In 1918, the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner purchased a set of bedsheets with her first wages. Twelve years later she took them with her when moving from London to Dorset, where she slept beneath them, and made love upon them, with her partner, Valentine (née Mary) Ackland. It was a bucolic ecstasy, “rollicking in bed” and “rollicking on bed (nice distinction)”. The sheets are of talismanic importance in Harriet Baker’s Rural Hours, a book built from furniture, plants and mended linen, from candlesticks and recipes and shopping lists. J Alfred Prufrock measured out his life in coffee spoons. Baker’s measuring tools are chintz and Chippendale.
Rural Hours is about periods of countryside domesticity in the lives of three novelists, Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), Warner (1893–1978) and Rosamond Lehmann (1901–90). Those dates are not to be found in its curiously structured pages, which divide into just five chapters. Each woman is given a long essay apiece, covering a brief and specific period of country living. Lehmann then disappears for an account of Woolf and Warner in the Second World War, and the book concludes with a nine-page epilogue.
Baker starts with Woolf who, in 1912, after three years of mental illness, took a house at Asheham in Sussex and lived there with her husband until 1919. “It would be easy to skip over the [Asheham] years,” Baker writes. “I would like to reclaim this period.” It’s hardly unknown territory: Hermione Lee devotes 110 pages to it in her biography of Woolf. But Baker has at her disposal, and uses as her compass, the “Asheham Diary”, only recently published in full. The very act of noticing and recording the countryside (“the dahlia in the front bed came out”) was part of Woolf’s recovery and maturing. “Eating our own broad beans,” she observed in her diary, in 1918. “Delicious.”
Warner moved to Dorset in 1930, finding a house she named “Miss Green”, after its previous owner. She was following the example of her acclaimed first novel, Lolly Willowes (1926), about a spinster who moves to the country and takes up witchcraft. As at Asheham, there was no running water and no electricity, but there was Valentine, a willowy and androgynous poet, who became the love of Warner’s life. Rural Hours concentrates on the seven or so years the couple spent at Miss Green, during which the relationship was in its most ecstatic bloom. Making a country home together was an act of sexual rebellion and a political statement: both women joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1935. Disdaining luxury, Warner threw herself wholeheartedly into a life of writing, cooking, gardening, making and making do. She even planned a recipe book, of eloquent and thrifty invention, which is witchcraft of a kind. “Broad beans, unjacketed,” she wrote in her diary, in 1932. “The sauce of thick cream.”
And so to Lehmann, who in 1942, children in tow, decamped to the village of Aldworth in Berkshire. She spent four years there, confiding to Laurie Lee the vicissitudes of her doomed affair with the poet Cecil Day Lewis, who left his wife each weekend for a tryst with Lehmann; her own marriage, to the artist Wogan Philipps, had collapsed. She used her time in Aldworth to depoliticise; her husband, like Warner, had travelled to Spain during the Civil War but, unlike Warner, Lehmann had grown tired of conventions and conferences, which seemed increasingly futile as the bombs fell. Baker shows how writers concerned with the modern and the new anchored themselves to the traditions that rural life seemed to demand. But the countryside proved volatile, rent by searchlights and barbed wire, even as the dahlias flowered once again. The neighbours watched Lehmann, in red trousers and alpaca sweater, sowing the broad beans.
The countryside proved volatile, rent by searchlights and barbed wire, even as the dahlias flowered once again
These writers produced their greatest work beyond the geographical and chronological bounds of Rural Hours. At Asheham, Woolf wrote her first—and weakest—books, The Voyage Out and (bits of) Night and Day. At Miss Green, Warner mainly churned out articles on left-wing politics and country living. Baker’s literary criticism is limited to accounts of Woolf’s last, posthumously published novel, Between the Acts; to Warner’s masterpiece, The Corner That Held Them (a literary frieze, published in 1948, of life in a Fenland convent across the 14th century); and to the short stories that Lehmann worked on during the war. But she argues, I think convincingly, that these pivotal periods in the country retrained the novelists’ eyes and ears to a different pace, giving them different ways of looking and experiencing that, refined in ostensibly minor writing, were a vital foundation for what came later.
The corner that holds Rural Hours, and occasionally traps it, is its overarching concept. That the sections are not better braided bespeaks structural uncertainty. Lehmann certainly knew the other two women, but it stretches a point to describe Woolf and Warner as “friends”; they seem to have met just twice, and if Baker knows different, she does not say so. “She is so charming,” wrote Warner of Woolf in 1925, despite reservations about Mrs Dalloway. “She has some merit,” wrote Woolf of Warner. A year later, they met again, soon after the publication of Lolly Willowes. Woolf asked Warner how she knew so much about witches. “Because I am one,” came the reply.
In the current vogue for group biography, Woolf tends to appear as the mashed potato, making commercially palatable whatever green-vegetable figures are being written about on the sly. But how many “unstoried episodes” (Baker’s phrase) have evaded the ziggurat of Woolf scholarship? Even Warner and Lehmann have had distinguished biographers of their own—Claire Harman on the former, Selina Hastings on the latter—and in Warner’s case there are published diaries and four volumes of correspondence; her glorious letters cast even Woolf’s into the shade. For long stretches, Baker can do little but paraphrase and repackage. (The section on Lehmann, by contrast, contains a great deal of new material.)
