30 January 2023
Galen Bunting, Northeastern University
This summer, I spent a single day visiting Monk’s House, which Virginia and Leonard Woolf purchased for 700 pounds in 1919. My taxicab drove through green tunnels to the small village of Rodmell, and stopped in front of the cottage where Woolf spent much of the Blitz—and where she wrote her 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway. With me, I had a copy of The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway, edited by Merve Emre (University of Oxford). Its margins were arrayed with historical, scholarly, and archival detail from Woolf’s manuscripts and journals, guiding me through Woolf’s texts as I visited Monk’s House.
When the Woolfs bought Monk’s House in 1919, its location in the countryside was an attractive prospect—a restful place away from the city, a cottage of their own in which to write. For Virginia, summertime became synonymous with escaping from dusty London to the cottage, where she would visit friends, like the socialite and heiress Vita Sackville-West, and go on long walks through Sussex and Kent.
A few months prior to my trip to Monk’s House, I had visited the New York Public Library, where Woolf’s archived letters lie between manilla folders, waiting to be read. In a May 1925 letter to Vita Sackville-West, Woolf writes archly, ‘Ha! Ha! And I thought you wouldn’t like Mrs. Dalloway.’[1] She continues, responding to an earlier invitation, ‘I will certainly come—towards the end of June? Might we perhaps call in for a bed after a walk? We have got with the habit of going for country outings’[2] In the collections of the New York Public Library, Virginia Woolf’s cane is displayed alongside the original drafts of Mrs. Dalloway. I thought I could see that its handle was weathered from use, from her walks over the Sussex Downs. In the low lodge in the back of the garden at Monk’s House, with a view of the Downs from her window, Woolf drafted the manuscript which would become Mrs. Dalloway.
When I visited the small cottage in July, it was surrounded by flocked bells of foxglove, purple irises, and full, nodding heads of poppies. Visitors to Monk’s House do not enter from the front door, but through the garden gate, along a mossy brick path, and through a greenhouse. Two young curators directed me to walk down a short flight of steps, where I found myself surrounded by the green walls of Virginia Woolf’s sitting room. Chosen by Virginia Woolf, this pea-green hue is distinctive to the house. Even indoors, I felt as though I remained in the garden.
Figure 2: A portrait of Virginia Woolf by her sister Vanessa Bell hangs on the wall of Monk’s House, above a small piece of furniture, also by Vanessa Bell.
Throughout the small cottage, the visual influences of Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell and her fellow artist Duncan Grant appear – a reminder of nearby Charleston Farmhouse, where Vanessa Bell lived and worked. Along with Grant, Bell was part of the Omega Workshop, a set of the Bloomsbury Group who applied Modernist aesthetics to interior design. Between the pastel-painted walls of Charleston, Bell and Grant depicted human and botanical figures alike, applying the Post-Impressionist influences of Henri Matisse to humble farmhouse walls. Woolf’s presence is everywhere at Charleston, from the portrait in Vanessa Bell’s room, to the airy ground-floor studio, where a small brass bust of Woolf’s head looks out to the garden. At Monk’s House, the sitting-room table is topped with blue ceramic tiles, hand-painted by Grant. Paintings by Vanessa Bell cover the walls, including the portrait of Woolf which is featured on the front cover of The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway.
Figures 3 and 4: Portrait of Virginia Woolf in Vanessa Bell’s bedroom, bust of Virginia Woolf at Charleston Farmhouse, personal photograph by author.
As Clarissa Dalloway steps outside in search of flowers for her anticipated party, ‘she had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.’[3] This line reflects the single day in June which comprises the novel, and the conflict at the heart of the narrative—the unseen tumult which ties together the novel’s two vastly dissimilar characters. Clarissa Dalloway looks across the street, preparing to cross, her heart weakened by influenza, preparing for her party. The shell-shocked Septimus Smith, with his haunted eyes, plummets to his death on the railings outside his boarding house. Despite being surrounded by people, both characters feel uniquely threatened by their post-war world.
In The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway, Merve Emre offers context for Woolf’s novel, a world disordered by a world war, a global pandemic, and Woolf’s own tumultuous life. Uniting recent scholarly work with the manuscripts of the novel, including Woolf’s short early drafts, Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street and The Prime Minister, Emre’s annotations inform the reader through biographical information on Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, alongside richly reproduced photographs of Woolf’s London home and Monk’s House.
