Literary Lives
The Quiet Ticking of Minutes
Harriet Baker, Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann.Β Allen Lane, 384pp., Β£25 cloth.
As its name suggests, Rural Hours tells the story of three writers who were only ever intermittent ruralists. Sylvia Townsend Warner, Virginia Woolf and Rosamond Lehmann all wrote their major works in London, and biographers usually capture what these snatches of country life signified with a vague gesture: a bolthole, an escape, a peaceful foil to the real life that happened in town. But the best biographies can offer an antidote to vagueness, and Harriet Bakerβs achievement lies in the unusually vivid attention with which she sketches out what those rural hours meant to these three women.
The writers came to the countryside at very different phases in their lives. Woolfβs country house was meant firstly as a place of healing, where her mental illness could slowly subside and her sense of self emerge from the tangible details of rural life that she meticulously notates in her diaries from Asheham, her rural Sussex rental house. For Townsend Warner, riding high on the sudden success that greeted her 1926 novel Lolly Willowes, a tiny, isolated cottage provided the opportunity to carve out a new life which could accommodate a new lover, the androgynous poet Valentine Ackland, as well as her budding communist principles. Lehmann, on the other hand, was on the run: fleeing wartime London as well as a painful divorce and trying to establish a rhythm with her young family and a new, married lover, Cecil Day Lewis. Bakerβs overarching suggestion that these rural spells were a creative forge is sometimes less interesting than all the other things she shows these interludes offered them: space for unconventionality away from prying eyes, time for slow recuperation, and a stage for hard-won self-reliance.
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