Women writers who escaped to the country to get down and dirty
The Rural Hours Harriet Baker Allen Lane £25
Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury go together like a horse and carriage. The genteel area of London was home to the novelist and her avant-garde friends for several decades, and it was from the elegant Georgian squares around the British Museum that some of the most groundbreaking novels and artwork of the 20th Century poured.
Woolf herself loved nothing more than stepping out from her front door to embark on an urban adventure. One of her most famous essays is Street Haunting (1930) which thrums with excitement as she ventures out into the streets humming with shops and traffic.
How important, then, to be reminded by Harriet Baker in this enjoyable book that Woolf was a countrywoman, too. From 1912 Woolf and her sister, the artist Vanessa Bell, spent much of their time in various cottages on the South Downs. Indeed, Sussex became the equivalent of Bloomsbury-on-Sea. Every weekend an eccentric group of philosophers, novelists, journalists and artists would trundle down on the train to Lewes and then walk the five miles over fields to their destination, or hitch a ride on a farmer’s cart.
It was poor mental health that had originally brought Woolf to East Sussex, in the hope that it would aid her recovery from a recent breakdown. Gradually, suggests Baker, she managed to still her runaway mind to match the slower rural pace around her. The sharp-tongued observer who used to make tart remarks about literary rivals now made notes in her diary about the price of eggs. Walking the Downs each day, Woolf began to feel that the past was still present, standing ‘almost stagnant’ in ‘these deep hollows’.
Her final book, Between The Acts, is an account of a historical pageant held in a village ‘three hours by train from London’. It was published in 1941, a few months after she walked out from her Sussex cottage, stepped into the nearby River Ouse and died by suicide.
The second of Baker’s three country cousins is Sylvia Townsend Warner, the novelist and poet. Warner, another native Londoner, was no stranger to the country having written her best-selling classic Lolly Willowes, which tells the story of a middle-class spinster moving to an isolated village and cheerfully turning herself into a witch. In 1930 Warner bought a cottage in the village of Chaldon in Dorset. It was no one’s idea of pretty – the surveyor called it ‘a small undesirable property’ – with no electricity and only cold water. Drawn to the Communist cause, Warner refused to update the cottage on the grounds she wanted to share in the life of her neighbours.
Baker shows Warner turning away from novels and poems to produce essays on country living. There was nothing romantic about these, which dealt with the sheer toughness of life in the country, at least for those who didn’t ride with the local hunt or send their prize roses into the flower show. Occasionally, Warner lightened up for long enough to write about the disposal of household waste.
The third subject is novelist Rosamond Lehmann who had been born in the country, although she had spent much of her married life in London. During the Second World War, though, she retreated to a village in Berkshire with her two children and looked forward to visits from her married lover, the poet Cecil Day Lewis.
Despite having written three very successful novels in the 1930s, the only one she wrote during these years was her unsuccessful The Ballad And The Source. She did, though, turn to short stories, and Baker links this change to the fact living in the country without much domestic help gave Lehmann less time, and forced her to bring her talent to a sharper point.
This is Baker’s first book and she brings a fresh perspective to biographical material already known. Her argument that country dwellers experienced a ‘threshold moment’ when they moved out of the city doesn’t always hold up, but the pleasure of her lyrical prose is a fair compensation.