Book Review: Rural Hours

Violet Hatch reviews
Harriet Baker, Rural Hours: The Pastoral Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann

Harriet Baker’s book Rural Hours (2024) tells the previously untold stories of three women writers – Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Rosamond Lehmann – and the time they spent living in the English countryside. Often dismissed by biographers as insignificant gaps in the trajectory of the great literary careers of these authors, Baker makes the compelling argument that these quieter periods of rest and recovery in the countryside, documented only in the form of fragmented paper trails, shopping lists, diaries and letters, left a subtle yet substantial impact on their future work.

Retreats to the countryside were vital for mental and creative rest. Readers get a glimpse of how the women’s future literary pursuits quietly simmered in the background of country living, whilst they adapted to a slower pace of life. In the meantime, they acquired new daily routines, busying themselves with domestic tasks, occupying their minds with the arduous and the ordinary, in an effort to physically and mentally distance themselves from the creative pressures of London’s literary social scene.

In the introduction, Baker explains her choice of topic:

These are not the most storied or well-known episodes in these writers’ lives, nor do they yield easily to summary. They are episodes not of high drama, but quiet domestic goings on, of the kind usually passed over in biographies. They require a different kind of attention, a different sense of scale and orientation. (p. 12)

This prepares readers to alter the scale of our reading, to adapt our focus to the kind of sustained attention the book requires. Baker reimagines the missing parts of these writers’ life stories through a focus on minute and mundane details. In a talk at Hatchards, Baker described her approach to writing the book. Inspired by a diary entry written by Virginia Woolf during her days at her country home in Asheham in Sussex, she wanted to look at the world through a magnifying glass, adjusting her literary lens to focus in on the minute details of everyday life. Country living allowed these writers to slow down, notice aspects of the world in microscopic detail and adapt to new rhythms and routines. And it was this new way of being, enabling them to alter their perspectives and sense of scale that, Baker argues, was to be crucial to their intellectual development, as well as their personal growth and recovery. 

The first section of the book covers the rural life of Virginia Woolf. Here, Baker draws upon Woolf’s Asheham diaries, which have recently been rediscovered and published in the first volume of the Granta reissue of The Diary of Virginia Woolf (2023). Following a bout of mental illness in London, Leonard and Virginia went to stay at Asheham House in Sussex, where Woolf made notes in a pocket-sized notebook from 3 August to 4 October 1917. It is easy to see why these entries have not previously been published. They are often monotonous descriptions of daily routines, uneventful and repetitive. Woolf documents her days minimally, in short sentences, often just listing the events of the day:

Monday 6th August
Very fine hot day. (Bank holiday). Sound of band in Lewes from the downs. Guns heard at intervals. Walked up the down at the back. Got plenty of mushrooms. Butterflies in quantities.

Tuesday 7th August
Bicycled back from Glynde. N & L went to get mushrooms and found several, also blackberries getting ripe, only no sugar for jam. (Woolf, Diary, I, p. 104)

What struck me about these minimal diary entries is the feeling of absolute authenticity. They are not written with an audience in mind; there are no elaborate, colourful descriptions or embellishments of the day’s events. It is a style of writing that readers would not necessarily associate with Woolf. Baker invites us to be drawn into a kind of intimacy with Woolf as a person rather than the novelist or literary celebrity.

For Woolf, Asheham was a space of sanctity, rest and healing. And this idea of the countryside as space for rest and recovery, a place for doing nothing and being idle, is a thread that runs through the book. For these three women, each recovering from or attempting to escape their own personal and professional struggles, these periods of idleness, absence and long days doing nothing were not only integral to their mental and physical wellbeing, but also productive.

Rosamond Lehmann (1901-1990) moved to the country following a long hiatus from writing and the breakdown of her marriage. ‘She needed such fallow periods, idle phases in which she could “just lie about walk, and not think of anything”.’ Baker shows that creativity cannot be forced or churned out like a machine. It is a complex, even mystical process that ebbs and flows, following its own rules and patterns that mirror the natural world in all its wild and ever-changing rhythms.

Each of the writers had experienced her own personal difficulties, struggling with mental illness, sexuality, identity, relationships or marital breakdown, which were affecting their work. Baker teases out the relationship between the outsider – the one who deviates from the norms and challenges social convention – and the outside, the rural spaces they inhabit where they were able to locate, rediscover or even recreate their authentic selves embracing their ‘outsiderness’.

Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) embraced her outsider status in her new rural setting. Baker sees this new life as liberating, even celebratory.

