I picked up this lovely book a few weeks ago when I went to the ‘Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors’ exhibition at the glorious Garden Museum, which is a genuine hidden gem in London that I actually don’t want more people to know about because I love how peaceful it is. It’s in a church just off Lambeth Bridge, at the back of Lambeth Palace, and aside from being beautiful and fascinating, with a tower from which you can see fabulous river views of London, it also has the most wonderful café that is in a secluded garden courtyard filled with green-tinged dappled light from the trees overhead. I love going there with a book and getting a coffee and one of their delicious chocolate chip cookies and whiling away an afternoon as if I were in the middle of the countryside, while the beating heart of London obliviously pulses just on the other side of the wall.

Having just come back from a sweltering New York, I was in the mood to read about how some of my favourite city-dwelling novelists of the mid twentieth century experienced life in the countryside when they escaped for various reasons from city life, and so I finally got around to reading Rural Hours. It argues that for Woolf, Townsend Warner and Lehmann, moving to the country at pivotal times in their lives enabled them to access new rhythms and perspectives that permanently altered their work and their relationship with it. The first section explores how Virginia Woolf’s first move to the country, to a now demolished house, Asheham, in 1912, revitalised her and gave her fresh inspiration and perspective after her first major breakdown and the writing of her largely unsuccessful first two novels. She then goes on to look at Sylvia Townsend Warner’s purchase of the cottage Miss Green in Dorset, and how this gave her the freedom to pursue a different life, though she had already written her only real hit, Lolly Willowes, when she moved there. Finally, Rosamund Lehmann came to the country to escape the war and a failing marriage. Facing a crisis in her life, the countryside offered her a fresh start at a time when everything else seemed to be falling apart around her.

The flaw of the book, as Rachel Cooke points out in her slightly acerbic review in The Guardian, is that Baker rather over-eggs her thesis that moving to the country was a profound influence on these women as writers, and that it fundamentally changed them and their work. I agree with Cooke’s view that the book is unsuccessful in proving this, and at times I felt that Baker was flogging a dead horse in keep circling back to this argument. All of the women moved to the countryside for very different reasons, at very different times in their lives, and none of their writing can be linked with any real meaning to the time they spent in these locations at all. In my view, what the book really shows is what the experience of living in the country compared to the city can do to someone’s state of mind, habits, relationship with themselves and with others. It was fascinating to read about the day-to-day routines of countryside living, with its pleasures and its pitfalls - fruit picking, mushroom hunting, long lazy summer days in the garden and cosy winter evenings by the fire, alongside collapsing ceilings, rising damp, freezing bedrooms and cultural isolation. As a social history of middle class people living in the countryside in the middle years of the twentieth century, as well as a biographical sketch of some unexplored periods of time in three wonderful writers’ lives, it’s a magical book. As a study of how living in the country affected these women as writers, it’s much less successful. This is largely because living in the country was only ever a part-time occupation for these women - all of them had their countryside cottages as their second homes, and were back and forth to London quite regularly on the train. In fact, the locations of their homes were chosen precisely because they could quickly get back to London - and I do wish that Baker had looked at this more in the book, as I think the relationship someone has with the countryside when they still have one foot in the city is profoundly different to a full time resident.

As someone who lives in the city but often fantasises about living in the country, I did find myself enchanted by Baker’s descriptions of country life, romanticised somewhat by the fact that all of these women had servants or women who ‘did’ for them, which undoubtedly makes life far easier wherever you are. However, in the back of my mind I had my grandmother’s voice, who grew up in Dorset, not far from where Sylvia Townsend Warner lived, and whose poverty-stricken upbringing in a cottage that her parents could not afford to fit out with the ‘mod cons’ Woolf, Townsend Warner and Lehmann were quick to do before they moved in was very far from the rural idyll presented here. The lack of engagement with the reality of the middle class second home experience of the country in this book was a missed opportunity, I think, and represents the ongoing commodification of the countryside by city dwellers, keen to have their cake and eat it while those who live there year round are left with only the crumbs. It’s all very well to have a rural retreat as a creative escape, but at what cost to the rural communities who service this luxury for those of us who live elsewhere? I think there’s also something interesting to be explored in the experience of living between two places, what we get from both the energy of the city and the repose of the countryside. I would perhaps argue that these women’s creative energy was bolstered by the variety they had access to, rather than just their experiences in the country. Nonetheless, despite my misgivings, it was still a very lovely read, and one I learned much from. A lovely read in these dying days of summer, when the open spaces of the countryside call to us all.