Rural Hours

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

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

The country life, with its dogs and flowers and sunsets, its leaky roofs and depression and boredom, has been an essential part of so many artists' lives, but is often seen as a weekend escape -- a quiet footnote to the more exciting drama of urban striving. Harriet Baker places rural hours at the center of the lives of three great writers, and shows how their works were forged in places whose quiet façades masked inner struggles every bit as tumultuous as the lives of the cities they left

Benjamin Moser, author of The Upside-Down World

[A] group biography with a difference

FT - What to Read in 2024

Amid the hubbub of Christmas, I found sanctuary in this Biographer’s Club Prize-winning account of how the country life profoundly influenced the work of three very different 20th century female authors: Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Rosamond Lehmann

Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller

A poignant portrait of three writers finding their own way

Alice Albinia

The transition from city to country life is a tale often told, but this absorbing and uplifting new iteration is of decided merit

House and Garden

Rural Hours makes clear the connection between creativity and place. in this engrossing book, nature is nurture; a place of reverie and renewal that encouraged the rich imaginations of three pioneering writers to seed and bloom. Full of fresh insights and lively prose, I couldn't put it down

Jennifer Higgie

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

Charlotte Stroud, Financial Times

Baker conjures the sights and sounds of mid-20th-century rural England with vivid lyricism

The Sunday Times

Rural Hours is beautifully written, and Baker’s reading is wide and deep

Observer

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

A delightful read, enhanced by quirky photographs – including several of these visionary writers with their goats

Independent

Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury go together like a horse and carriage … How important, then, to be reminded by Harriet Baker in this enjoyable book that Woolf was a countrywoman, too … Baker’s first book brings a fresh perspective to biographical material

Kathryn Hughes, Daily Mail

Fluid, engaging ... Rural Hours brings the much-loved country places of all three writers vividly back to life ... Baker really excels in capturing that elusive sense of place

Vanessa Curtis, Times Literary Supplement

The best thing a summer can be is languid and, for that reason, I’m sure I’ll be returning to Harriet Baker’s Rural Hours, which pays a considered, domestic kind of attention to the "fallow periods" of Sylvia Townsend Warner, Rosamond Lehmann and Virginia Woolf’s lives

Jo Hamya, Observer 'Summer Reads'

A fascinating look at the impact of country home-making on the lives and work of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann. It's beautifully written, gorgeously produced, absorbing and full of insight

Sarah Waters, Guardian

Exploring what she calls "threshold moment[s]", Baker examines quiet periods in the lives of three great literary figures, and how those years of rural solitude in which seemingly little happened led to groundbreaking experimental leaps in their fiction. A triumph of biographical writing and literary scholarship

Carl Wilkinson, Financial Times

A fascinating investigation into the rural lives of Virginia Woolf, Rosamond Lehman and Sylvia Townsend Warner and the way their choices of where to lead their country lives shaped and influenced their work

William Boyd, TLS

A near-mystical account of rural domesticity in wartime England

Frances Wilson, TLS

A splendidly evocative and illuminating account ... Baker has a writer’s eye for detail, a scholar’s discernment and an enthusiast’s verve

Patricia Craig, Dublin Review of Books

Rural Hours is an immaculately researched group biography, replete with intriguing details about each woman’s attitude to pastoral living

Katie Rosseinsky, Independent, Book of the Year

A charming portrait of three beloved 20th-century female writers … Teeming with memorable anecdotes, Rural Hours is a book that focuses admirably on the small and the everyday

Books of the Year – The Times

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.

Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Sunday Times

Amid the hubbub of Christmas, I found sanctuary in this Biographer’s Club Prize-winning account of how the country life profoundly influenced the work of three very different 20th century female authors: Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Rosamond Lehmann

Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller