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Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Rosamond Lehman
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 were forever changed by it.
In this bold new biography, Harriet Baker vividly recreates the ‘rural hours’ of the writers Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Rosamond Lehmann. 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 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 to recognize the radical potential of domestic life and rural places, and find new enchantment in the routines and rituals of each day.
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 were forever changed by it.
In this bold new biography, Harriet Baker vividly recreates the ‘rural hours’ of the writers Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Rosamond Lehmann. 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 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 to recognize the radical potential of domestic life and rural places, and find new enchantment in the routines and rituals of each day.
368 pages, Hardcover
First published March 28, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
April 22, 2024
Harriet Baker explores episodes from the life and work of three women writers: Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann. Although these women interacted at various points, the overlap that concerns Baker relates to the impact of place on their writing. In Woolf’s case, Baker focuses on her move to Asheham in Sussex during WW1, loosely documented in her Asheham Diary. Here Woolf, recuperating from a serious health crisis, immersed herself in her idea of country living, blocking out the horrors of wartime by devoting herself to books, gardening and long walks, increasingly entranced by her close encounters with nature. Woolf’s diary from this period’s far less ordered than her later ones: shopping lists, notes about daily life, images and scenes drawn from memory, mingle with impressionistic scenes of her local environment: an experiment in form and the representation of time and the everyday. A process Baker views as crucial to Woolf’s shift from conventional to more experimental novelist – starting with the publication of elliptical pieces like 1917’s The Mark on the Wall.
In Baker’s version of events Woolf’s understanding of rural existence is near-mystical, meditation and heightened sensation punctuated by the mundane – from servant problems to wartime rationing. In comparison Sylvia Townsend Warner’s time in the country’s far more grounded, in keeping with her radical, political sensibilities. In the early 1920s, Townsend Warner developed ties to a bohemian circle based in Dorset, centred on writer T. F. Powys who became a close friend. In 1930 she bought a rundown worker’s cottage in nearby East Chaldon which she shared with another woman, her lodger Valentine Ackland. For Townsend-Warner the move was revelatory both personally and intellectually. She and Valentine fell in love forming a lifelong bond, fractured but never entirely severed by Valentine’s later affairs. In their early years together, they shared a fascination with the social and economic aspects of country life, documenting and publicising the challenging conditions facing agricultural workers and their families. An approach which grew out of their mutal belief in the importance of the social and communal over the individual. A commitment that resurfaced in Townsend-Warner’s fiction particularly her novel The Corner That Held Them.
Baker’s study abruptly transitions from 1930s Dorset to WW2 and newly-divorced Rosamond Lehmann who’s relocated to a staid, Berkshire village, conveniently placed for trysts with married lover, poet C. Day Lewis. For many years embedded in middle-class domesticity, Lehmann’s the most conformist as well as the most puzzling of Baker’s notional trio – and the least vividly drawn. The English countryside seems more backdrop than integral to Lehmann’s lifestyle and creative choices. Although I enjoyed reading about Woolf’s and Townsend Warner’s experiences I wasn’t entirely convinced by the concept behind Baker’s book and her entries on Lehmann intensified my uncertainty. In the classic The Country and the City theorist Raymond Williams demolished traditional urban/rural binaries, a divide implicated in circulating myths of Englishness, heritage and the workings of capitalism. Baker cites Williams’s work but never directly engages with it. She never addresses – at least in any developed sense - her chosen writers’ clashing conceptions of the rural versus the urban. This makes Baker’s choices, and conclusions, seem rather arbitrary. Nor does she adequately explain her decision to focus on women writers here, how gender figures is another weirdly taken-for-granted element - Baker's an academic and this is her first book for a broader readership, so I wondered if she went too far in her efforts to make her study accessible. Whatever the reasoning behind Baker's creative decisions, from my perspective, the finished piece was disappointingly incoherent although the anecdotes about Woolf and Townsend Warner made it engaging enough to hold my attention.
In Baker’s version of events Woolf’s understanding of rural existence is near-mystical, meditation and heightened sensation punctuated by the mundane – from servant problems to wartime rationing. In comparison Sylvia Townsend Warner’s time in the country’s far more grounded, in keeping with her radical, political sensibilities. In the early 1920s, Townsend Warner developed ties to a bohemian circle based in Dorset, centred on writer T. F. Powys who became a close friend. In 1930 she bought a rundown worker’s cottage in nearby East Chaldon which she shared with another woman, her lodger Valentine Ackland. For Townsend-Warner the move was revelatory both personally and intellectually. She and Valentine fell in love forming a lifelong bond, fractured but never entirely severed by Valentine’s later affairs. In their early years together, they shared a fascination with the social and economic aspects of country life, documenting and publicising the challenging conditions facing agricultural workers and their families. An approach which grew out of their mutal belief in the importance of the social and communal over the individual. A commitment that resurfaced in Townsend-Warner’s fiction particularly her novel The Corner That Held Them.
