Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner & Rosamond Lehmann
Harriet Baker (Allen Lane, £25)
I MUST 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
