Getting Away - DRB

Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann, by Harriet Baker, Allen Lane, 384 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0241540510

‘This place is exquisite,’ Sylvia Townsend Warner exclaimed in a letter to David Garnett in June 1932. The place was East Chaldon in Dorset, and ‘the fields, hay-cutting has only just begun, are so full of flowers that in the evening they smell exactly like the breath of cows’. And a bit later, ‘I have never lived with trees before.’

At the same time, Virginia Woolf at Monk’s House, Rodmell in Sussex, was playing bowls with visitors from London, wearing an old felt hat on her head and long pointed canvas shoes, putting on a show of bonhomie in the intervals of brooding about the state of the world. And Rosamond Lehmann, at Ipsden in Oxfordshire, was entertaining guests at the Queen Anne manor house she shared with her then husband Wogan Philipps, and complaining about the Women’s Institute meetings she felt obliged to attend (‘Damn and hell … I hate it so’). It would be another ten years before she was able to report to a friend, ‘I’m in my cottage at last.’

The country retreat as a source of well-being, inspiration or recuperation is a thread running through Harriet Baker’s energetic and engrossing account of three extremely urbane women writers and their separate experiments in rural living. Each had her own version of pastoral, whether in the tradition of Englishness embodied in ditches and haystacks and grazing cows, in blackberry picking and ploughing and hoeing and the village green, or at odds with it (or both). A craving for fresh country air, as well, sometimes arose in the face of urban over-stimulation – and here the theme of escape enters in. Of Harriet Baker’s literary trio, the one most in need of nature’s restorative properties was Virginia Woolf; and in 1915, in the aftermath of her well-documented nervous breakdown, we find her installed at Asheham, an exquisite, secluded house in a hollow in the Sussex Downs (like Pointz Hall in Between the Acts), leased by Virginia and her sister Vanessa Bell between 1912 and 1919. (For all their closeness, the two rarely stayed in it together; Vanessa had her own house and entourage at nearby Charleston.) Here, with a resident nurse to monitor her medical condition, and with regular visits from her husband, Leonard Woolf, to look forward to, Virginia adapted pretty swiftly to rural routines. She would sit in the garden at Asheham reading Othello, or walk on the Downs observing nature ‘with a botanist’s eye’: flora and fauna, birds taking flight, the activities of grasshoppers and beetles. She was particularly impressed by a large green caterpillar with purple spots on its head. All Woolf’s impressions of day-to-day country living went into her Asheham diary; mushrooms, rain storms, servants picking fruit in the apple orchard, shopping in Lewes – and refusing to demean herself by standing in a queue at the butcher’s. An inbred hauteur kept her apart from the local hoi polloi. She never lacked for company of her own kind though. It has often been pointed out that Asheham, and later Monk’s House at Rodmell, functioned as a kind of Bloomsbury-in-the-wold, with a large amount of literary and artistic toing-and-froing between London and Sussex.

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