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.
In fact, all three of the writers under consideration drew boundaries between themselves and their respective village employees and acquaintances. During significant parts of their lives they were in the country, but not exactly of it. Even Sylvia Townsend Warner, the least class-conscious of the three, ruled out excessive socialising with the dour, well-meaning or peculiar inhabitants of East Chaldon in Dorset. Here, on one occasion, a neighbour brought her a gift of an injured owl, with the recommendation that she should have the creature stuffed and keep it as an ornament. She accepted the gift, but treated the owl and released it back into the wild. It’s a tiny instance of the way in which she found herself slightly at odds with country ideas and attitudes. However, she absorbed a good deal of the spirit of country places, and the benefit to her life and work was considerable. ‘It was the established country courtesy, the invitation to take root,’ thinks a character in one of her novels; and, in East Chaldon, she began to put down roots, without relinquishing her urban sensibility and complexity of outlook. Like the handsome young man in her Cat’s Cradle Book of 1960, Warner revelled in ownership – ‘ownership of house, and trees, and cats, and privacy, and solitude’ (the last was soon to become a solitude-à-deux).
Warner was thirty-six, about to withdraw from a long-standing relationship with a married music teacher and father of four, and already an acclaimed author, when she paid £90 for a labourer’s cottage in an out-of-the-way Dorset village. She bought the ‘small undesirable property’ against the advice of her surveyor, who enumerated for his client the property’s many defects, including an absence of electricity or running water. But she went ahead, pooh-poohing such pusillanimous advice. Quirky and independent in her nature as well as in her fiction, she saw how the questionable move could be made to work, and brought it off. She already knew the lie of the land through her friendship with the allegorical novelist and short-story writer TF Powys (author, among other things, of Mr Weston’s Good Wine, with its title borrowed from Jane Austin’s Emma), who presided over what Harriet Baker calls ‘a small bohemian community’ which had somehow gravitated towards the bleak Dorset district of East Chaldon.
The cottage, christened ‘Miss Green’ after its previous occupant (an elderly spinster lady), provided sufficient challenges to send an ordinary person scurrying back to London, but Warner persevered. She was not going to be got the better of by a roof in need of mending or an outside water butt.
Improvements were set in train, and the house began to take on an aspect of homeliness, though Warner kept it resolutely unpicturesque, which suited her character. She was delighted to express her unconventional tastes, in interior decoration and in other areas. The latter included a whole-hearted embrace of a lesbian ethic: planning to divide her time between Dorset and London (where she owned a rather grim flat above a furriers’ in the Bayswater Road), Warner installed as caretaker of Miss Green in her absences an odd young woman called Valentine Ackland, who was staying in the neighbourhood, loosely attached to its bohemian coterie. It didn’t take long for Sylvia’s lodger to become her lover, and from this time on, as far as her sexual and emotional life was concerned, she never looked back.
Valentine Ackland was twenty-four years old, six foot tall with an Eton crop and a propensity to wear trousers. She was also a dab hand with a rifle, to the detriment of local hares and rabbits, many of whom went into pies and casseroles prepared by Sylvia in the kitchen at Miss Green (not without a qualm or two in the face of so extremely carnivorous a diet – this is someone who was angry all her life about fox- and otter-hunting). Sylvia’s notebooks attest to her interest in cookery and other indoor pursuits, and the two women, with their separate domains of expertise, made a good team within the country surroundings of Miss Green. There were areas of minor discord, though, amid the sexual rejoicings and the novelty of domestic companionship. For example, Valentine – who had changed her name from Molly, because she thought Valentine had a more distinguished ring about it – nourished literary ambitions of her own, and it didn’t sit altogether well with her that Sylvia Townsend Warner had far outstripped her as a poet and novelist, with even the hard-to-please Virginia Woolf conceding ‘Indeed she has some merit.’ (If there’s a touch of ‘faint praise’ about this remark, you’d have to say that the sentiment was reciprocated. In a letter of 1925, Warner describes meeting Virginia Woolf and finding her so charming ‘that I had the greatest pleasure in stifling my scruples and telling her how much I admired [Mrs Dalloway]’.)