Baker’s study abruptly transitions from 1930s Dorset to WW2 and newly-divorced Rosamond Lehmann who’s relocated to a staid, Berkshire village, conveniently placed for trysts with married lover, poet C. Day Lewis. For many years embedded in middle-class domesticity, Lehmann’s the most conformist as well as the most puzzling of Baker’s notional trio – and the least vividly drawn. The English countryside seems more backdrop than integral to Lehmann’s lifestyle and creative choices. Although I enjoyed reading about Woolf’s and Townsend Warner’s experiences I wasn’t entirely convinced by the concept behind Baker’s book and her entries on Lehmann intensified my uncertainty. In the classic The Country and the City theorist Raymond Williams demolished traditional urban/rural binaries, a divide implicated in circulating myths of Englishness, heritage and the workings of capitalism. Baker cites Williams’s work but never directly engages with it. She never addresses – at least in any developed sense - her chosen writers’ clashing conceptions of the rural versus the urban. This makes Baker’s choices, and conclusions, seem rather arbitrary. Nor does she adequately explain her decision to focus on women writers here, how gender figures is another weirdly taken-for-granted element - Baker's an academic and this is her first book for a broader readership, so I wondered if she went too far in her efforts to make her study accessible. Whatever the reasoning behind Baker's creative decisions, from my perspective, the finished piece was disappointingly incoherent although the anecdotes about Woolf and Townsend Warner made it engaging enough to hold my attention.
May 8, 2024
For someone pretty clueless about the lives, Bloomsbury group and even the books of these authors, I am amazed by how much I enjoyed this. I feel like I have been introduced to who these three women are at their most pure and vulnerable.
The writing is brilliant. There is a balance of diary entries/facts/wider context.
This captures the realities of rural living, urban discontentment, mental health, relationships and political awakening. Author inspiration is so clearly fuelled by their personal lives, and most clearly, their rural escapes.
Despite the broken hearts, longing for recognition, wartime scarcity and cottage-life simplicity, this book makes me long for countryside living.
Okay, now to go read alllll their books....
The writing is brilliant. There is a balance of diary entries/facts/wider context.
This captures the realities of rural living, urban discontentment, mental health, relationships and political awakening. Author inspiration is so clearly fuelled by their personal lives, and most clearly, their rural escapes.
Despite the broken hearts, longing for recognition, wartime scarcity and cottage-life simplicity, this book makes me long for countryside living.
Okay, now to go read alllll their books....
June 30, 2024
I love Sally the Spaniel. This was such a lovely book!
July 28, 2024
To be read with your feet in the Ouse or similar water.
May 1, 2024
This is a beautiful book. I've read many biographies of Virginia Woolf but none specifically looking at how her spells living in the country influenced her writing and creativity. The book also covers the rural lives of the authors Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamund Lehmann. Creativity changes in the countryside for each of them, as do their lives. This is a fascinating perspective on creativity in three great writers. I love the way the book weaves very well researched fact with imagination and descriptions of the landscape to bring the book and its subjects alive. Harriet Baker is a beautiful writer.
September 5, 2024
I loved this biography of the country lives of 1930s writers Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann, and the effects of rural living on their work and personal lives. Each moved to a new house in a southern English county (Sussex; Dorset; Berkshire) at a time of personal crisis or change. Woolf was recovering from mental breakdown; Townsend Warner discovered a new sexual identity; Lehmann was getting over a failed marriage and embarking on an affair with the married, egotistical poet Cecil Day-Lewis, who joined her most weekends.
The book deals with slim segments of each writer's life in granular detail - particularly in the cases of Woolf and Warner, who left diaries and lists. We see Woolf observing butterflies, which she can identify by name, with an almost meditational focus on tiny details and rituals, as she deals with her mental health. Warner creates a beautiful but rustic, pink-walled hideaway in her Dorset cottage. There, with the poet Valentine Ackland, she discovers freedom and independence as she (like the other women, from a privileged background), learns how to cook, grow vegetables and undertake domestic chores, whilst writing practical articles for various magazines. Lehmann enjoys the trappings of bourgeois living but struggles with her political conscience, espousing left-wing views whilst enjoying the comforts of a traditional 'conservative' way of life.
But all good things come to an end and, their rural rituals disrupted by the second world war, all endure personal disasters and even tragedies.
