Virginia Woolf: A Home of One's Own
"There’s nothing I enjoy more than looking for houses."
Yesterday marked 143 years since the birth of Bloomsbury Group member and author Virginia Woolf. To celebrate this, I have brought the following post from behind the paywall for all subscribers. I hope you enjoy reading! Coming soon: a biography of D.H. Lawrence and collections from the Bloomsbury Gallery and Bloomsbury Library.
Virginia Woolf was an author, essayist, diarist, and biographer. She is best remembered for being a founding member of the Bloomsbury Group and for her innovative stream-of-consciousness writing style in novels such as Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse.
Virginia also loved houses, and much of her writing was influenced by those she lived in or visited throughout her life. I will explore some of these in this biography, from her Victorian childhood home in Kensington to Monk’s House, the Sussex retreat she shared with Leonard.
Virginia was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on 25th January 1882 at 22 Hyde Park Gate, South Kensington. She was the seventh child of Julia Prinsep Jackson, a model and philanthropist, and Leslie Stephen, a writer and historian.
Leslie and Julia were widows when they married and already had four children between them: Laura Stephen, George, Stella, and Gerald Duckworth. Vanessa was born the year after their marriage, followed by Thoby the year after that and Virginia and Adrian soon after.
22 Hyde Park Gate was a fashionable Victorian townhouse situated opposite Kensington Gardens. Already tall and imposing, the Stephens built two more storeys onto the property shortly after their marriage. In her memoir, Old Bloomsbury, Virginia remembered it as a house of:
…innumerable small oddly shaped rooms.1
Together with Vanessa, Thoby and Adrian, Virginia lived in the day and night nurseries on the top floor of the house. George, Stella and Gerald Duckworth inhabited the second floor, and Laura, Leslie's disabled daughter from his first marriage, was cared for by a nurse.
During their formative years, Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, and Adrian were educated primarily at home by their parents and half-sister Stella. Before Virginia was even seven, she had Latin, History, French, and Mathematics lessons.
Highly intelligent and wanting to keep up with their brothers who had now left for boarding school, Virginia and Vanessa educated themselves, retreating to a downstairs room with high windows overlooking the gardens where Vanessa would study art practice from Ruskin's The Elements of Drawing, and Virginia, aged just nine, writing a family newspaper The Hyde Park Gate News and reading the books in her father's library. She is said to have loved the literature of the Elizabethan period and also read Hakluyt's Voyages from an early age. As Leslie and Julie were culturally connected, she and Vanessa would also come into contact with some of the leading artists and writers of the day, including Henry James, Thomas Hardy, John Ruskin, George Meredith, and Edmund Gosse.
As they lived in London, Leslie and Julia carefully managed their daughters’ leisure time with twice-daily chaperoned walks. So, some of Virginia’s happiest times were spent at Talland House, a pretty Cornish villa just outside St Ives.
Now famous for its artist community, St Ives was predominantly a fishing village in the late nineteenth century.
Leslie Stephen discovered Talland House during a walking holiday in 1881 when Virginia was just six months old, and for thirteen years, the family would spend a few weeks there each summer. Virginia and her siblings enjoyed a freedom they did not have in London, playing tennis and cricket, bathing in the sea, and exploring the nearby beach and rock pools.
It is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive.2
Talland House was a lovely property, a large Regency villa with balconies, extensive gardens, elegant windows and beautiful views. One of its most striking was of Godrevy Lighthouse, an 85-foot structure built 300 metres off Godrevy Head in 1859 to warn sailors of the Nine Maidens - a cluster of dangerous rocks that stretch across the bay.
The importance of St Ives and Cornwall to Virginia is echoed in several of her novels, including The Waves and Jacob’s Room, but most obviously, To the Lighthouse. Though the story is set on the Isle of Skye, it is a reflection of her childhood holidays in St Ives. Godrevy Lighthouse plays the title character and a significant role in the very first chapter when six-year-old James Ramsay feels rage towards his father when a trip to the lighthouse is cancelled. An incident not unlike one Virginia recorded in her childhood family newspaper in 1892.