The thing that had precipitated Warner into the literary limelight, and earned her quite a lot of money, was her novel of 1926, Lolly Willowes. As an assertion of female autonomy and idiosyncrasy, it was both timely and captivating. It was also prescient, with its theme of decamping to the country about to be enacted in the life of its author (though perhaps without so sorcerous a resolution). Laura (Lolly) Willowes is a wry old-maidish lady occupying a rather put-upon role in the London household of her married brother, when she suddenly takes flight to a hamlet in the Chilterns called Great Mop, enters into a compact with the Devil and becomes a witch. Despite its subject matter, the book is not excessively whimsical – or its whimsey is tempered by a stern ironic overtone. A style at once mischievous and elegant is one of Warner’s hallmarks, whether it’s applied to a mediaeval nunnery beset by money worries (The Corner That Held Them, 1948), the beguiling and ruthless Cat’s Cradle Book (1960), or the distinctly unfairylike Kingdoms of Elfin (1977), her last subversive flight-of-fancy, carried out with an eldritch inventiveness. Incidentally, the title and epigraph for this book are taken from Warner’s admired Thomas Love Peacock, and the epigraph in particular sums up a good deal about her own artistic practice:
I like the immaterial world. I like to live among images of the past and the possible, and even of the impossible, now and then.
If the impossible loomed large for this author, it was always delineated with a steely completeness and accuracy, and with a large measure of self-awareness. Poking fun at her own witchlike nature in a letter of 1967, Warner mentions ‘flying home on my broomstick’ to live happily ever after.
Broomstick or not, however, a state of unalloyed happiness was rarely achieved at Miss Green or anywhere else. (Over the years, there were other rural retreats for the Warner/Ackland partnership besides the Chaldon cottage, though Miss Green remained in Warner’s possession until its sad end in 1944 when a German Messerschmitt, aiming for a nearby military base, dropped a bomb on it.) Throughout the thirties – and once the wayward duo had established a satisfactory domestic routine – Warner and Ackland found a good deal of common ground which helped to consolidate their relationship. They joined the Communist Party in 1935 and visited Spain together during the Civil war, sending reports from the fighting zones to various left-wing papers. They attended meetings against fascism and flaunted their common inclination to ‘err-and-stray’ (Warner’s term). But it wasn’t long before trouble arose over Ackland’s tendency to stray too far. Her constant infidelities were a source of grief to her partner (though she put up with them, even when they took place under her nose). Warner was equally dismayed when Valentine took to religion and kept a rosary by her bedside. But in spite of everything, and with accommodations worked out on both sides, the two stayed together right up until Ackland’s death in 1969.
In the mid-1930s, Rosamond Lehmann appears in her handsome sitting room, wearing her usual fashionable attire while playing hostess to a crowd of scruffy communists who are making her feel uneasy. Under the influence of her second husband, Wogan Philipps (the father of her two children), she has taken up the left-wing cause and opened her house to its adherents. She has even been co-opted as organiser of an event called “Writers Declare Against Fascism” at the Queen’s Hall in London (with Sylvia Townsend Warner among the participants). All goes to plan on this occasion, but Rosamond fails to conform to the image of a dedicated activist by delivering her speech dressed in purple chiffon and silver brocade. It is plain that her talents and inclinations do not lie in the sphere of left-leaning agitation.
The most romantic looking of her three semi-rural subjects, according to Harriet Baker, Rosamond Lehmann was also celebrated for the bitter-sweet, romantic aspect of her novels, which tend to feature heroines inexpediently in love who sit forlornly on park benches while the world cracks on around them. As with Warner’s Lolly Willowes, the mood of Lehmann’s fiction is somehow indicative of the shape her own life is about to assume. Some months before the outbreak of war, she bought a place in the country ‘as a safeguard’ against the break-up of her marriage, which was on its last legs. But before she took possession of Diamond Cottage in a remote Berkshire village called Aldworth, the war came and with it came evacuees from East London to be installed at Ipsden – eleven small children who created scenes reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags, with their bed-wetting and infections and unruly behaviour. Escape to the country could no longer be delayed.
