Writers’ lives of ‘swallows, rooks and thistledown’
Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner & Rosamond Lehmann
Townsend Warner furnished her ugly cottage “against the grated carrot, folk-pottery way of life”
Harriet Baker (Allen Lane, £25)
IMUST go and plant lettuces. What a spring, what a spring,’ wrote novelist Rosamond Lehmann to a friend in April 1945, as if her life’s primary urgency, as the Second World War staggered exhaustedly to its close, was the demands of her garden. In Rural Hours, Harriet Baker traces a relationship between writers and their surrounds, and assesses the impact of rural domesticity, including the exigencies of wartime housekeeping, on Lehmann, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Virginia Woolf, a loosely connected trio.
The relationship between environment and imagination is one the women themselves would have recognised: years later, Townsend Warner explained that ‘an old teapot, used daily, can tell me more of my past than anything I recorded of it’. Her subjects, the author comments, ‘were invigorated by place, and the daily trials and small pleasures of making homes’, although for each their country lives evolved unexpectedly, without forewarning or any deliberate plan.
Woolf, who was recovering from mental illness, described country life at Asheham House, in Beddingham, East Sussex, as ‘very pleasant’: ‘swallows, rooks, thistledown, men thatching ricks’. Like Townsend Warner, Woolf sharpened forensic observational skills on her rural surroundings, in Miss Baker’s account ‘practising a convalescent quality of attention, through which she reached an understanding of the natural world’. The years she spent there, between 1912 and 1919, provided solace and recovery, as, in different ways, their country existences did for both Townsend Warner and Lehmann.
For all three women, the periods examined in this book were relatively fallow in terms of their written output; in Lehmann’s case, despite Miss Baker’s verdict that ‘the success of her writing was tied up with the success of Diamond Cottage’, any connection between her writing and her lived experience in a small Berkshire cottage, where the novelist described herself as an ‘exhausted prisoner’ to domestic drudgery, feels slender.
The diaries and letters of Woolf and Townsend Warner recall aspects of country life a century ago in beautiful and beguiling detail, and Miss Baker’s descriptions of the two womens’ lives— Woolf in the care of her husband, Leonard, Townsend Warner rejecting a longstanding affair with a married man many years her senior for a partnership with the younger female poet Valentine Ackland that lasted until Ackland’s death in 1969—are consistently absorbing. Both embraced country living on their own terms, Townsend Warner, for example, determined to furnish her small, ugly cottage in a manner that ‘declared against the grated carrot, folkpottery way of life’. Equally absorbing is Miss Baker’s commentary on the women’s writing. ‘This period was one of her most creative and experimental,’ she states of Townsend Warner’s life in Dorset in the 1930s and she argues her case vigorously and persuasively.
It is hard not to conclude that she overstates connections between her subjects’ rural lives and their subsequent output, and Lehmann certainly fits her hypothesis less convincingly than Woolf or Townsend Warner, but there is much in which to delight, particularly for Woolf’s legions of admirers. Matthew Dennison