The choice of three well-chronicled lives may be part of Baker’s fascinating and ambitious gameplan. This is an attempt to write the underside of the biographical rug, turning over the tapestry to examine the knots. Biographers usually do strange things to time; they write “Eliot went to Missouri” or “Picasso moved in the spring” and a week collapses into a sentence, paying no heed to the finding of the correct seat in the carriage, the nothingy days spent at sea, the search for food, sustenance, amusement during tedium—the time spent doing very little. Lives can seem short and full when crammed between hardcovers. Hours are long and often empty.
Baker turns on its head the biographical scale, zooming in rather than out, building a pointilliste life from dots of almost-nothing-at-all, in the knowledge that the bigger picture, the important days, the literary achievement, are charted elsewhere. Rural Hours stakes its territory not only in the chalk hills of Sussex, Dorset and Berkshire, but in the margins of the cradle-to-grave books. Readers interested in Ackland’s infidelity and Warner’s unrepentant Stalinism; in the scandal of Lehmann’s first novels and her turn to spiritualism after the death of her daughter; or simply in Mrs Dalloway, The Waves or To the Lighthouse will be disappointed. Instead: “In Lewes [Virginia] bought a new pair of boots and Leonard had his hair cut.” Out of context, the quotation risks bathos, but amid Baker’s rhythm and scope it makes sense, the ostensible mundanities accruing at compound interest. Woolf wrote of the “marriage of granite and rainbow” in biography, the melding of stony fact with iridescent fantasy. Baker puts the granite under a magnifying glass to catch the sparkle of the quartz. This approach falters only with Lehmann, who left few of the diaries, lists, inventories and recipes that are put to good use elsewhere.
Baker is attentive to ironies and nuances: the romanticisation, even fetishising, of a rural life maintained by staff, the playing-at-countryside by those who have London places or annuities from inherited investments, even as they dismissed creature comforts as bourgeois. But these sweet especial rural scenes need the odd cowpat, perhaps, a dose of Cold Comfort Farm and its skewering of the so-called Loam and Lovechild novels by writers such as Mary Webb. Nothing of those here, which would have been a useful temper: ruralness isn’t always radical. Perhaps, though, there is one hidden joke. Baker describes Warner, having embarked on the affair with Ackland, “educating herself in country matters”. Hamlet knew a good pun when he saw one.
These sweet especial rural scenes need the odd cowpat—perhaps a dose of Cold Comfort Farm
Baker can write beautifully, allowing a recounting of minutiae to build into a prose-style of incantatory simplicity. But sometimes she writes “beautifully”. At Asheham, she says, Woolf “found sanctity, a state of being which grew out of her feeling for the landscape, with its patina of human history patchworked over the wide, wave-like downs”. But doesn’t she mean “sanctuary”? And can a patina be patchworked over a wave? Rural Hours needed another proofread. The text is full of repetition, a near-identical point about Asheham’s influence appearing four times between pages 76 and 79, and Baker elides Woolf’s early London homes (the “communal household” she describes was at Fitzroy, not Brunswick, Square). The names of Ethel Smyth, Desmond MacCarthy and Saxon Sydney-Turner, major players in Bloomsbury, are all misspelled, and the phrasing drops a number of stitches (“make no bones” doesn’t mean “make no fuss”). It is not “monks” who sing together during a scene in The Corner That Held Them but a lay-clerk, a leper and his chaplain, and, in Baker’s opening paragraph, about an expedition Warner made to Great Wakering in Essex, she cherry-picks lyrical details (a mist, a sailing boat) from an account of a separate trip, to Southminster, nearly 20 miles away. In a book about the noting and noticing of rural terrain, about careful attention to small details, this matters. Woolf, she says, “was concerned with accuracy”.
The house at Asheham is no more; a “surly” owner, suspicious beneath security cameras, rebuffed Baker’s attempt to visit Lehmann’s Berkshire retreat; and, in 1944, Miss Green was bombed to rubble. By then Warner had moved with Ackland to another Dorset house, at Frome Vauchurch. “We have eleven rabbits and six rows of peas, and five rows of broad beans.” She sowed and sewed. In 1957, her enduring bedlinen, bought in the last year of the First World War, was darned and mended, made good for another decade; in 1969, it was used for Ackland’s deathbed. “Needlework,” Baker writes, “like a diary, is continuous, making sense of itself, moving over breaks and patches. And like a diary, it can document a life.”
With needlework a running theme of her book (a tapestry lies at the heart of The Corner That Held Them), it is odd that she omits Warner’s major collection of embroidered pictures by John Craske. She misses, too, a moment in which self and thread become one. In 1949, Valentine Ackland fell passionately in love with an American woman and Sylvia, in anguish, moved to a local hotel, so that Ackland could pursue the affair. Before her departure, she unpicked her initials from the monogrammed linen. So much speaks in that tiny, epic gesture, a personality revealed in the act of its own obliteration. Such a detail, as Rural Hours proves, can be the stuff of which lives are made, and unmade: the linen, the embroidery, the tormented and methodical unstitching.
