Rural Hours

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

1917. Virginia Woolf arrives at Asheham, on the Sussex Downs, immobilized by nervous exhaustion and creative block.

1930. Feeling jittery about her writing career, Sylvia Townsend Warner spots a modest workman’s cottage for sale on the Dorset coast.

1941. Rosamond Lehmann settles in a Berkshire village, seeking a lovers’ retreat, a refuge from war, and a means of becoming ‘a writer again’.

Rural Hours tells the story of three very different women, each of whom moved to the country and were forever changed by it.

We encounter them at quiet moments – pausing to look at an insect on the windowsill; jotting down a recipe; or digging for potatoes, dirt beneath their nails. Slowly, we start to see transformations unfold. Invigorated by new landscapes, and the daily trials and small pleasures of making homes, they emerge from long periods of creative uncertainty and private disappointment; they embark on new experiments in form, in feeling and in living. 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.

Graceful, fluid, and enriched by previously untouched archival material, Rural Hours is both a paean to the bravery and vision of three pioneering writers, and a passionate invitation to us all: to recognize the radical potential of domestic life and rural places, and find new enchantment in the routines and rituals of each day.

©2024 Harriet Baker (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

An outstanding piece of literary scholarship ... A biography that is far more intimate than most ... By choosing to embrace the daily routines of rural life, Baker proposes, these women found that the quality of their attention shifted ... Rural Hours is also a provocation to the present. No one could finish this book without concluding that the most important thing to any writer is solitude ... [It] reminds us that today we too often fail to afford our writers this necessity
Financial Times
Rural Hours is beautifully written, and Baker’s reading is wide and deep
Observer
Rural Hours is a page turner - lively, inspiring and beautifully crafted. It's a reminder of the value of rural living and quiet observation for the imagination. Most literary biographers struggle to get the right balance between life writing and critique, but Baker has achieved it seamlessly with this astonishingly confident debut. She has made literary criticism exciting again.
The Sunday Times
A delightful read, enhanced by quirky photographs – including several of these visionary writers with their goats
Independent
Rural Hours is Harriet Baker’s first book and it is immensely readable. It bristles with evocative detail and she invests each chapter with the narrative drive of a short story. [...] Baker is extremely good at finding significance in the ordinary and has a feel for the thinginess of domestic existence, for what teacups or the grocer’s bill can reveal. She sifts quiet periods of homemaking for meaning and honours the bulb-planting, sheet-folding, list-making and resourceful cooking that contributed to the texture of the subjects’ days and fed back into their writing.
Literary Review
Baker is an elegant and eloquent storyteller – and authoritative even while she’s in thrall, rightly, to the three women who make this book so often fascinating.
Spectator
An absorbing study of the impact of country living on Woolf, Townsend Warner & Lehmann. A meditative exploration of renewal, visionariness—interior & exterior, generative & tormenting—grievous loss, & love—cool & passionate, fragile & enduring
David Hayden
A superb portrait of the complex imprint the countryside makes on the life of the mind, this exquisite book reveals three writers, each vividly drawn in the particularities of her own surroundings, her own difficulties and joys. This book is a thoughtful exploration of rural life and creativity, drawing on deep archival roots and Harriet Baker's unique warmth and eloquence. A treasure
Doireann Ní Ghríofa, author of A Ghost in the Throat
Baker conjures the sights and sounds of mid-20th-century rural England with vivid lyricism
The Sunday Times
In this warm, perceptive, eloquent study, Harriet Baker collects some overlooked moments in these women’s lives, and with great honesty and empathy, captures what it felt like to live and write through them. Like Baker’s protagonists in their countryside boltholes I felt “socketed” by this book. I know I’ll return to it again and again
Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse and Art Monsters

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