Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann

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A joyful, rule-breaking experiment in biography, which celebrates 'country life' as a state of mind 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.

Reviews

An outstanding piece of literary scholarship ... A biography that is far more intimate than most ... By choosing to embrace the daily routines of rural life, Baker proposes, these women found that the quality of their attention shifted ... Rural Hours is also a provocation to the present. No one could finish this book without concluding that the most important thing to any writer is solitude ... [It] reminds us that today we too often fail to afford our writers this necessity -- Charlotte Stroud * Financial Times *
Rural Hours is Harriet Bakers first book and it is immensely readable. It bristles with evocative detail and she invests each chapter with the narrative drive of a short story. [...] Baker is extremely good at finding significance in the ordinary and has a feel for the thinginess of domestic existence, for what teacups or the grocers bill can reveal. She sifts quiet periods of homemaking for meaning and honours the bulb-planting, sheet-folding, list-making and resourceful cooking that contributed to the texture of the subjects days and fed back into their writing. * Literary Review *
Baker conjures the sights and sounds of mid-20th-century rural England with vivid lyricism * The Sunday Times *
Rural Hours is beautifully written, and Bakers reading is wide and deep * Observer *
A delightful read, enhanced by quirky photographs including several of these visionary writers with their goats * Independent *
Baker is an elegant and eloquent storyteller and authoritative even while shes in thrall, rightly, to the three women who make this book so often fascinating. * Spectator *
An absorbing study of the impact of country living on Woolf, Townsend Warner & Lehmann. A meditative exploration of renewal, visionarinessinterior & exterior, generative & tormentinggrievous loss, & lovecool & passionate, fragile & enduring -- David Hayden
A superb portrait of the complex imprint the countryside makes on the life of the mind, this exquisite book reveals three writers, each vividly drawn in the particularities of her own surroundings, her own difficulties and joys. This book is a thoughtful exploration of rural life and creativity, drawing on deep archival roots and Harriet Baker's unique warmth and eloquence. A treasure -- Doireann N Ghrofa, author of A Ghost in the Throat
In this warm, perceptive, eloquent study, Harriet Baker collects some overlooked moments in these womens lives, and with great honesty and empathy, captures what it felt like to live and write through them. Like Bakers protagonists in their countryside boltholes I felt socketed by this book. I know Ill return to it again and again -- Lauren Elkin, author of Flneuse and Art Monsters
The country life, with its dogs and flowers and sunsets, its leaky roofs and depression and boredom, has been an essential part of so many artists' lives, but is often seen as a weekend escape -- a quiet footnote to the more exciting drama of urban striving. Harriet Baker places rural hours at the center of the lives of three great writers, and shows how their works were forged in places whose quiet faades masked inner struggles every bit as tumultuous as the lives of the cities they left -- Benjamin Moser, author of The Upside-Down World

Author Bio

Harriet Baker has written for the London Review of Books, the Paris Review, the New Statesman, the TLS, Apollo and frieze. She read English at Oxford and holds a PhD from Queen Mary, University of London. In 2018, she was awarded the Biographers' Club Tony Lothian Prize. She lives in Bristol.