Novelist Virginia Woolf, 38, and her husband, Leonard, 39, are getting accustomed to life in their new country home, the 18th century cottage they bought at auction just last year.
Today she confides to her diary,
We only slept by snatches last night, and at 4 am turned a mouse out of Leonard’s bed. Mice crept and rattled all night through. Then the wind got up. Hasp of the window broke. Poor Leonard out of bed for the fifth time to wedge it with a toothbrush. So I say nothing about our projects at Monks, though the view across the meadows to Caburn is before me now; and the hyancinths blooming, and the orchard walk. Then being alone there—breakfast in the sun—posts—no servants—how nice it all is!”
Virginia is working on her third novel and is thinking that she and Leonard could publish this one themselves through their own five-year-old Hogarth Press. That would be better than having to submit her work again to her half-brother’s publishing company, Gerald Duckworth & Co.
Monk’s House today
“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago… is the basis for the book, “Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s, to be published by K. Donnelly Communications. For more information, email me at kaydee@gpysyteacher.com.
If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”: Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.
In 2020 I will be talking about writers’ salons before and after the Great War in Ireland, England, France and America in the University of Pittsburgh Osher Lifelong Learning program.
Manager as Muse, Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins and his relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions.
SuchFriends Blog 