleasure to read.
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