News of the cottage and its contents spread quickly through Chaldon: rumours of pink paint sent from London and ‘the grandeur of saucepans and not a single upholstered chair’. Sylvia – already known in the village as the owner of the fluffy black dog who gambolled on the village green – had no qualms about baffling people. The cottage expressed her playfulness and she revelled in its deviation from convention. On a chest in the sitting room, beneath the rococo mirror, she placed a 1646 Bible and a 1787 edition of the book of Common Prayer, which became known as ‘Mrs Johnson’, the first of her private jokes with Valentine. Every evening, she would pick a passage at random and read aloud much to their amusement and the bewilderment of their guests. (p. 105)

Warner was creative and resourceful in renovating and decorating her country cottage which she fondly named ‘Miss Green’. Through this process of homemaking, she was able to carve out a life that suited her. Her décor and her domestic objects became an extension of her identity and a way of expressing her idiosyncrasy. In the rural home she crafted for herself and her lover Valentine, Warner had the freedom to embrace her true identity, sexuality and political beliefs. This creativity was then translated into her much-loved novel Lolly Willowes (1926), in which a young woman leaves London to make a new life for herself in the country, eventually finding herself drawn towards the practices of witchcraft. Away from the suffocating pressures of the city, Warner was able to craft a space to suit her creative, intellectual and personal needs as both woman and writer.

Though Woolf, Townsend Warner and Lehmann are three writers one would not necessarily think to put together, Baker links them through serendipitous meetings and crossings, traces and hauntings. Sometimes they wrote to one another directly. Virginia Woolf stayed with Rosamund Lehmann in her country home for a time. Baker also details more evasive encounters; the echoes of Woolf who in times previous had passed by near where Rosamund Lehmann was living, ‘driving through the same country [road] a decade earlier’ (p. 162). And this echo carries through, recalling Woolf’s 1942 essay ‘Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in A Motor Car’ where Woolf tries to grasp for a sense of self in the present moment as she observes Sussex at a new pace from a novel perspective in a motor car:

But relinquish, I said (it is well known how in circumstances like these the self splits up and one self is eager and dissatisfied and the other stern and philosophical). (p. 8)

Similarly, in Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf conceptualises the idea of ‘the moment’ as a temporal unit, something subjective and internal. She describes this by observing a kind of split temporality between her past and present selves:

It would be interesting to make the two people, I now, I then, come out in contrast. And further, this past is much affected by the present moment. What I write today I should not write in a year’s time. (p. 87).

The idea of the moment, a psychological, meditative, perhaps even physical pause seems to lend itself to the rituals of rural living that Baker describes. And Baker illustrates the Woolfian moment in practice enacted by the rural Woolf:

By October, the autumn days were passing quickly, bookended by mist. She helped the servants make blackberry jam, and collected walnuts which were spilling from a tree over the wall and into the garden. In her reports from Asheham, she was beginning to record her observations: ‘I have never got so much out of nature before,’ she wrote. And yet her participation was minimal: she wasn’t yet ready to begin her diary. Still, she felt relieved. She had lost almost three years to illness and was eager to regain her footing in the world, in her marriage, and to write. (p. 40).

This is how Woolf’s concept of the moment plays out in a rural setting. Baker presents the reader with the Woolf of that time in the present who is beginning to record her observations in her diary; the Woolf of the past who had been consumed with illness and the promise of the writer she would eventually become. As with Susan in Woolf’s 1931 novel The Waves, who attempts to describe who or what she is, using the natural world around her, ‘I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn’ (p. 7), in the countryside, one is confronted immediately by the changing of the seasons. As the seasons change, so do our moods, routines even aspects of our physical selves moving with them and with the passage of time. We become a different version of our selves, adding or shedding a layer in a process of renewal and transition.

But as the reader is guided through various literary lanes, we never quite reach a definitive conclusion. Perhaps Baker wants to leave the reader with the impression that there is always more to explore, further lanes and pathways to travel down in the effort to gain a holistic and true understanding of a life. The knowledge that our literary idols allowed themselves periods of stillness reminds us that rest is essential. And receiving and meditating on these stories has given me (and I hope other readers) permission to do nothing from time to time: to be still, to be quiet, perhaps to go outside, and count the butterflies.

Violet Hatch
Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge

Works Cited

Harriet Baker, Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann(Allen Lane, 2024). https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Rural-Hours-by-Harriet-Baker/9780241540510

Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 1, 1915-19 (Granta Books, 2023)

Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931), with introductions by Jeanette Winterson and Gillian Beer (Vintage, 2004)

Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays (Hogarth Press, 1980)

Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being (Pimlico, 2002)