The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner & Rosamond Lehmann by Harriet Baker

How could the countryside change your life? This absorbing account of the ‘country lives’ of three of our finest writers offers an uplifting, unexpected answer.

Harriet Baker has written for the London Review of Books, the Paris Review, the New Statesman, & others publications. In Rural Hours, she tells the story of three very different women, all authors, each of whom moved to the countryside and were forever changed by it.

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: Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Rosamond Lehmann emerge before us as the passionate, visionary writers we know them to be.

Following long periods of creative uncertainty and private disappointment, each of Harriet’s subjects is invigorated by new landscapes, and the daily trials and small pleasures of making a home; slowly, they embark on new experiments in form, in feeling and in living that would resonate throughout the rest of their lives. In the country, each woman finds her path: 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 all: to recognize the radical potential of domestic life and rural places, and find new enchantment in the routines and rituals of each day.