How Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann found creativity in the countryside

When a biographer first sits down to her colossal task, stacks of books, objects from the archive, innumerable scraps of paper, diaries and letters all heckle simultaneously to be considered. A large part of her job, then, is to be selective; to, as Virginia Woolf had it, sift “the little from the big”. What counts as little and what as big, however, is bound to change for each generation of biographers. In Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann, Harriet Baker finds that the small moments, those days when “nothing strange or exalted happened” to these three writers, the ones that slipped through previous sieves, are of great significance.

Beginning in 1917, when Virginia arrives at Asheham House in the Sussex Downs of southern England to convalesce after a bout of depression, the book then takes us to Dorset in 1930. Here, the author and musicologist Sylvia Townsend Warner has just bought the most “unattractive” cottage she could find, where she retreats into private life with her lover, the poet Valentine Ackland. We meet the novelist Rosamond Lehmann in 1941, recently divorced and beginning a new life at Diamond Cottage in Berkshire. By the time we leave her, she is alone again — after a failed love affair with the poet Cecil Day-Lewis — “waving a flame” beneath frozen pipes during that last bitterly cold winter of the second world war. These are what Baker calls “threshold moment[s]”, when all three writers were on the cusp of new experiments in fiction.

Their rural hours were quiet, contemplative, filled with “a small litany of happenings” in the kitchen, in the garden or on country walks. Woolf kept her Asheham diary, the entries compressed into one tight paragraph like small seeds — their energy coiled for later use. Townsend Warner put her left-wing politics into practice and lived “self-sufficiently”, eschewing modern plumbing, growing her own vegetables, and cooking rabbits shot expertly by the ever-capable Ackland. Lehmann proved that a writer must live in what she called a “detached condition”. It was at Diamond Cottage that she wrote what is arguably her greatest work — Henry Green thought it the best short fiction since Chekhov — “A Dream of Winter”.

By ‘choosing to embrace the daily routines of rural life’, Baker proposes, these women found that the quality of their attention shifted

Though these days were quiet, they were also quietly radical. By “choosing to embrace the daily routines of rural life”, Baker proposes, these women found that the quality of their attention shifted. It became more local, magnified, concerned with “small deviations, the differences in sameness”. Walking the Sussex Downs each day, Woolf began to feel that the past was still present, standing “almost stagnant” in “the deep hollows”. And all three women discovered an “alternative” human history, one which did not take place on the battlefields in France but in small English villages. Its protagonists, Baker writes, weren’t Hitler or Churchill, but countrywomen, like the woman from the grocer’s shop in Townsend Warner’s village who became unnervingly good at throwing grenades. Their version of history was parochial, dealing with, as the poet Patrick Kavanagh wrote in defence of that term, “the fundamentals”.

It was Woolf, with her love of biography done well, who urged writers to flout the limitations of the form. Baker has done so here to great effect, producing a biography that is not only far more intimate than most, but is also an outstanding piece of literary scholarship. By tunnelling down into the fallow periods in these writer’s lives, when they collected, like shrewd birds, their twigs and feathers, their wisps of lichen and spider silk, Rural Hours shows us just how those nests were built. To read their later work — Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth”, Townsend Warner’s novel The Corner that Held Them, or Lehmann’s winter stories — after reading Baker’s book is to feel closer to answering that perennial question: how did they do it?

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. Woolf required it to reach what she called an “exalted” state of “immunity”, Townsend Warner to write from a place of productive “indifference”, and Lehmann to enter that “detached condition” — the prerequisite of all great writing. Rural Hours reminds us that today we too often fail to afford our writers this necessity.

Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann by Harriet Baker Allen Lane £25, 384 pages

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