Hepworth was a leading modernist sculptor, and also the mother of four, including triplets with her second husband, the artist Ben Nicholson. ‘I’ve slowly discovered how to create for 30 mins, cook for 40 mins, create for another 30 and look after children for 50 and so on through the day,’ she said to a friend.

Initially these Little-Women-esque siblings were going to be ice-skating, but I was sidetracked by thinking about apples. The Marches' home in Little Women is inspired by Orchard House, where Louisa May Alcott lived from the age of 26 with her parents and sisters. And the house was named after the many surrounding apples trees by Louisa May Alcott’s father, Amos Bronson, a wonderfully idealistic teacher who believed that all morality comes from within. So there are all those apples – and I also love Louisa's description of her hero Jo retreating to her garret with six apples and a novel to weep over.

'Does housekeeping interest you at all?' Virginia Woolf wrote to a friend. 'I think it really ought to be just as good as writing'. She could not see 'where the separation between the two comes in.' In her diaries, literary entries entwine with notes like a list of 'Linen left to be washed'. 'Made chair cover'. 'Eating our own broad beans – delicious'. In Mrs Dalloway, one of the most experimental novels of the time, a woman walks through London on an errand, planning a party, building a mundane, practical to-do list in her head. Home-making and writing, in Woolf's view, both offered the ability to try out new ways of being.

When J G Ballard's wife died of pneumonia in 1964, single fathering was rare. Acquaintances and family offered to take on his three children, told him that he was risking damaging them by insisting on 'playing mother'. But he ignored them. Each morning he would get Jim (9), Fay (7) and Bea (5) dressed, make breakfast, drop them at school, then, just after nine o'clock, would pour his first, stiff Scotch and soda of the day, light a cigarette and settle down at his desk to write his strange and excellent brand of dystopian fiction. (The inhabitants of a luxury high rise go feral, warring with each other and eating pet dogs; a group of fetishists stage and participate part in car crashes; a man makes his home on the median strip of the motorway, feeding himself on litter thrown away by passing drivers.)

One of the books I took with me for my recent few solo days in a cottage in Cumbria was Laurie Lee’s memoir of setting out in 1934, aged nineteen, on foot from his childhood home in Gloucestershire. It is a dramatic, lyrical account of wandering through Depression-era England, then Spain on the verge of civil war, but what resonated with me most was something simple: Lee’s evocation of a world – not so long passed – whose speed was set at walking pace. 

Kathleen Jamie, Scotland’s Makar (aka poet laureate), confessed to an inquiring friend that she didn’t exactly pray when her husband fell critically ill – but that she found herself noticing things with a new intensity. The cobwebs, the ‘shoaling’ light, the way the doctor listened, the slender shape of the feet of the man in the bed opposite on the ward. ‘Isn’t that a kind of prayer?’ she wrote, in one of the most beautiful essays on observation (or anything else) that I have read. ‘The care and maintenance of the web of our noticing, the paying heed?’

Over the last few days I've been immersed in Doris Lessing's autobiography, a source of comfort while nursing my family through various health dramas. One of my favourite passages comes after she has moved from South Africa to London and is in the early stages of becoming an author. On an average morning, she writes, her son wakes her at five, and she entertains him until it is time for school. Then she goes back to bed for a few minutes (such a good idea) to subdue 'the feverish need to get this or that done – what I call the housewife's disease: “I must buy this, ring So-and-so, don't forget this, make a note of that”'. Then she is ready to write:

Last week I was in Devon with my children, their cousins, my three siblings, and my parents, staying in a coastguard’s cottage out of which you could tumble straight down to a pebbly cove. For the adults the time was good but also . . . hard work, as holidays with small children and several generations can be. The children flourished. Soaking up the waves and wildflowers and salty air (and endless raindrops), revelling in feeling safe and secure and surrounded by a natural world of great adventurous possibility.

One of the lesser known foibles of D. H. Lawrence is that he loved to scrub floors. I have been reading his collected letters, five thick volumes, and it seems that any time he moved into a new house (and he moved with astonishing frequency), he would get down on his hands and knees with a scrubbing brush. ‘I tied my braces round my waist and went for it,’ he wrote to the writer and socialite Lady Cynthia Asquith in 1913. ‘Lord, to see the dark floor flushing crimson, the dawn of deep red bricks arise from out this night of filth, was enough to make one burst forth into hymns and psalms.’

My two-year-old fell from the top of a ladder when we were on holiday in Devon last week. There were several hours of terror as the doctors did tests to rule out spinal and brain injury. That morning I’d been reading film-maker, artist and gay activist Derek Jarman’s last diary, a record of the experience of facing down his fear of his coming death, and I kept thinking about it while I waited.

Nature writer and wild swimmer Roger Deakin lived on his own for three decades, in an ancient, half-moated, timber-framed house in Suffolk, which he found in ruins and rebuilt himself. I've been drinking in his notes on his life there, and in particular his thoughts on solo domesticity. 

The poet W. H. Auden was scruffy in person, and astonishingly messy in his domestic habits. (His signature side table look: 'books, periodicals, half-emptied coffee cups, scummed over with cream, a dash of cigarette ashes for good measure, and a heel of French bread'.)

In her memoir, literary-editor-turned-writer Diana Athill describes going with her brother to gaze at the bull on the neighbouring farm when they were children. This was ‘not a random whim but an accepted pastime. A bull is a spectacle in himself.’