How country living changed the lives of three remarkable women writers

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. Ladies Bedstraw, Roundheaded Rampion, Thyme, Marjoram.

This isn’t what we expect from Virginia Woolf, known for her caustic investigations of friends and filigree portraits of her own inner life. But in 1917, after three years of mental illness, she moved to Asheham in Sussex and began a slow but dogged recovery that took the form of these daily walks and list-filled diary entries, which rarely contain the word ‘I’. Harriet Baker argues convincingly in her new book that the Asheham diaries marked the beginning of a new direction for Woolf as a writer, leading first to experimental tales such as ‘Kew Gardens’ and then to her most innovative modernist fiction.

Rural Hours tells the stories of three interwar women writers – Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann – during separate periods of transition from London to the country. It wasn’t a coincidence that Woolf’s new writing style began at Asheham. She was closer to nature than she’d ever been, and the effect was a new, slow attentiveness. Baker argues that the country had a similar effect on all three women. ‘Country living – choosing to embrace the daily routines of rural life – changed your perspective, these women discovered. It allowed for new experiments in form and in feeling.’

There are larger questions here about what the countryside was and is that don’t get answered in what is a solely biographical study. Alexandra Harris’s epochal Romantic Moderns (2010) made a larger intervention in thinking through the dialectic between the city and the countryside in modernism that Baker might have gained from engaging with more specifically – slow attentiveness itself a value that could be interrogated; is this a form of exploiting the countryside, and aren’t there ways in which rural nature is more sensually tumultuous and metamorphic, while cities are stifling and paralysed?

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s writing itself inspired her move to the country, as much as the countryside shaped her later writing. The spinster heroine of her 1926 Lolly Willowes moves to the Chilterns and becomes a witch – a nicely playful version of rural renewal. Four years later, Warner bought a house she named ‘Miss Green’ in a chalk valley in Dorset. It was tiny and there was no running water or electricity, but she relished the simplicity.

In need of a steward, she installed Valentine Ackland, a willowy young poet with connections to the village. After a period of shared homemaking, the two women began a love affair that would continue, often tortuously, until Ackland’s death in 1969. ‘From the first morning when Valentine in silk dressing-gown and green slippers laid and lit the fire, our parts were established, and we never contested them.’ After a sociable, rather strung-out existence in London, Warner found new forms of peace and creativity in isolation with her lover. They even installed a partition in the sitting room so that one person could escape while the other answered the door.

Rosamond Lehmann was 41 when she moved in 1942 into a substantial house in the Berkshire village of Aldworth, not far from the house she’d shared with her estranged husband. She brought along her 13-year-old son, eight-year-old daughter and her lover, the poet Cecil Day Lewis, when he wasn’t doing war work or visiting his wife. She hadn’t published a novel for six years and hoped the move might make her ‘perhaps even a better person, and a writer again’.

It was here that she wrote the three wartime stories that her friend Elizabeth Bowen described as ‘the loveliest’ of all her work. They are wintry tales of a single mother and her children in a countryside that has as much agency as the characters, especially in ‘When the Waters Came’, where the daughter almost drowns in the stream that floods the village when the frost thaws. Lehmann powerfully portrays the ways that a mother can come in and out of focus for her children. The mother’s terror in ‘When the Waters Came’ stresses both the hyper-vigilance required of mothers and the need to protect children from this. These are wartime stories, written when maternal terror was anxiously sharpened.

I am glad to have revisited these odd, compelling stories. Much of Baker’s material is familiar; but the particular texts she centres on gain hugely from this new lens. The larger question – of what it means to move from the city to the country and to shift to a quieter pace – has particular resonance in the wake of the pandemic. I myself am one of many who moved out of London in lockdown. It changed my life, as moves are wont to do. But while we observed the hawthorns, and changed the shape of our sentences in response, the nation began a process of implosion that we continue to witness. Do we bear responsibility for it?

Politics are largely absent from Baker’s book. Warner joined the Communist party in 1935 but Baker doesn’t explore this in detail, being more interested in private forms of politics – which seem chiefly to involve Warner doing chores without help from servants. In the final chapters we witness the effects of war on Woolf’s and Warner’s rural scenes and them giving up their isolation for a more engaged form of community. But I’d have liked to have had a larger sense of the culture and politics of all the book’s moments, and to have seen these beating down on the tiny patches of England in question, and opening up larger questions about the role of place in shaping a life and of people in shaping place. But Baker is an elegant and eloquent storyteller – and authoritative even while she’s in thrall, rightly, to the three women who make this book so often fascinating.