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.