Harriet Baker signing Rural Hours

Join us to celebrate the paperback publication of Rural Hours by Harriet Baker.

A Times Book of the Year 2024, not to mention a Heron Books Book of the Year.

Virginia Woolf, Rosamond Lehmann and Sylvia Townsend Warner fans, this is a must read. If you are yet to become a fan of theirs, this is also a must read. We are so excited to share this book and the three authors whose lives and writing it explores with you.

Come in to meet the author, get your copy signed and enjoy a drink with us. The event is free but it would help if you let us know you are coming by emailing read@heronbooks.co.uk.

About the book
Harriet Baker tells the story of three very different women, each of whom moved to the countryside and was forever changed by it. We encounter them at quiet moments – pausing to look at an insect on the windowsill; jotting down a recipe; or digging for potatoes, dirt beneath their nails.

Slowly, we start to see transformations unfold: Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Rosamond Lehmann emerge before us as the passionate, visionary writers we know them to be. Following long periods of creative uncertainty and private disappointment, each of Baker’s subjects is invigorated by new landscapes, and the daily trials and small pleasures of making a home; slowly, they embark on new experiments in form, in feeling and in living that would resonate throughout the rest of their lives. In the country, each woman finds her path: to convalescence and recovery; to sexual and political awakening; and, above all, to personal freedom and creative flourishing.

In graceful, fluid prose, Baker vividly recreates these overlooked episodes, revealing how ‘rural hours’ defined the lives of three pioneering writers. In the end, she shows, their example is an invitation to us all: to recognize the radical and creative potential of rural places, and find new enchantment in the rituals of each day. ‘Warm, perceptive, eloquent … Like Baker’s protagonists in their countryside boltholes I felt “socketed” by this book.

I know I’ll return to it again and again’ Lauren Elkin
‘A meditative exploration of renewal, visionariness, grievous loss, and love – cool and passionate, fragile and enduring’ David Hayden

Order the hardback here.
Pre-order the paperback here.

About the author
Harriet Baker has written for the London Review of Books, the Paris Review, the New Statesman, the TLS, FT Magazine, and Apollo. In 2018, she was awarded the Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian Prize. Her first book, Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann, was published by Allen Lane in April 2024, and has since been shortlisted for the Charlotte Aitkin Sunday Times Young Writer Award. She lives in Bristol.