All three write important, if not successful, works during the war, which Baker analyses and relates to their country lives. Woolf's Between the Acts is a fragmentary work dealing with a village pageant against the backdrop of war, based on her own observations and experiences. Warner's more successful The Corner That Held Them is about bickering nuns in a mediaeval convent during the period of the Black Death, inspired, in part, by Warner's wartime involvement with the Dorchester Women's Voluntary Service. Lehmann's three short stories (including 'A Dream of Winter') sound like beautiful but profound domestic pieces, and I can't wait to look them up!
Woolf commited suicide in 1941, affecting the other two women who respected and knew her -- though not intimately. (Lehmann's brother worked for the Woolfs' Hogarth Press; Woolf and Warner admired one another and met, as writers, more than once.) Warner suffered deeply from being the third woman when her partner, Ackland, engaged in a long-term, passionate affair; and Lehmann was unceremoniously dumped by Day-Lewis when he left both his mistress and his wife for a beautiful young actress. (Prior to Day-Lewis, poor Lehmann had found about the end of her previous relationship when she spotted her younger partner announcing his engagement to someone else in the Times. The double blow was devastating.)
In the 1950s, Lehmann went through an far worse tragedy from which she never recovered, and, though Baker touches on it only briefly, this section had me in tears.
While the scholarship is good, other (professional) reviewers have noted repetitions, small mistakes and errors in Baker's telling; but I will limit myself to noting the inaccuracy of her assertion (on p.166) that Lehmann's 1936 The Weather in the Streets describes the protagonist's abortion 'just two years after the first literary representation in Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark'. (There had, in fact, been several others, including Susan Glaspell's Fidelity in 1915, Dorothy Parker's abortion stories in 1924 and 1932, and Kay Boyle's My Next Bride in 1934. Lehmann's, however, was among the most detailed.)
Still, the balance between the factual and the emotional is perfectly judged, as are the moving end chapters where Baker seems to know just what to leave out and what to leave in -- not an easily acquired skill for a biographer. I savoured this book slowly over several weeks. It leaves a gap in my reading life which I am not yet sure how to fill ...
The book deals with slim segments of each writer's life in granular detail - particularly in the cases of Woolf and Warner, who left diaries and lists. We see Woolf observing butterflies, which she can identify by name, with an almost meditational focus on tiny details and rituals, as she deals with her mental health. Warner creates a beautiful but rustic, pink-walled hideaway in her Dorset cottage. There, with the poet Valentine Ackland, she discovers freedom and independence as she (like the other women, from a privileged background), learns how to cook, grow vegetables and undertake domestic chores, whilst writing practical articles for various magazines. Lehmann enjoys the trappings of bourgeois living but struggles with her political conscience, espousing left-wing views whilst enjoying the comforts of a traditional 'conservative' way of life.
But all good things come to an end and, their rural rituals disrupted by the second world war, all endure personal disasters and even tragedies.
All three write important, if not successful, works during the war, which Baker analyses and relates to their country lives. Woolf's Between the Acts is a fragmentary work dealing with a village pageant against the backdrop of war, based on her own observations and experiences. Warner's more successful The Corner That Held Them is about bickering nuns in a mediaeval convent during the period of the Black Death, inspired, in part, by Warner's wartime involvement with the Dorchester Women's Voluntary Service. Lehmann's three short stories (including 'A Dream of Winter') sound like beautiful but profound domestic pieces, and I can't wait to look them up!
Woolf commited suicide in 1941, affecting the other two women who respected and knew her -- though not intimately. (Lehmann's brother worked for the Woolfs' Hogarth Press; Woolf and Warner admired one another and met, as writers, more than once.) Warner suffered deeply from being the third woman when her partner, Ackland, engaged in a long-term, passionate affair; and Lehmann was unceremoniously dumped by Day-Lewis when he left both his mistress and his wife for a beautiful young actress. (Prior to Day-Lewis, poor Lehmann had found about the end of her previous relationship when she spotted her younger partner announcing his engagement to someone else in the Times. The double blow was devastating.)
In the 1950s, Lehmann went through an far worse tragedy from which she never recovered, and, though Baker touches on it only briefly, this section had me in tears.
While the scholarship is good, other (professional) reviewers have noted repetitions, small mistakes and errors in Baker's telling; but I will limit myself to noting the inaccuracy of her assertion (on p.166) that Lehmann's 1936 The Weather in the Streets describes the protagonist's abortion 'just two years after the first literary representation in Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark'. (There had, in fact, been several others, including Susan Glaspell's Fidelity in 1915, Dorothy Parker's abortion stories in 1924 and 1932, and Kay Boyle's My Next Bride in 1934. Lehmann's, however, was among the most detailed.)
