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

by 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 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, History, Nature, Audiobook, Books About Books, Memoir

368 pages, Hardcover

First published March 28, 2024

Reviews

[Alwynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Diane Barnes · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a little more academic than I cared for; still I ended up learning a lot about these women authors.

[Katrina Clarke · Rating 4 out of 5]

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....

[Lauren Thomson · Rating 4 out of 5]

a meticulously researched book…to the point I’m kind of in awe that it exists and that someone has put so much work into something. though at times a little repetitive, i found this interesting and a good ‘overall history’ on these women despite being marketed as a study on their experiences with remoteness. also pretty heart wrenching at times…how sad that there isn’t a trace left of many of these homes; where life was lived and people healed, loved, cooked, wrote.

particularly enjoyed reading about Virginia and Sylvia/Valentine.

[William Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Sally the Spaniel. This was such a lovely book!

[Marguerite Kaye · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have always been fascinated with our relationship with the landscape, and often write the landscape into my own books as a character, so this book, about how the countryside acted as a solace and inspiration to three female writers, was right up my street. (As with so much of my non-fiction reading, I picked this up from a display table in my local, fabulous independent bookshop Bookpoint, on the recommendation of the lovely Taylor who runs the shop, so thank you once again for this.)

I have read quite a bit by and about Virginia Woolf, hers is the first biography I ever read, aged about 16 when I'd never read any of her fiction. But I have to confess that although I'd come across both Rosamond Lehmann and Sylvia Townsend Warner in my reading of Woolf, Bloomsbury and the Bohemians, I'd never read any of their poetry or fiction. I'll fess up now, though I found what they wrote and why fascinating, I am fairly convinced that it will have dated badly, so I'm not sure that I will. That said...

This was an excellent read. The country landscape, surprisingly close together for all three authors who did know each other to a greater or lesser degree, plays the main part in the narrative. What was it about the country, especially in times of war (both world wars) that drew the authors to it, what was it that they were seeking solace from, and what was it that inspired them to write, to recommence writing, or to change tack? All three were going through emotional turmoil. All three were 'blocked'. All three found happiness, inspiration and love, individual love, but also love of the small societies they inhabited, and of the land itself. I didn't need any convincing that landscape can change a narrative or a whole ethos, I've written about that myself in another life when studying with the Open University, but if I had needed convincing, this book would have done it.

It's not a bio, not by any stretch. It covers interludes in the three authors' lives, turning points, rural idylls. It's beautifully written, it's a lovely, elegaic read, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

[Michele · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Lisa Verhelst · Rating 4 out of 5]

To be read with your feet in the Ouse or similar water.

[Tabs Hannam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful study of the short period of lives in which Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann lived in the countryside and their imaginations were inspired and restored by the respite and retreat of these moments in time. Despite never having read any Sylvia Townsend Warner, the descriptions of the freedom she imbibed from the rural settings is joyful and makes me want to read both her works and Valentine’s.

Close reading and the concentration on noticing the outside world - time to not have headphones in whenever I’m walking somewhere!


“We recur in our courses like comets” [Sylvia to Rosamond]

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started this knowing a fair bit about Virginia Woolf, a very little bit about Sylvia Townsend Warner, and next to nothing about Rosamond Lehman. I discovered much about all of them, loved the triple biography based on the theme of when they each swapped the city for the countryside, and came away wanting to read more from each of the authors (although just one by Rosamond Lehman, as I wasn't a big fan of her writing before, and I didn't find much sympathy for her while reading this, but even so I would like to read The Gipsy's Baby). Harriet Baker does a fine job of analysing how these periods of their lives influenced their writing, and details the (for the most part) novels that were written and/or published at the time, as well as their inner lives. Enough information is given about their lives overall so as to put the book in context of their lives in general.

Thanks to the publisher for a review copy.

[Elsbeth Kwant]

Lovely read.

[Isabel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Great if you want a yarn about British authors moving to the countryside and being lesbians. Nice audiobook to have in the background, lots of hedgerow content. Not great if you want comparative analysis, could have done without the Rosamond Lehmann sections and altogether too long.

[Tessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

oh to be a writer finding solace in the English countryside

[Ross · Rating 3 out of 5]

this was okay, liked sylvia’s parts but kind of found it a bit boring at points

[ReadingwhileWalking · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 ...

[Roman Clodia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a sort of group biography of three female writers: Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann. Baker's projected focus is on how place, specifically rural stays or living, affected them and their writing - at least, that's the premise. However, the narrative spills over beyond this remit and can lose focus at times as it follows Woolf and Lehmann back to London. I'd also have liked a clearer understanding of why these three women: they occasionally meet through work but are not especially close; the timescale of their lives sometimes overlaps but, then, so do plenty of others; it's a little tenuous to say that they justify being examined together because they all spent some time in the country and were female writers...

I felt that Woolf takes up most of the airspace in this book. This is a little counterproductive as, arguably, she's the best known with the key beats of her life - and death - culturally familiar; certainly more so, I'd guess than Townsend Warner or Lehmann. I was hopeful that this was going to concentrate on Woolf's early life based on her Asheham diary: she moved there during the first world war to recover from a crisis in her health so that it was a place of sanctuary and healing for her. This section is interesting as is the assertion that Woolf came to a kind of mystical sense of nature. However, later chapters move on from Asheham and this period of Woolf's life and discuss her other country homes without quite the same interest. Living between London and the country was hardly exceptional for Woolf's class and social circle so it becomes quite diffuse and unclear exactly what point the book is making here, apart from the fact that the Woolfs had a cycle that moved between city and rural settings.