Lehmann had envisaged a life at Diamond Cottage for herself and the writer Goronwy Rees, with whom she was then in the throes of an affair. (The two had met at Bowen’s Court in the summer of 1936; Elizabeth Bowen had earmarked Rees for herself, but he made off with the younger and more attractive Lehmann.) However, this aspiration fell apart when Rosamond read a newspaper announcement of her lover’s forthcoming marriage to someone else. There followed an episode of emotional unrestraint: ‘beating of head, lying senseless on the floor, calling for brandy, screams and cries’. But she pulled herself together, having no alternative, began another intense love affair, this time with the poet Cecil Day Lewis, and – eventually – moved into Diamond Cottage at Aldworth in Berkshire, where she practised survival tactics amid wartime dangers and privations, and worried about her children away at school. The presence of her new lover at weekends was a constant solace.
Harriet Baker examines at length, and with a calm detachment, the complexities of the Lehmann/Day Lewis liaison. He had a wartime job at the Ministry of Information and a wife and children down in Devon, as well as a vocation as a poet and literary commentator – not to mention his accomplished and intriguing series of detective novels (which Baker doesn’t), written under the name of Nicholas Blake and featuring the debonair amateur sleuth Nigel Strangeways. Even with the help of a housekeeper and gardener, Lehmann struggled in Aldworth with domestic disasters and annoyances; frozen pipes, the collapse of a bedroom ceiling, food shortages, wood and coal running low, her ‘ambiguous social status’ in the village. Against these continuous upsets were the refreshing weekends with Cecil; walks in the country, reading Jane Austen by the fireside, sex (though the last is not specified). But towards the end of her four years of country living, cracks in the cherished and apparently well-established relationship were beginning to appear.
To celebrate the publication of one of Rosamond’s novels, Cecil arrived at Diamond Cottage bearing a half-bottle of wine. This does not seem munificent, even as a gesture in wartime. But he had a lot on his mind. No doubt he felt overburdened by the obligations, uncertainties and intricacies of his personal life. Rosamond had hoped the two of them would marry in due course, but they never did. Cecil in the end ditched both wife and mistress for a younger woman with whom he spent the rest of his life. First Goronwy and then Cecil had proved to be utter cads, at least as far as Rosamond was concerned. The second betrayal marked the end of her time in the country, but what she took from her rural hours was a strengthening of her literary impulse: the five stories which make up her wartime collection The Gipsy’s Baby are altogether more pungent, pointed, atmospheric and distinctive than anything that came before (or indeed, after).
Various kinds of ill luck, ill health or ill-judgement, then, caused distress in Dorset, bewailing in Berkshire and melancholy at Monk’s House. But all three of Harriet Baker’s intermittent country-dwellers possessed considerable social and intellectual resources, and each kept going in her own way, drawing inspiration from fields and woods, from historic emblems of rural England, from the forces of nature overclouding and overbrimming. They went on observing, recording and responding to great and small events, with the upheaval of the Second World War bringing down devastation on each of their heads. Virginia Woolf, after the bombing of her flat at 37 Mecklenburgh Square, had moved permanently to Monk’s House, where her state of mind became more and more disturbed, with the inevitable outcome which followed. News of her suicide in 1941 came as a stunning blow to Rosamond Lehmann, who had known and admired the older novelist (they had many friends and associates in common). Sylvia Townsend Warner, reading Between the Acts (published four months after its author’s death), called it ‘the last light handful remaining of that tall and abundant woman’. She was conscious of a void, and of a sense of an ending.
The two survivors lived on into their eighties, writing, observing, taking stock of social and personal changes, of landscapes both arid and enchanted. The lives of all three of the Rural Hours protagonists are rich in city and country allegiances and associations; and with regard to the latter, Harriet Baker presents a splendidly evocative and illuminating account. She has a writer’s eye for detail, a scholar’s discernment and an enthusiast’s verve. She resists any Stella Gibbons-like impulse towards parody, but plainly and clearly sets out her findings, and her insights. Here’s Sylvia Townsend Warner again, playful and concise as ever, in a passage from a 1961 letter accidentally and wittily summing up the whole Rural Hours undertaking:
… and isn’t it astonishing [she wrote] … what quiet elderly women living in the country with their cats and their roses have to look back on? And what a lot of ghosts come sit round a tea-table on a lawn?
1/10/2024
Patricia Craig’s most recent book was Kilclief & Other Essays. It was published by Irish Pages and was reviewed by Eve Patten in the September 2021 issue of the Dublin Review of Books. http://drb.ie/articles/rounding-up-the-strays/