On Saturday morning Master Hilary Hunt and Master Basil Smith came up to Talland House and asked Master Thoby and Miss Virginia Stephen to accompany them to the light-house as Freeman the boatman said that there was a perfect tide and wind for going there. Master Adrian Stephen was much disappointed at not being allowed to go.
Tragically, 1894 would be the family's last summer at Talland House. Just a few months later, on 5th May 1895, Julia Stephen passed away unexpectedly from heart failure, aged just forty-nine. Shortly after, Virginia suffered her first nervous breakdown, lost her desire to write, and the Hyde Park Gate News ended.
Following their father's death nine years later on 22nd February 1904, Virginia, Vanessa, Thoby, and Adrian moved to 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, a five-storey terraced house opposite a tree-lined square.
Unlike their childhood home, the house had electricity and large rooms with high windows that filled them with light. Inspired to create an environment very different from 22 Hyde Park Gate, Vanessa painted the walls white and decorated them with brightly coloured fabrics.
Now twenty-two years old, this move to her first Bloomsbury home marked the beginning of Virginia's life as an independent woman. She loved Bloomsbury, its bookshops, galleries, and theatres, and she began walking daily—an activity she continued throughout her life, and that was important to her writing.
Also enjoying his independence, Cambridge-educated Thoby invited his university friends, including Saxon Sydney-Turner, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell and Leonard Woolf, to gather at Gordon Square for regular weekly Thursday Club intellectual ‘salons’. Shortly after, Vanessa formed a Friday Club for artistic discussions with members that included Roger Fry and Duncan Grant. Though these clubs would form the basis for the Bloomsbury Group, this happy period was to end tragically with Thoby’s sudden death from typhoid fever in 1906.
Following Thoby's death and Vanessa's engagement and subsequent marriage to art critic and Thursday Club member Clive Bell, Virginia began looking for a new home for herself and Adrian. In March 1907, they moved into 29 Fitzroy Square, an attractive 1830s property that had formerly been the home of playwright George Bernard Shaw and his mother.
It was an agreeable house and not so close to Gordon Square that the Stephens became a mere annex of the Bells, nor yet so far that the two households could not meet whenever they chose. It was ideally placed for the purposes of those friends who got into the habit of visiting one of the houses and then strolling over to the other.3
Now working as a freelance journalist, Virginia wrote book reviews for The Times Literary Supplement, among others. In 1907, she also started writing her first novel, The Voyage Out, about a young woman’s journey of self-discovery. Though she was busy professionally and socially, she also felt the expectation to marry, and in 1909, she accepted an offer of marriage from Lytton Strachey. Lytton, though, who was attracted to men, withdrew the offer soon after. He wrote to his friend Leonard Woolf in Ceylon - suggesting that he should marry Virginia instead.
You must marry Virginia. She’s sitting waiting for you, is there any objection? She’s the only woman in the world with sufficient brains; it’s a miracle she should exist; but if you’re not careful you’ll lose the opportunity.4
Immersed in the writing of The Voyage Out, Virginia's mental health began to suffer again, and she was prescribed a break at a nursing home for women with nervous disorders. Her experiences there are reflected in the novel’s central character, Rachel Vinrace, who suffers from fever and hallucinations.
Following visits to Cornwall and Dorset, Virginia returned to Fitzroy Square in October. Her time away from the city had benefited her immensely, and she began to look for a regular countryside retreat. She signed a lease on a semi-detached house in Firle on the South Downs but, during a walk one day, came across Asheham House near the village of Beddingham. She and Vanessa signed the lease the following month.
In July 1911, Virginia and Adrian started to discuss giving up Fitzroy Square for a new way of living. On 20th November, they moved to 38 Brunswick Square and shared a house with John Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, and, after 4th December, Leonard Woolf.
Virginia's friendship with Leonard was growing. They held many of the same beliefs, and she found his intelligence attractive. Leonard, feeling the same way, proposed marriage several times, but Virginia was uncertain. Struggling with her health again, she returned to the nursing home and then to Asheham House to recover. But in May 1912, she accepted his proposal, and they were married at St Pancras Registry Office in Camden on 10th August.
Following a honeymoon in Somerset and a European holiday, they decided they didn't want to return to the communal living of Brunswick Square, and instead rented a property at Clifford's Inn close to Fleet Street.
