In Rural Hours, Harriet Baker reveals the perceptive, eloquent stories of three very different diverse women, each of whom moved to the countryside and was forever changed by it. We encounter them at quite moments – pausing to look at an insect on the windowsill; jotting down a recipe; or digging for potatoes, dirt beneath their nails. Slowly but surely, we start to see transformations unfold: Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Rosamond Lehman emerge before us as the passionate, visionary writers we know them to be.

Following long periods of creative uncertainty and prorate disappointment, each of Baker’s subjects is invigorated by new landscapes, and the daily trials  and small pleasures of making a home; slowly, they embark on new experiments in form, in feeling and in living that would resonate throughout the rest of their lives. In the country, each woman finds her path: to convalescence and recovery; to sexual and political awakening, and, above all, to personal freedom and creative flourishing.

Baker vividly recreates those overlooked episodes, revealing how  “rural hours” defined the lives of three pioneering writers. In the end,  she shows, their example is an invitation to us all to recognize the radical and creative potential of rural places, and find new enchantment in the rituals of each day.

Their rural hours were quite, contemplative, filled with a “small litany of happenings”.

Bakers reveals what she calls “threshold moments”, when all three writers were on the cusp of new experiments in fiction, and highlights small moments, those day when “nothing strange or exalted happened “ to these three writers, the ones that slipping through previous sieves, are of great significance.

Beginning in 1917, when Virginia Woolf arrives at Ashram House in the Sussex Downs of Southern England to convalesce after a bout of depression, the book then takes us to Dorset in 1930. Here, the author and musicologist Sylvia Townsend Warner has just bought the most “unattractive” cottage she could find, where she retreats into private life with her lover, the poet Valentine Ackland. We meet the novelist Rosamond Lehmann in 1941,  recently divorced  and beginning a new life at Diamond Cottage in Berkshire. By the time we leave her, she is alone again – after a failed love affair with the poet Cecil Day Lewis – “Waving a flame” beneath frozen pipes during the last bitterly cold winter of the Second World war. 

Their rural hours were quiet, contemplative, filled with “a small litany of happenings” in the kitchen, in the garden, or on country walks. Woolf kept her Ashram diary, entries compressed into tight paragraphs like small seeds, energy coiled for later use.

Townsend Warner put her left-wing politics into practice and lived “self-sufficiently”, eschewing modern plumbing, growing her own vegetables and cooking rabbits shot expertly by the ver capable Ackland. Lehmann proved that a writer must live in what she called a “ detached condition”. It was at Diamond Cottage that she wrote arguably her greatest work – Henry Green thought it the best short fiction since Chekhov “ A Dream of Winter”.

Baker proposes, how these women found that the quality of their attention shifted by choosing to embrace the daily routines of rural life, becoming more local, magnified, concerned  with “ small deviations, the differences in sameness”. Walking the Sussex Downs each day, Woolf began to feel that the past was still present, standing “ almost stagnant” in “the deep hollows “. All three women discovered an “alternative” human history, one which did not take place on the battlefields in France but in small English villages. The woman from the grocer’s shop in Townsend Warner’s village who became unnervingly good at throwing grenades.

Rural House is a provocation to the present when Woolf reached what she called an “exalted” state of immunity, Townsend Warner to write from a place of productive “ indifference” and Lehmann to enter that “detached condition”.

Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Syvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann by Harriet Baker, Allen Lane £25, 384 pages.