"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" - 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

"[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" - The Bookseller

"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

"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" - 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" - 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" - 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" - 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" - 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" - TLS

"A near-mystical account of rural domesticity in wartime England" - TLS