Introducing Readers on Writers – the series where our shadow judging panel interview the shortlisted authors for the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award.
In this interview, shadow judge Jenn Li (@bookmarkonthewall) speaks to Harriet Baker (@harrietrjbaker) about her shortlisted non-fiction book Rural Hours published by Allen Lane. Their conversation offers a window into Harriet’s research, retracing Lehmann’s steps over the Downs, spending time with the women written about and locating quietly private periods of transformation in the author’s otherwise well-documented lives.
1. Please tell us a bit about your book, Rural Hours, and why you decided to focus on the country lives of these three 20th-century novelists?
Rural Hours is a group biography of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann, each of whom moved to the country and was changed by it. The book meets Woolf at Asheham in Sussex in 1917, during the last phase of her recovery from illness; Warner in Dorset in 1930, shortly after she had abandoned her career and her London flat to live with a woman; and Lehmann in Berkshire in 1941, following the collapse of her second marriage.
Each felt her writing career to be in the doldrums. Woolf’s difficult first novel, The Voyage Out, had come out while she was ill, while for Warner and Lehmann, the experience of literary success—Warner with Lolly Willowes and Lehmann with The Weather in the Streets—was followed by creative uncertainty and self-doubt. The book stays with each writer for a period of roughly two years each. During that time, we witness the ways in which country living invigorated them, bringing about new domestic arrangements, relationships, and experiments with new literary forms.
We often think of Woolf as a city writer and dweller. But on reading her small ‘Asheham diary’, documenting the Sussex summers of 1917-18, I encountered her anew, as a walker, nature writer, and someone interested in local history, gardening, and domestic life. The diary is written in an extraordinarily compressed style which belies its fullness, and resembles, to my eyes, a literary experiment in and of itself. I began to understand Woolf’s brief time at Asheham as incredibly important; it was a threshold moment, marking her passage from illness to health, and from her first writerly attempts to the radical style which characterised her novels of the 1920s. It seemed there was a direct link between her counting butterflies during her walks on the Downs, to the teeming insect life of experimental stories such as ‘Kew Gardens’.
I began to look for other examples of such transformation. I found Warner wading in the River Frome to the delight of her lover, the poet Valentine Ackland, and trying out new recipes, politics and essays; and Lehmann digging potatoes in her city clothes, attempting to feed her two children during wartime, whilst trying her hand at short stories. For all three, these moments represent quiet, private interludes in otherwise well-documented lives, and yet they were living more adventurously, resourcefully, and experimentally than before. In making homes, falling in love, and trying out different kinds of writing, they were finding both personal and creative renewal. That became my story.
2. Can you share the research you conducted to write this book? Did you visit the respective homes and places where these writers presided to get a feel of each writers’ rural hours?
A lot of archival work, from New York to rural Dorset. The book takes a revisionary feminist approach to literary archives to argue for the value of even the most ephemeral texts, including diaries, recipe books, gardening notebooks, inventories, and lists. For example, a laundry list tucked into Woolf’s diary, or Warner’s painstaking inventory of her cottage, became the means through which I reconstructed their rural hours, and told their stories. The haptic qualities of Warner’s enamel jugs, her quilts, crockery and cutlery were brought vividly to life, but also led me to ask the question, What kind of person makes such a list? It was an emotional inventory, of sorts. She, like Woolf, was poised between lives, and I could sense her uncertainty and excitement trembling between the lines.
Neither Asheham nor Miss Green, where Warner lived, still exist, but both writers documented their daily walks in their diaries, and I spent whole days retracing their steps over the Downs and along coastal paths. Lehmann’s Berkshire cottage still stands, but it’s been poshed up and I wasn’t allowed in. Instead, I looked for her in the village, peering into the Post Office where she bought supplies, or the pub where she went to drink with her lover, the poet Cecil Day Lewis. She described wartime village life magnificently in her short stories (especially ‘Wonderful Holidays’, published in The Gypsy’s Baby in 1946), and there are traces still.
As the book developed, I discovered that writing biography can be creative. For me, research can be both real and sort of imaginary. Once I had been in the archives and assembled my facts, I looked for these women, finding them sifting laundry, cooking, writing, walking, with dirt beneath their nails. Creating a sense of atmosphere in the book, allowing readers into their rooms, to read their shopping lists and rummage through their cupboards, was as important to me as having my facts straight.
3. There is a real sense of intimacy in the way in which you bring to life the day to day routine of country living that really enables the reader to vividly imagine Virginia, Sylvia and Rosamund settling into their idyllic lives in the countryside. What are the key themes you wanted to explore when spending time with these women, and what do you want readers to take away from their lives?
When I began the book, I thought I would address bigger themes, answer bigger questions. These women’s rural hours were bookended by war. And yet as I spent time with them, I realised their attention was directed elsewhere, and what they were experiencing was something more inward. They were responding to new places, to the uncertainties of new relationships, and all while the world was thrumming. Most interestingly, none of the three was engaged in writing a big novel. Instead, they were directing their creative energies into cooking and sewing curtains, and into different kinds of writing, from kitchen essays and nature diaries to inventories and notes for stories. And so one of the biggest themes in the book became the nature of creativity itself. I wanted to show that the fallow periods in a writer’s life might, in fact, be the most quietly generative of all.
4. As well as being a group biography, this book feels like a love letter to nature and rural living. What is it that fascinates you about the natural world and the countryside?
I grew up in a small village in Leicestershire, but have mostly lived in cities since. I experience a kind of Woolfian longing: when I’m in the city, I feel I need space and silence, and when I’m in the country, I dream of wet winter streets. This will go on!
5. Lastly, do you have any advice for any aspiring young writers?
Don’t rush. There is no hurry to write your first book in your twenties, or publish by the time you’re 30. Research is deep, and ideas evolve in mysterious ways. Sit with them, walk with them, carry them with you in your day-to-day. When I was writing Rural Hours I missed a manuscript deadline. I could have raced to meet it, but I decided to spend longer with the women in the book, with their lives and writing. As a result, the book was published a whole year later. But I didn’t mind. The manuscript ripened and matured and was the better for it. By then, it had taken on a life of its own and I let it guide me.