Dr Harriet Baker, Faculty of English

hrjb2@cam.ac.uk

 

Biographical Information

I am a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in English. I was awarded my PhD from Queen Mary, University of London in 2023. My Leverhulme project, The Painter’s Notebook: Life-writing by Twentieth-Century Women Artists, explores the place of life-writing in the creative lives of a group of important twentieth-century artists including Gwen John, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Marion Milner, Prunella Clough and Anne Truitt. The aim of this project is to examine the different ways in which these artists produced life-writing alongside their visual works, and explore how this writing become a distinct mode of creative experiment.

Research Interests

My interests span predominantly British modernist and postwar art and literature. My research focuses on life-writing and revisionary feminist approaches to literary archives. My first book, Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann, was published by Allen Lane in 2024, and was awarded the Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian prize and the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Trust Young Writer of the Year award. I am currently working on my second, also to be published by Allen Lane. Intense Life is an exploration of working motherhood in the lives of a group of postwar artists and writers including Doris Lessing, Penelope Mortimer, Maeve Gilmore, Beryl Bainbridge and Jean Cooke.

My essays and criticism have appeared in the London Review of Books, Paris Review, New Statesman, Times and Financial Times, among others.