Harriet Baker’s book Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann (Allen Lane, 2024; paperback 2025), began its life as a PhD completed at Queen Mary, University of London. In this workshop Harriet will start by discussing how her PhD turned into a trade book, some of the issues that arose in writing something both academic and public-facing, and how her experiences demonstrates a potential shift in doctoral research. She’ll consider how her methodology developed in Rural Hours and in her current project, and what it means to make imaginative or intuitive use of the apparatus of scholarship and of the archive.

Participants will then be invited to participate in two activities, which will be ways of exploring the accuracy, ethics and traditions of biographical practice, and the emergence of biography as a form of creative experimentation

Numbers for this workshop will be limited for space reasons; to register please write to Joe Moshenska at joseph.moshenska@ell.ox.ac.uk by noon on Friday May 9th; your participation will be confirmed by Sunday 11th.

This sessions is the latest in the series of ‘Workshops in Experimental Criticism’ under the auspices of the John Fell funded project ‘Creating Criticism.’ See here for more information on the project and on previous workshops: creatingcriticism.web.ox.ac.uk