Although Virginia loved London, the time she and Leonard spent away from the city at Asheham House was beneficial for her mental health. But when she had finished The Voyage Out and it deteriorated once again, Leonard successfully encouraged her to move from London to Hogarth House, a large property in Richmond with views over to Kew Gardens.
With the outbreak of the First World War, it was a difficult time for them both, and on 23rd March 1917, eager to find a diversion for Virginia, Leonard purchased the necessary equipment to start a small hobby printing press. Two Stories, a small book they wrote, was published in July of that year, and the world-famous Hogarth Press was founded. Two Stories was followed by Virginia’s subsequent two novels, Night and Day in 1919 and Jacob’s Room in 1922. They also published the work of other writers: Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude in 1918, T.S. Eliot’s Poems in 1919, and Eliot’s The Waste Land in 1922.
Virginia and Leonard also collaborated with Vanessa, who designed book covers for Hogarth Press. In a sudden desire to be close to her sister, who was now living at Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex, Virginia bought a property in Lewes, then Monk’s House in Rodmell. Though the conditions at Monk’s House were initially basic, with no water or indoor toilet, it was a bright and sunny house with beautiful views over the South Downs. At first, Virginia and Leonard spent only holidays there, but it would become Virginia’s final home.
In 1920, the owner of Hogarth House advised that he would not renew their lease but was instead putting it on the market for sale. Virginia and Leonard decided to buy Hogarth House and the adjoining Suffield House, with plans to combine the properties.
By the summer of 1923, though, Virginia had become weary of travelling back and forth from Richmond to London. She had also begun work on Mrs Dalloway and missed being a part of the city she was writing so passionately about.
There’s nothing I enjoy more than looking for houses.5
Despite Leonard’s concern that London was too boisterous for her health, she began house hunting in October and, on 7th January 1924, found 52 Tavistock Square—an early nineteenth-century building in Bloomsbury with four storeys and a basement. They moved into the property on 13th March 1924, and the mother of their fellow Bloomsbury, Saxon Sydney Turner, leased Hogarth House.
Virginia writes about the property in her diary entry of Wednesday, 9th January 1924:
At this very moment, or fifteen minutes ago to be precise, I bought the ten years lease of 52 Tavistock Sqre London W.C. 1. -I like writing Tavistock. Subject of course to the lease, & to Providence, & to the unforeseen vagaries on the part of old Mrs Simons, the house is ours: & the basement, & the billard room, with the rock garden on top, & the view of the square in front & the desolated buildings behind, & Southampton Row, & the whole of London - London thou art a jewel of jewels, & jasper of jocunditie - music, talk, friendship, city views, books, publishing, something central & inexplicable, all this is now within my reach.6
Virginia and Leonard lived on the top two floors. Their rooms were bright and well-proportioned, and they commissioned Vanessa and Duncan Grant to decorate them with murals and paintings. The Hogarth Press was re-established in the basement, and a firm of solicitors occupied offices on the ground and first floors.
London stimulated and inspired Virginia once more, and in May 1924, she returned to her unfinished novel Mrs Dalloway - a portrait of a day in the life of a London society woman - and resolved to complete it by September.
In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.7
Following the publication of Mrs Dalloway, London continued to inspire Virginia and was the setting for many of her novels, including Night and Day, Jacob's Room and The Years. Sadly, Leonard was right to be concerned about the city's impact on Virginia's health. But, although she fell ill several times, like Rachel Vinrace in The Voyage Out, she found walking daily beneficial.
To walk alone in London is the greatest rest.8
I like walking… I like seeing things going on—I love the freedom of it.9
Virginia and Leonard lived at 52 Tavistock Square for fifteen years—Virginia’s longest home and where she wrote most of her novels. But when they learned of plans to demolish properties on the south side of the square, they began house-hunting once more. They found a new home at 37 Mecklenburg Square and moved in May 1939.
But, in September 1940, 37 Mecklenburg Square was destroyed in the London Blitz, followed by 52 Tavistock Square the following month.
