“Suddenly, as if the movement of his hand had released it, the load of her accumulated impressions of him tilted up, and down poured in a ponderous avalanche all she felt about him.”
—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse (via daysofreading) (via awritersruminations)
June 2010
21 posts
“One must love everything.”
—Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room
“Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins—of happiness and unhappiness.”- Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room
Bloomsbury setting →
telegraph.co.uk
Six years ago Jonathan and Caroline Zoob were settled in south-west London with no thought of moving, when a newspaper article caught their eye: ‘How would you like to share your home with 7,000 visitors a year?’ They read on to discover that the National Trust was looking for new tenants for Monks House, the former country home of Leonard and Virginia Woolf. The tenants would live upstairs, look after the garden and open the house to the public twice a week. Jonathan, a keen gardener, and Caroline, an embroiderer and textile artist, were intrigued and within two days of sending off their CVs, were on their way to an interview at the house.(…)
Monk's House, home to Virginia and Leonard Woolf
In 1919 Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard, leading lights of the literary Bloomsbury Group, bought this modest weatherboarded house in the main street of Rodmell as a retreat from London life.
The large garden and beautiful view across the river Ouse to the hills beyond made up for some of the disadvantages of the house. These included a well as the only source of water and oil lamps for lighting.During their years at Monk’s House the Woolfs entertained some of the best-known literary and artistic figures of the day. Among the visitors were Vita Sackville-West, Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster, Maynard Keynes, T.S. Eliot and Roger Fry. Many were members of the Bloomsbury Group which Virginia and Vanessa founded with their brother Thoby.
There are only echoes of Virginia Woolf at Monk’s house but the house is full of reminders of the talented circle in which she moved. At Monk’s House there are pieces of painted furniture by Vanessa and Duncan Grant in post-Impressionist style. In the sitting room there is a table and chairs in muted abstract designs relieved by a panel of peaches on the back of each chair. Decorated china by Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and her son Quentin is displayed on the mantlepiece and in the dresser in the tiny kitchen. Every room is hung with paintings by the family circle. There are paintings and portraits by Vanessa including a haunting likeness of Virginia.
The garden is still as the couple left it. There is a large open lawn where they played bowls, some fine old trees and three ponds. Near the house there is a formal garden where paths, yew hedges and flint walls shelter a herbaceous area.
Virginia and Leonard Woolf divided their time between Monk’s House and their London house until 1940 when the latter was bombed. After the novelist Virginia Woolf took her life in 1941, drowning in the River Ouse, her ashes were scattered under an elm just beyond the garden of Monks House.
The plaque which her husband, Leonard, raised to her memory is now inside the garden. It has a quotation from her novel ‘The Waves’.
“London itself perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play and a story and a poem, without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets… To walk alone in London is the greatest rest.”
— Virginia Woolf on London
I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee’s life of the poet. She died young—alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross–roads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here to–night, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give her. For my belief is that if we live another century or so—I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals—and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting–room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky. too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton’s bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would he impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.
Virginia Woolf (A Room of One’s Own)
“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach. What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off
them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”—was that it?—”I prefer men to cauliflowers”—was that it?” — Mrs.Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach. What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off
them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”—was that it?—”I prefer men to cauliflowers”—was that it?” — Mrs.Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
“A certain melancholy has been brooding over me this fortnight. I date it from Katherine’s death. The feeling comes to me so often now – Yes. Go on writing of course: but into emptiness. There’s no competitor.”
—Virginia Woolf, on Katherine Mansfield (via katherinemansfieldproject)
Moment of Truth: Virginia Woolf buys a cat →
mattmoment.com
The following is a quote from a speech given by writer Virginia Woolf to a graduating class in 1931. I’m not sure why, when reading the transcript of the speech, this hit me so hard. But, when I did read it, I found myself laughing aloud (something that generally doesn’t accompany my…
“If I could catch the feeling I would: the feeling of the singing of the real world, as one is driven by loneliness and silence from the habitable world.”
—Virginia Woolf, Diaries (via aliceunderskies)
“The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.”
— Virginia Woolf
