How Virginia Woolf’s list-making paved the way for her literary experiments

What can a list of sheets and pillow cases, tablecloths and bath towels tell us about Virginia Woolf? Quite a lot, I think. I have spent a long time thinking about one particular list. It is written in Woolf’s neat, graceful hand inside the back cover of a small notebook, beneath the heading “Linen at Asheham”. The date is January 1918. There are enough cotton sheets for a house party (and when the beds ran out, we know that Duncan Grant was content to sleep in the bath). Next, she lists “Linen left to be washed”. She did not do the washing herself — her servants Lottie and Nellie took care of that — yet the list remains the most quietly engaged example of her housekeeperliness I have been able to find. It is a record of how, in this period of her life from 1912 to 1919, a time of prolonged recovery from mental illness, of war and isolation in the country, Woolf’s mind turned to domestic things. And in shifting her attention, she was able to emerge out of illness into everyday life.

The list is both intimate and ordinary. It is an accumulation of material details, but also an emotional life, compressed. And it can provide a key to those years and the literary experiments that came out of them. In 1918, Woolf was 35 and the author of one novel, The Voyage Out. Since her marriage to Leonard Woolf in 1912, she had been ill. Following a series of breakdowns and a suicide attempt, he brought her to Asheham, a large-ish house nestled beneath the South Downs in East Sussex, in 1915. Her recovery was slow. She was permitted a walk and a page of letter-writing each day and encouraged to drink glasses of milk. Leonard presided over this routine, which she described to a friend as, “bed-walk-bed-walk-bed-sleep”.

By the summer of 1917, Woolf was in the final phase of her recovery. Her nurse had long since left, and she moved easily between Asheham and Hogarth House in Richmond, London. On August 3, she resumed her diary-keeping after a two-year hiatus. Her Asheham diary, as it has become known, is unlike those that precede or follow it. Part nature notes, part kitchen memorandum, the small notebook documents Woolf’s rural hours in a style that is economical, poetic and precise.

Each day followed a pattern. Woolf noted the weather; any insects or birds seen on her walk (“3 perfect peacock butterflies”); her daily tally of mushrooms or blackberries (“A record find”, “Enough for a dish”); gardening or domestic activities (“Made chair cover after tea”); what was happening in the fields (“German prisoners cutting wheat with hooks”); what she had for supper (“Eating our own broad beans — delicious”); and the price of rationed goods (“Eggs 2/9 doz. from Mrs Attfield”). Adhering to a structure in her diary gave shape to her convalescence. Woolf rarely used “I” and yet we catch sight of her out walking, or sewing on the terrace in a straw hat.

It’s not by chance that she wrote the laundry list on the inside cover of this notebook. During this period, listmaking and diary-keeping became part of the same practice of paying attention to small things and of setting down her experience, sparely and without flourish, on the page. To biographers, this slender diary has appeared inconsequential compared with the weightier stuff of her later longhand diaries and letters. (Until last year, when Granta reissued Woolf’s collected diaries, the Asheham notebook hadn’t been published in full.) It reveals nothing of her thoughts or literary ambitions, her anxieties following the publication of her difficult first novel. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those biographers have largely seen the years 1912-19, covering the lease of Asheham, as years diminished by illness and war.

Living is a perilous business. We make lists to steady ourselves, to hold a moment in place when life threatens to overwhelm

But look again. Woolf was experimenting. In her domestic life, she was attempting a freer, more bohemian version of living, epitomised in her instruction to visitors to the country to “bring no clothes” (evenings at Asheham were informal affairs). In her writing, she was on the brink of a new style, ready to abandon novelistic tradition for something more fluid. And in conversations with her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, who lived nearby at Charleston, she was developing her painterly eye.

In July 1918, Woolf asked Bell to illustrate “Kew Gardens”, her burbling, murmuring story of disembodied voices drifting over the flowerbed, of teeming insect life. The woodcuts Bell produced, depicting two hatted women against a leafy background with flowers, and a tailpiece of a butterfly and a caterpillar, united the kingdoms of words and pictures in a way Woolf found profoundly satisfying. And their collaboration was important. Having been ill, Woolf felt she was always catching up with her sister. “I think the book will be a great success — owing to you,” she wrote. “I suppose, in spite of everything, God made our brains upon the same lines, only leaving out 2 or 3 pieces in mine.”

