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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
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
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 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
A delightful read, enhanced by quirky photographs – including several of these visionary writers with their goats ― Independent
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
Author: Harriet Baker
Hardcover Published 19 August 2024 384 Pages