Rural Hours by Harriet Baker review – the country lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann
Three writers’ pastoral years are beautifully observed in this group biography but seem little more than tangential to their work
On Easter Monday 1930, the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner was walking along a lane in East Chaldon, Dorset, when she arrived at an unappetising-looking cottage, its muddy stucco powerfully redolent – to most people, at least – of damp and disheartenment. She knew already it was for sale, and having borrowed a set of keys from a nearby pub, she went inside for a closer look. For her, if for no one else, its shabby severity was an essential part of its attraction. So what if it had no electricity or running water? If the surveyor would later describe it as undesirable? Such cons were her get-out clause; her exoneration from naughty “bourgeois cravings”. Unlike other down-from-London types, she wouldn’t pinch the best house from the locals. She would jump on the very worst house, and hope not to crash through any rotten floorboards as she did. Reader, she bought it, warts and all.