Though set in London, “Kew Gardens” owes its imagery of the natural world to Asheham, along with its depiction of domestic life. As the snail moves among the “vast green spaces” of the flowerbed, the women’s incidental talk — “sugar, flour, kippers, greens” — contributes to the general, wavering tissue of sound. Woolf was snobbish in her imitation of working-class voices, and yet the story was an attempt to show all life, both human and animal. It was one of many “short things” she wrote during the period, agile pieces that hailed a radical change in her style and set her on her way to books like Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway. In many ways, the latter is a domestic novel. A woman walks through London on an errand, planning her party, a list forming in her head.

Woolf’s years at Asheham were years of humdrum pleasures, of looking and noticing, of creative experimenting and renewal. I see all of it there in her laundry list. Here was a writer attempting to maintain order over her emotions, to tether herself to the physical world, line by line. “Haddock & sausage meat,” she would write in her diary many years later, in 1941, when she feared the onset of another breakdown. “I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage & haddock by writing them down.”

Recently, in a friend’s kitchen in her new house in the country, I noticed a slip of paper on which was written the opening times of the fishmongers and the local market days. It was written so neatly. My friend had suffered a profound loss almost as soon as she’d moved in. Living is a perilous business. We make lists to steady ourselves, to hold a moment in place when life threatens to overwhelm. There was such fortitude to this list. It read as a statement of intent, a letter to a future self. Years from now, if it survives, it will stand for an interval in a life, of making a home in an unfamiliar place, of recovering, of trying to move on.

This year, I published a group biography of three writers crafted around lists and other homely texts, including recipe books, gardening notebooks and household inventories. These writers had in common a move to the country, followed by a quiet period of making home and making do. In 1930, 12 years after Woolf counted her bed linen, the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner took a notebook and inventoried the entire contents of her Dorset cottage. Moving from room to room, she recorded the candlesticks and coal scuttle, the lustre jugs and aluminium saucepans, crockery and cutlery.

It reads like the wedding list of any middle-class couple of the time. Yet it is more heartfelt, more precarious, when one learns Warner’s household was a queer one. The new love of her life, the female poet Valentine Ackland, arrived at a moment of personal crisis, when Warner’s relationship with an older, married man was floundering and, after the success of her first novel, Lolly Willowes, she was at a sticking point in her work. After an unhappy spell in London, in the inventory she was stocktaking her new life, taking the measure of her gold.

One more list — this time, typed. On August 4 1954, the novelist Rosamond Lehmann’s possessions were catalogued for auction on Friar Street in Reading. A pair of fawn velvet curtains, three damask tablecloths, two bedspreads, sundry kitchen crockery, a dog basket and its contents, a patterned carpet (worn). After the end of her nine-year affair with the poet Cecil Day Lewis, Lehmann was packing up her house in rural Oxfordshire. When she arrived in 1941, her most famous books and two marriages were behind her. She was an unlikely countrywoman, a mother of two young children, on the cusp of middle age. But she dug in and began to write short stories, some of her finest work. In “A Dream of Winter”, a woman chastises herself for self-delusion and past mistakes: “Life doesn’t arrange stories with happy endings any more, see?” Lehmann might have known. The catalogue listing her possessions shows the dismantling of a life, an inventory in reverse.

A list is both much and little. It allows the biographer a glimpse of a life in scraps and fragments. Like Woolf’s tenure at Asheham, Warner’s first years in Dorset have often been glanced over, her story seeming to pick up with her communist politics in 1935. But reading Warner’s inventory in the archive, her cottage came colourfully to life, with its mischievous juxtaposition of Regency and rustic, coupling Chippendale with cross-stitch, rococo mirrors with patchwork quilts. I felt as if I were pacing round, rummaging through her cupboards and drawers. And reading Woolf’s Asheham diary in the New York Public Library, the small marbled notebook in my hands, I had the sense of peering over her shoulder as she tallied her pillowcases and sheets.

For all three writers, their country interludes represent the spaces between the big events, between the landmarks that might dominate a traditional biography. In the archives, I studied the materials, but looked closer still. And I followed the line of their looking. Reading their notes, lists and plans, I discovered those spaces to be lived-in, hopeful, fruitful.

And so I allowed myself to glimpse the writers themselves, to see Sylvia coming in from the garden, dirt beneath her fingernails, Rosamond trailed by dogs or Virginia kneeling to count the household linen, feeling the draught along the landing, a current of cold air. In feeling myself into my subject as a novelist would a character, I felt closer to the grain and texture of her life at Asheham. Biography is so often about the public triumphs, but it can be about the quiet, private ones too. I am mistress of my own home, Woolf seems to be saying to herself as she sifts and sorts, turning to her notebook. I am managing. I am well.

Harriet Baker is the author of “Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann” (Allen Lane)

Follow @FTMag to find out about our latest stories first and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen