Textures of Ambivalence: Harriet Baker on Woolf, Warner and Lehmann
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I wanted to start with a congratulations! You’ve been shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. I was looking up the previous winners today, which include huge names like Sally Rooney, Zadie Smith and Simon Armitage. How does it feel to be shortlisted for such an award?
It is completely thrilling and a little bit surreal. I have a toddler now, and I’m so embedded in my domestic life that the email announcing the shortlisting was out of the blue. It was a very nice reminder that the life of the book is continuing. Writing a book is very strange. You submit a manuscript, you publish it – I published Rural Hours a year ago – and you begin to feel quite distant from it. So the reminder that the book is out there in the world, living its life, doing its work, is exciting.
You did your bit and finished it, and now it has this afterlife.
Exactly, and being shortlisted for something feels like such a vote of confidence in your work. Because it’s my first book, Rural Hours acts as a template for the way that I’m going to work in the future. It’s a specific way of working with archives, and of writing lives. I’m beginning to think about my next project, and so it feels like encouragement for the way that I approach my subjects. I’m very happy and grateful, obviously.
Let’s start at the beginning. I wanted to ask where the idea for the book came from, because I found the lives of the three writers intersected in quite subtle ways. There’s a particularly lovely moment where Rosamond and Sylvia, in their letters to each other, realise the strange symmetry of their careers. Did you find these overlaps as you were writing, or was that the reason for the book in the first place?
The book grew out of my PhD. I was looking at Woolf in the countryside, and I stumbled upon what is known as her Asheham diary, which is a small notebook that she kept when she was convalescing at Asheham house in Sussex during the summers of 1917 and 1918. It’s the strangest, most beguiling notebook, in which she documents, in a kind of shorthand, her rural routine during those summers. This period of her life has been largely overlooked because she’d only published one novel, she hadn’t started her radical novels of the 20s and she was ill, or recovering from illness. I think it’s only seen as a chapter in her life, rather than something worthy of a book, because it was convalescent and quiet.
Group biographies often espouse a single argument or trajectory. Whereas these women are distinct, and they approached rural life differently.
But, to me, it showed that she was actually experimenting with the diary as a form, and she was also connecting that experiment to things she was reading: Thoreau, Dorothy Wordsworth and eighteenth-century English naturalists like Gilbert White. I wanted to show that when she was walking on the Downs and looking very closely at the natural world and counting butterflies, there was a direct link to the stories that came afterwards. ‘Kew Gardens’, for example, which was published in the collection Monday or Tuesday in 1921, might be set in London, but it’s teeming with insect life. Those two years at Asheham were a period of enormous transformation, both privately, because she was recovering from illness, but also creatively, in her writing.
I then began to look for other writers that had had similar experiences. And it wasn’t long before I came across Sylvia Townsend Warner through her wonderful novel Lolly Willowes, which was published in 1926. Shortly afterwards she moved to rural Dorset, bought a cottage, fell in love with a woman and her life changed dramatically. Finally, I found Rosmond Lehmann, who, in 1941 after the collapse of her second marriage, moved to a small cottage in Berkshire to raise her children during wartime. It was there she started writing short stories.
I’m glad you pointed out the late letters between Warner and Lehmann, in which Warner describes them as comets recurring in their courses, because their first and last books were published in the same year. It’s a beautiful image. These women did know each other, and they liked and respected one another, but they weren’t a group or a coterie. That mattered to me. Group biographies often espouse a single argument or trajectory. If you think about Bloomsbury, it’s often quite hard to disentangle the lives within it. Whereas these women are distinct, and they approached rural life differently. And that was what I wanted to work with.
Do you think that the three writers were aware of their record keeping as something for posterity? Do you think they intended their diaries or letters to be read?
I think Woolf regarded her time at Asheham as generative and convalescent, though it haunted her for the rest of her life. Years later, she would look at Asheham Down from her writing shed in the garden of Monks House and note in her diary that she was thinking about her time there. So it mattered a lot to her, but it was a brief experiment, and I don’t think this particular diary had any sense of being written for posterity.
For Warner and Lehmann, it was different. When Warner fell in love with the poet Valentine Ackland, they became very radical and left wing together, joining the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1935. But in this book, I wanted to show that they were practising their politics in an experimental, domestic way in the years leading up to that. Warner believed in everyday history and history from below, and part of that thinking is the idea that every scrap of one’s history is important, and to that end, she and Valentine kept everything. And so her archive, which is in Dorchester, is absolutely fascinating. It’s meticulous. It was just amazing for me, because I was interested in these often overlooked, ephemeral domestic texts, and yet, for Warner, they were equally as important. Her recipe book is there, her gardening notebook, the inventory where she listed all of the possessions in her cottage, her shopping list, the cards she and Valentine wrote to each other, lists of household chores and presents. The whole of a life is there. And so keeping that and archiving it was incredibly important to her, it was part of her political and creative aesthetic.
Rosamond Lehmann, on the other hand, didn’t keep a diary, and so I turned to the short stories that she wrote, between 1938 and 1944, as my autobiographical text. They’re so true to the life, and I made sure that everything corresponded with her letters. She was an amazing letter writer, and she does make one reference to putting her letters in an archive later. So she seemed to be thinking in that way, for posterity.
I was actually going to ask about Rosamond, about the lack of diaries. I did wonder if that made her biography more difficult, so it’s interesting that the stories helped you with that.
The other place I turned to was Laurie Lee who kept diaries during that period. They’re in the British Library, and they’re beautiful. His diaries tallied with Lehmann’s letters and her short stories, but also offered another angle, because she was being described by somebody who liked her immensely, but didn’t completely trust her. They allowed me to see her in the round.
What was it like to bring all these resources together, then? There were lists, diaries, letters, stories and even some photos.
An enormous amount of work! The book took me the best part of six years. But I do work quite slowly, and working slowly is important for me because I like to engage with an archive really thoroughly and then let the material sit. When I live with the material for a while, ideas come floating to the top; the manuscript evolved in its own mysterious way, and I let it guide me. So it was an exciting process.
I wanted to meditate on the idea that not all experiments are successful.
In bringing it all together, my methodology began to shape itself. I was drawn to the domestic texts that I’ve been talking about – the lists and notebooks and things – and I asked myself why I was drawn to them, what kind of story they would enable me to tell, and how that story might differ from conventional cradle-to-grave biographies. I realised that I was taking a revisionary feminist approach to literary archives, in the sense that I wanted to argue for the value of these texts, that they can indeed tell a whole of a life. So, for example, Warner’s inventory of her possessions might appear as simply a list of household objects, but to me it reads more like an emotional inventory. I find myself asking what kind of person makes this list, and then I picture her doing it, moving from room to room with a notebook and fountain pen in hand, the painstaking slowness of it, and her feeling for all her possessions. She’s like a newly married woman tallying her wedding presents and feeling hopeful and uncertain at the same time.
There were quite a few moments of sadness in the book. Woolf’s illness and subsequent death, of course, and both Warner and Lehmann go through significant losses. What was it like to be so close in your research, to relive these periods of loss?
Sylvia and Valentine had great difficulties in their relationship, and there’s a deeply melancholic strain to Sylvia’s diaries. Rosamond endured two marital collapses, the failure of her nine year relationship with Cecil Day Lewis and then the loss of her daughter, Sally. In their letters, both continued to be acerbic and witty. But turning to the diaries and private writings, a more private self comes out. It’s as if there’s a low note of music playing underneath everything. The two go together incredibly beautifully. I found this creatively useful because, as we all know, life is not happy and easy all of the time, and – it might seem obvious to say – but a writer’s best work is often when they’re going through difficulty or times of uncertainty or sadness or pain. I suppose it was a privilege, in a way, to feel such intimacy with these women during those periods in their lives, and to let that musical note inflect my own writing.
The book is perhaps melancholy because it’s about short intervals in the lives of these writers that are experiments. Woolf is coming out of breakdown into a period of healing and transformation. Warner was writing with such optimism and excitement at the beginning of her relationship with Ackland, but was still uncertain. Lehmann, though outwardly she appears a successful writer and mother, is beginning to admit her ambivalence and insecurity. All three of them are making homes, sustaining new relationships and experimenting with new styles of living and writing. And so I wanted to meditate on the idea that not all experiments are successful. Some fail. Woolf ended her life in the country, Warner never left Ackland, but went through fractured times, and Lehmann – following Cecil Day Lewis’s desertion – sold up, left the country and went to live in London. Their experiments in rural living and their literary endeavours had a mixed quality, they didn’t all work out in the end.
There were massive geopolitical changes occurring in these periods, including the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. Sylvia was very politically engaged, and was interested in local issues like the rural housing crisis. But Rosamond swung from being very political in the 30s to determining, in the end, that neither she nor her art were political at all. I wondered how you balanced their different stances?
Certainly, Lehmann was less outwardly political than Warner. Like many intellectuals, she was politically engaged during the 1930s, but then she enacted a kind of retreat. I found myself becoming sympathetic towards what she was describing as a texture of ambivalence.
She wanted to write about matters of the heart, but that doesn’t mean her novels were unpolitical.
She wrote of being torn between right and left, which felt like a battle between heart and head, or between her upbringing and the social injustices she was aware were taking place in the world. There is a wonderful letter where she describes attending a rally in London, waving a placard about half-heartedly and jumping into a taxi to come home! She shrank from political discussion, especially with her brother, John Lehmann. She wanted to write about matters of the heart, which Stephen Spender told her was verging on irresponsible. But that doesn’t mean her novels were unpolitical. She’s been dismissed as a romantic, middlebrow novelist, and yet her novels are quietly radical. Ambivalence is her subject. Her female characters drift against the current of everyday life, they don’t fit in, they feel alienated. Gradually, this becomes a kind of defiance, a practice of passive resistance. It’s a subtler kind of politics, but it interested me.
You mentioned Rosamond’s ‘political brother’ just then, who I did want to talk about very briefly, because her brother was John Lehmann, editor of The London Magazine for a number of years. There were quite a few figures, too, in the book who can be found in our archives from that time, like Stephen Spender and Cecil Day Lewis. I was curious to know if you came across The London Magazine in any of your research?
I didn’t, as he was editor beyond the time frame of the book, but John Lehmann is certainly an interesting figure. In the 30s, when he was editing Penguin New Writing, he knew that his sister Rosamond was in the doldrums – her second marriage was failing, she’d moved back into her mother’s house and she wasn’t writing – and he cajoled short stories out of her, which she wrote because she needed the money. And it’s brilliant that he did. Those short stories, including ‘Wonderful Holidays’, which stars Laurie Lee, are some of the best of her writing.
There were some great lines in the letters and diaries you put forward in the book. I loved the line Virginia wrote when she was trying to encapsulate rural life and said, ‘what a little I can get down with my pen of what is so vivid to my eyes’. As a final question, what were some of your favourite lines from the archives?
There is a line from one of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s letters that swims into my head quite often. She was writing to an American friend towards the beginning of the Second World War, when she and Valentine were living at Frome Vauchurch in Dorset, and it felt as if war was closing in on everyday life. Everything appeared strange: soldiers in the lanes, and searchlights at night. In her letter, she describes standing in the garden with Ackland and watching the searchlights roving over the landscape, and she says they look like the fountains at Versailles.
To me, this is pure Warner, and reveals her amazing facility for imagery and originality, but also optimism. She could experience something so otherworldly and possibly frightening, and turn it into an image of incredible beauty. And of romance. Her relationship with Ackland was at the centre of her life, and here it’s as if the lights have been lit just for them. I can see them watching, their arms threaded together in the dark.
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Harriet Baker has written for the London Review of Books, the Paris Review, the New Statesman, the TLS, Apollo and frieze. She read English at Oxford and holds a PhD from Queen Mary, University of London. In 2018, she was awarded the Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian Prize. She lives in Bristol.
Zadie Loft is a writer from Suffolk, now living in London. After reading Classics at Cambridge, she studied Creative Writing at Oxford and is represented by Becky Percival at United Agents. She works as the Marketing and Editorial Assistant at The London Magazine.
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