For Woolf, Monk’s House was a shelter from the London Blitz—and a place where her writing was often disturbed by others. Woolf describes Clarissa Dalloway buying flowers in ‘the middle of June.’[4] Likewise, summers in Monk’s House were a time of cacophony for Woolf. When members of the Bloomsbury Group abandoned muggy London for the Sussex countryside, they came to Monk’s House, where Woolf would entertain them at her garden parties. As Emre describes, ‘Summer stretched before her as a season of “splintered disorder”[…]People showed up to Monk’s House and demanded their amusement and her attention. There was never enough time to write.’[5]
And yet, Woolf did write. Past the Italianate garden, with its rectangular pools and roses, we stepped into a small grey reconstruction of Woolf’s writing cottage. Behind glass, curators have imagined Woolf’s writing studio. Photographs line the walls, depicting Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf in garden chairs amid the flowers and trees of the garden. These photographs, alongside Emre’s annotation, hint at the split life which Woolf occupied at Monk’s House: ‘the bright clamor of Clarissa’s June day catches the happy possibilities of summer’s social life, all that Woolf could have enjoyed had she simply given in to the allure of flowers and parties and people.’[6]
Figure 5: Virginia Woolf’s bedroom in Monk’s House. Of particular note is the painted fireplace, detailed by Vanessa Bell.
Woolf’s bedroom is disconnected from the rest of Monk’s House, a shelter. To reach it, visitors must walk through the garden itself, past foxglove and delphiniums, which wave in the breeze just outside the window. Copies of Shakespeare sit on the shelves, carefully wrapped by Woolf herself. Vanessa Bell decorated the bedroom fireplace with a cobalt blue lighthouse, depicting the Cornwall lighthouse where Virginia and Vanessa visited every summer as children. (This lighthouse, and subsequent trips, may have inspired the elusive lighthouse of Woolf’s novel To The Lighthouse, which Woolf also wrote during her time at Monk’s House). In this room, Woolf could rest during her bouts of depression, and from the bed, she could look out at her garden.
Emre’s annotations point to the importance of green spaces, not just in Monk’s House, but in the city parks which form the lungs of Mrs. Dalloway. As Emre discusses in her introduction, trees (in both Regent’s Park and St. James Park) provide a focal point for Woolf as she joins together both Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith through their observations of mundane objects. Emre observes that Woolf’s ‘theory of perception merged with her technique of creating character’ so that her prose served to craft the novel’s form itself.[7] Objects, like branches of trees, served to ‘reveal both the convergences and divergences of individual minds.’[8] It is upon observing trees that the disparate personalities of Clarissa and Septimus diverge. When Clarissa looks out at the June leaves, she feels waves of ‘divine vitality,’[9] an extension of her own ecstatic spirit on a summer morning. In contrast, Septimus perceives that the trees in St. James Park are sending him a message, that ‘leaves were alive, trees were alive, and the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body, there on the seat fanned it up and down.’[10] While Clarissa understands the same leaves as a reflection of herself, Septimus is overwhelmed by the natural world, unable to hold on to his own personality in a sea of green. Through this use of contrast, Emre points to trees in Mrs. Dalloway as a means to demonstrate Woolf’s own theory of literature as a site of connectivity, where ‘all the world is mind.’[11]
Monk’s House forms a contradictory location in writing which takes up Woolf’s literary legacy. Even Woolf scholars tend to think in terms of either/or—either Woolf was a tormented genius, tortured by parties and gatherings, or she hosted wonderful garden soirees and detested the city, or she was a solitary writer troubled by mental illness. None of these assumptions are entirely true. As Woolf writes in Mrs. Dalloway, ‘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 of June.’[12]
For Woolf, Monk’s House was a place to rest and a place to work. It was a site of connection, where Virginia Woolf penned some of the most influential novels in the English language. Regardless of geographical location, readers can visit Monk’s House, read the letters of Virginia Woolf, and glimpse the drafts which shaped her 1925 novel—in Merve Emre’s annotated Mrs. Dalloway.
Cover image: The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, annotated by Merve Emre, photographed by the author outside Woolf’s bedroom at Monk’s House.
Sources
[1] Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, Virginia Woolf, letter to Vita Sackville-West, Wednesday, late May 1925, Virginia Woolf collection of papers, folder 5.
[2] Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, Virginia Woolf, letter to Vita Sackville-West, Wednesday, late May 1925, Virginia Woolf collection of papers, folder 5.
[3] Virginia Woolf, The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway, ed. Merve Emre (London: The Hogarth Press, 1927; repr. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2021) p. 7.
[4] Woolf, ed. Emre, p. 8.
[5] Merve Emre, The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway, (London: The Hogarth Press, 1927; repr. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2021), annotation 1, p. 10.
[6] Emre, annotation 14, p. 10.
[7] Merve Emre, “Introduction,” in The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway, (London: The Hogarth Press, 1927; repr. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2021), p. i.
[8]Emre, annotation 31, p. 14.
[9] Woolf, p. 14.
[10] Woolf, p. 31.
[11] Woolf, quoted in annotation 91, p. 39.
[12] Woolf, ed. Emre, p. 8.
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