Three women writers who swapped London for a calmer life in the country
IN 1994 an old house in a remote setting up on the South Downs was demolished to make way for the expansion of a landfill site. This nineteenthcentury building, slate-roofed and romantic, with gothic arched windows, was once the Sussex home of Virginia Woolf and the inspiration for her short story “A Haunted House” (1921). Woolf’s years at Asheham are brought back to life as part of Harriet Baker’s richly detailed debut book about the country routines of three women writers who decided to swap their city existences for the seclusion of Sussex, Dorset and Berkshire.
In her introduction Baker reveals the initial reasons why each woman chose to pursue a more rural and secluded way of life. Woolf’s tenancy at Asheham came on the tail of a long period of serious illness, affording her a chance to recuperate away from the noise and bustle of London. Sylvia Townsend Warner was bored with being the long-term mistress of an older man with five children, so, settling in a cottage in Chaldon Herring, Dorset, she made a home instead with the poet Valentine Ackland, who became her partner and great love for nearly forty years. And Rosamond Lehmann, her appearance evocatively painted by the author as “softly glamorous”, decided on her country retreat as a safe place to recover from a marriage breakdown and bring up children during the Second World War.
Baker claims that she will bypass “already navigated ground” in this book, and in her first, long chapter on Woolf she achieves this, wisely choosing to focus on two relatively obscure years in the author’s life. As her main source, she draws on the Asheham diaries of 1917–18. (Until the new edition of Woolf’s complete diaries was issued recently by Granta, the Asheham books had never before been published in full.) These notebooks were used by Woolf to record observations of the flora and fauna that flourished all around her in the South Downs.
As she began to write she was still required to adhere to the routines put in place for recovery by her husband, Leonard. Life revolved around plenty of bed rest, very little writing and large quantities of food. (Woolf recorded her record weight of twelve stone around this time.) Visitors were still allowed – and, as Baker reminds us, many of the Bloomsbury Group experienced their own lifechanging moments at Asheham during the years prior to the First World War. Woolf’s sister Vanessa fell in love with Duncan Grant as he painted out on the terrace. Carrington met Lytton Strachey and declared herself instantly devoted to him for life. Woolf’s rival Katherine Mansfield visited her for the f