Townsend Warner was the most interesting to me. Unlike the Woolfs, she moved permanently in the 1930s to a workman's cottage without amenities, part of her commitment to socialist politics. She took in a lodger to help with the bills - Valentine Ackland - and promptly fell in love with her. Their unconventional rural life makes this section fascinating and the book makes interesting connections with Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes and other writing. Here it feels like the rural setting is a distinct alternative to the urban, taking on an aura of liberation. Sadly, her marriage to Ackland broke down due to infidelity, but the cottage became a site of memory and an evocation of lost happiness that itself fuelled Townsend Warner's writing.

The third woman, Rosamond Lehmann, is perhaps the most elusive. I adore her writing and was looking forward to learning more about her life but somehow she proves the most slippery. Her extended affair with the poet Cecil Day-Lewis is well known, and her Berkshire cottage where she retreats after divorce, becomes the site of their weekend trysts. Like her own heroines, Lehmann believes that her married lover will leave his wife when his sons are older and is left hanging on to this vision of a fictional future. Eventually, of course, he leaves both wife and mistress for a younger, newer woman - and Lehmann is devastated. She's the most conventional of the three authors, conservative with both a big and little C, so her country living isn't a break with or from her life as a sort of doubling down on it.

I suppose one of my qualms about this book - apart from the rather random nature of the material and women selected - is that it operates on a kind of fictional divide between urban and country life, and a strong sense of 'Englishness' that doesn't get interrogated or even really acknowledged. It feels a little too glib to say that Woolf needed to recuperate from London and that the country fed her creativity and mental stability (I could be wrong here but I think she did almost all her writing, editing and re-writing in London), especially since she committed suicide not in London but in the country. The role of the country house within the larger Bloomsbury Group seems more complicated from what little I know, not least as the site of unconventional sexual and other partnerings.

Townsend Warner is interesting because her country life is associated both with her politics and her marriage to Valentine. While she was a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s, her activism is local and she starts writing about the economics of rural affairs and agricultural workers, based on her life amongst them. A move to the country is crucial to her most well-known book, when Lolly Willowes frees herself from the confines of her bourgeois family and becomes a witch.

Lehmann is the most puzzling: the material feels more sparse here and her cottage isn't so much a move as a continuation of her essentially conformist life. She admits herself that she can't envisage life without a man - and is devastated when her lover, rather predictably, leaves her for yet another - younger - woman.

As writers who I greatly admire, these miniature lives were always going to interest me but this book could have felt less tentative and slightly random if it had had a tighter objective and had thought more intentionally about what this separation between city and countryside was intending to do. Also, why three women? Just because...? How did gender play into the issues of place, I wondered, but - like so much else - this isn't addressed.

I listened to the audiobook read by the author.

[Kitty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Harriet Baker's group biography takes three well-known novelists - Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamund Lehman - and gives a fresh insight into their lives and writing by looking at the impact on each of a sustained period of rural living. Baker was inspired by Woolf's 'Asheham diary', written at her Sussex country house as she recuperated from a mental breakdown in 1917. Baker saw in this rather mundane and domestic record - so different from her other, published, diaries - the crucible of Woolf's later work. We then leap a decade or so forward to the early 1930s when Sylvia Townsend Warner bought her house in Dorset, Miss Green, and began her relationship with Valentine Ackland. Then another leap to the early '40s and Rosamund Lehman's life at Diamond Cottage in Berkshire. The domestic details that Baker draws out from their diaries and letters is fascinating and brings alive these three very different characters, their daily rituals and the inspiration behind their writing. A novel - and very readable - approach to biography.

[Ros Huxley · Rating 4 out of 5]

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!

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

I met amazing people in this book. One I knew more of, the other two not so much. This biography of the ladies who bring it to life, alongside Nature which is the real star of the show, is earthy, strong, all feeling and highly interesting. It does a great service to Woolf, Townsend Warner and Lehmann in their most human form. Away from their intellect and work, the raw insights into their country lives is original and wholesome. A clever, captivating and rather great read.

[Alison Enever · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really interesting and well written and researched book. Fascinating insight into specific periods of time in three authors lives and on those terms I really enjoyed it. I’m not sure how well it hung together for me personally as a thematic approach. I would have liked a bit more about the connectivity between them and some more explicit links made. But nonetheless an excellent read.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful poetic book about 3 authors i didn't really know anything about. I really enjoyed the chapters on Virginia and Sylvia, but i found Rosamond a bit unlikable until the last section. I really love the way memory plays a huge part in the structure especially in the last chapter as Sylvia remembers her time with Valentine, it was such a beautiful and haunting section of the book.

[Liz Owen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this interesting in places, but overall,it was rather too long, and I found that the three sections were disjointed.
I most enjoyed reading the section about Virginia Woolf, I think mainly because much of her life was lived very near to my home village.

[Catharine · Rating 4 out of 5]

A surprise, and one of my favorite reads this year. Absorbing and immersive account of three authors, all only dimly known to me. Contains some nicely-done social history of England during both WWI and WWII, but mostly compelling for the stories of the women themselves.

[Desirae · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely read. The chapters on Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehman were particularly compelling. Partly due to their respective non traditional personal relationships, which made for very interesting reading.

[Emma Collier · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Catherine Jeffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting and absorbing look at the work of three writers who all spent some years of their lives living in the country. We see how this shaped their writing and their personal relationships.

[Theresa Howes · Rating 5 out of 5]

An immersive and fascinating read. Brilliantly researched and compelling.

[Christine Parker · Rating 1 out of 5]

Rich women slumming it in the country without servants, whatever next!
Intensely annoying and very boring.

[Juno]

Beautifully written and wonderful to read, if a little disconnected and discontinuous at points.