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Penguin Rural Hours.
Rural Hours ABISBOOK Penguin.
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Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review
December 24, 2025
By depicting the rural interludes in the lives of three women writers, Harriet Baker pulls off a finely nuanced, interlinked biography.
Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamund Lehmann were acquaintances but they were not exact contemporaries. There are no neat arcs, parallels or resolutions in their stories. What Baker does so skilfully is to weave together descriptions of interior lives with the everyday concrete details of country life. Living in a house, even in the Home Counties in the interwar and war years, required physical fortitude. For Lehmann, this was severely tested in the bitter cold of the winter of 1939-40. In the 1930s, Townsend Warner embraced the domestic labour and discomfort of cottage life in Dorset, allowing herself only the luxury of a single, indoor cold-water tap. Bathing happened but once a week, depending on a copper for hot water.
At a moment when women’s lives were changing significantly, this provides an intriguing social history that focuses as much on domestic, practical realities as the complex emotional lives of its subjects.
Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamund Lehmann were acquaintances but they were not exact contemporaries. There are no neat arcs, parallels or resolutions in their stories. What Baker does so skilfully is to weave together descriptions of interior lives with the everyday concrete details of country life. Living in a house, even in the Home Counties in the interwar and war years, required physical fortitude. For Lehmann, this was severely tested in the bitter cold of the winter of 1939-40. In the 1930s, Townsend Warner embraced the domestic labour and discomfort of cottage life in Dorset, allowing herself only the luxury of a single, indoor cold-water tap. Bathing happened but once a week, depending on a copper for hot water.
At a moment when women’s lives were changing significantly, this provides an intriguing social history that focuses as much on domestic, practical realities as the complex emotional lives of its subjects.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review