Virginia recorded the devastating events:
Our private luck has turned. John says Tavistock sqre is no more….But its almost forgettable still; the nightly operation on the tortured London. Mabel wants to leave it. L. sawing wood. The funny little cross on the Church shows against the downs. We go up tomorrow….the Siren, just as I had drawn the curtains. Now the unpleasant part begins. Who’ll be killed tonight? Not us, I suppose. One doesn’t think of that – save as a quickener. Indeed I often think our Indian summer was deserved; after all those London years. I mean, this quickens it. Every day seen against a very faint shade of bodily risk.10
Virginia and Leonard escaped to Monk’s House, the countryside retreat they had purchased in 1919.
Virginia was struggling with a biography of her Bloomsbury friend, Roger Fry, but was also enjoying working on Pointz Hall - a novel set in a quiet village in the heart of England, not unlike Rodmell.
But, the war was becoming increasingly close with regular sightings of German planes and bombs dropped locally. And, on a trip to London in January 1941 she saw the wreckage of the beautiful panels that had been lovingly created by Vanessa and Duncan and noted in her diary:
I looked at the river; very misty; some tufts of smoke, perhaps from burning houses. There was another fire on Saturday. Then I saw a cliff of wall, eaten out, at one corner; a great corner all smashed; at Bank; the Monument erect; tried to get a Bus; but such a block I dismounted; & the second Bus advised me to walk. A complete jam of traffic; for streets were being blown up. So by tube to the Temple; & there wandered in the desolate ruins of my old squares; gashed; dismantled; the old red bricks all white powder, something like a builders yard. Grey dirt & broken windows; sightseers; all that completeness ravished & demolished.
When Pointz Hall (that became Between The Acts), was finished, Virginia’s health deteriorated once again. On 18th March, she went for a walk but returned home wet, telling Leonard that she had fallen into a brook. Concerned, he took her to see a doctor, but just ten days later, she left Monk’s House for the last time. She filled her coat pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse. In her final letter to Leonard, she wrote:
I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.
Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this biography, please like and/or share. And, as always, I would love to know your thoughts in the comments. You can also click the following link to Become a Member and/or read the suggested Beyond Bloomsbury posts below. Until next time…
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Sources and Recommended Reading:
ed. Bell, Anne Olivier, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume I-V: 1915-1941
Bell, Quentin, Virginia Woolf: A Biography (Pimlico, 1972; repr. 1996)
Curtis, Vanessa, The Hidden Houses of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (Robert Hale Ltd, 2005)
ed. Giachero, Lisa, Vanessa Bell: Sketches in Pen and Ink, A Bloomsbury Notebook (Pimlico, 1998)
Hancock, Nuala, Charleston and Monk’s House: The Intimate House Museums of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (Edinburgh University Press, 2012)
Macaskill, Hilary, Virginia Woolf At Home (Pimpernel Press, 2019)
Nicolson, Nigel and Trautmann, Joanne, The Letters of Virginia Woolf (Houghton Mifflin, 2009)
Whybrow, Marion, Virginia Woolf & Vanessa Bell: A Childhood in St Ives (Halstar, 2014)
Woolf, Virginia, Moments of Being (Harvest, 1985; repr. Pimlico, 2002)
Woolf, Virginia, The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1929-1932 (Chatto & Windus, 2009)
Virginia Woolf, ‘Old Bloomsbury’ in Moments of Being (Harvest, 1985; repr. Pimlico, 2002), p. 182.
Virginia Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’ in Moments of Being (Harvest, 1985; repr. Pimlico, 2002), p. 65.
Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography (Pimlico, 1972; repr. 1996), p. 115.
Victoria Glendinning, Leonard Woolf: A Life (Pocket Books, 2006), p. 115.
Hilary Macaskill, Virginia Woolf At Home (Pimpernel Press, 2019), p. 143.
ed. Anne Olivier Bell, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Two: 1920-1924 (Harcourt Brace, 1978), pp. 282-283.
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (Hogarth Press, 1925; repr. Vintage Classics, 2000), p. 4.
Virginia Woolf, The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1929-1932 (Chatto & Windus, 2009).
Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (Duckworth, 1915; repr. Vintage, 2004), p. 228.
ed. Anne Olivier Bell, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Five: 1936-1941, p. 342.
Virginia Wolff is endlessly fascinating and in this essay you continue to fascinate!
I adore this essay, Victoria. Might be my favorite of yours yet!