Still, the balance between the factual and the emotional is perfectly judged, as are the moving end chapters where Baker seems to know just what to leave out and what to leave in -- not an easily acquired skill for a biographer. I savoured this book slowly over several weeks. It leaves a gap in my reading life which I am not yet sure how to fill ...
July 17, 2024
Three of my fave authors squeeze together in this excellent examination of how living in the country can help or hinder writing. Harriet Baker has done some extensive research and these three quirky women come alive through her choice of diary entries, letters, and literary extracts. I particularly enjoyed the section about Sylvia Townsend Warner (my almost neighbour) and learned a huge amount about Virginia Woolf. Rosamond Lehman, however, was more difficult to get a handle on (maybe because she was the last to be discussed and my concentration was fading!)
Is it me, or do books with a colon in the title ramble sometimes? The phD effect possibly. This is a great book for any woman struggling with the demands of country life, but wanting to write. Though, these ladies, did have staff most of the time!
Is it me, or do books with a colon in the title ramble sometimes? The phD effect possibly. This is a great book for any woman struggling with the demands of country life, but wanting to write. Though, these ladies, did have staff most of the time!
August 11, 2024
Loved this book about three great women writers and their country lives - Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and one of my mum’s favourite writers, Rosamund Lehmann.
All the women struggled to find time and space to write in a way that men just didn’t, and don’t, generally have to.
Harriet Baker was working as a journalist and critic while trying to write a PhD on Woolf and researching the archives. She has clearly researched widely; reading correspondence held in universities and libraries in the States and in the UK.
Life writing is difficult to do well and Baker has definitely approached her book in a way that makes it very enjoyable to read.
I found the last chapters almost unbearably poignant. To learn that Woolf’s much loved house was demolished despite a campaign to save it is sickening.
Baker has really reached into the lives of these women who sought solace in the countryside and creatively imagined their thoughts and feelings.
Brilliant
All the women struggled to find time and space to write in a way that men just didn’t, and don’t, generally have to.
Harriet Baker was working as a journalist and critic while trying to write a PhD on Woolf and researching the archives. She has clearly researched widely; reading correspondence held in universities and libraries in the States and in the UK.
Life writing is difficult to do well and Baker has definitely approached her book in a way that makes it very enjoyable to read.
I found the last chapters almost unbearably poignant. To learn that Woolf’s much loved house was demolished despite a campaign to save it is sickening.
Baker has really reached into the lives of these women who sought solace in the countryside and creatively imagined their thoughts and feelings.
Brilliant
August 27, 2024
I like group biographies but found this a little disappointing. The link between the three writers - the time spent in the country by Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamund Lehmann - seemed tenuous to me. But it is a meticulously researched work - the three wrote not only for publication but filled many notebooks and sent many letters, all diligently mined by the author who also makes extensive use of existing biographies. But the detail of household lists became a bit overwhelming and I didn't feel I learned much that had not already been covered elsewhere.
November 20, 2024
Just wonderful. A melancholy ending but such a beautiful book. My favourite section was definitely Sylvia Townsend Warner. She lived so boldly and i look forward to reading her work.
May 12, 2024
I am ashamed to say that I have never read anything written by these pioneering women writers. That will be put right immediately.
I chose this book to follow my summer reading theme of gardens, nature, and countryside. It did not disappoint. Not only did it take me back to the feeling of living during the first and second world wars, but it also shows clearly the changing role of women in British society. Yes, these women were from privileged backgrounds, but each embarks on a new life due to illness, death, or the loss of a marriage. They learn how to fit into local communities, even when at first they struggle to understand the boring chitchat of every day folk who are too exhausted at the end of a long day's work to discuss literature or politics. Local life is more to do with survival and the next essential task.
I warmed immensely to Virginia and Sylvia but Rosamond grated on me, she and I are probably too much alike in the errors of our lives, this won't stop me seeking out her work though.
I recommend this as a good garden read. Lie in the sun, breathe the fresh air and catch snippets of a by hone England.
I chose this book to follow my summer reading theme of gardens, nature, and countryside. It did not disappoint. Not only did it take me back to the feeling of living during the first and second world wars, but it also shows clearly the changing role of women in British society. Yes, these women were from privileged backgrounds, but each embarks on a new life due to illness, death, or the loss of a marriage. They learn how to fit into local communities, even when at first they struggle to understand the boring chitchat of every day folk who are too exhausted at the end of a long day's work to discuss literature or politics. Local life is more to do with survival and the next essential task.
I warmed immensely to Virginia and Sylvia but Rosamond grated on me, she and I are probably too much alike in the errors of our lives, this won't stop me seeking out her work though.
I recommend this as a good garden read. Lie in the sun, breathe the fresh air and catch snippets of a by hone England.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews