“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, end of March, 1924, Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury, London

Virginia Woolf, 42, settles into the big old armchair in the corner of the room, positions herself beside the gas fire to get the best morning light through the skylight, and pulls the three-ply board on to her lap to continue working on her novel, The Hours.

Tavistock Square

A couple of weeks ago Virginia and her husband Leonard, 43, moved themselves and their business, the five-year-old Hogarth Press, into the basement of this three-story building.

The Press’s offices, printing press, storage room and a shop for the booksellers’ representatives who call on them are adjacent to Virginia’s room. Above, on the ground floor are the offices of Dollman and Pritchard, solicitors; the Woolfs live on the second floor.

They have asked Virginia’s sister, Vanessa Bell, 44, and her partner, Duncan Grant, 39, to decorate their rooms.

Sitting room in 52 Tavistock Square

Of necessity, Virginia’s studio is turning into a storage room also. As she works, she is surrounded by piles of books and piles of papers. Pen nibs, paper clips, buttons, ink bottles, stationery and cigarette butts have already begun to accumulate.

But, in all the years the Woolfs have been sharing their private lives with their working life—the Hogarth Press—this is the first time they think they have enough room for both.

Virginia feels she has a space she can call her own. She decides she will finish this novel in the next four months.

A portion of the manuscript of The Hours

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the paperback series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, and as signed copies at Pan Yan Bookstore in Tiffin, OH, City Books on the North Side and Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Mark your calendars! The Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books will take place Saturday, May 11, at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Stop by the “Such Friends” table in Writers’ Row.

This summer I will be talking about the literary 1920s in Paris and New York at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, Summer, 1923, East Sussex, England

Julian Bell, 15, and his brother Quentin, turning 13 this summer, have become publishers. Their project while staying at their family’s country home, Charleston farmhouse, is to publish a family newspaper they’re calling the Charleston Bulletin.

Julian Bell at Charleston

This is great fun. They can write and draw their impressions of their relatives, the domestic help, and various guests.

Best of all, they have roped into their project Aunt Virginia, 41. As she is a writer herself they thought they’d ask her. She really seems to be enjoying this new style as well as Quentin’s drawings to illustrate the gossip. Aunt Virginia has contributed a complete short story, “The Widow and the Parrot,” which her nephews almost rejected but decided to accept.

Here is an excerpt from one of their vignettes of “Eminent Charlestonians,” about the household cook: 

When in a good & merry mood, Trisy would seize a dozen eggs & a bucket of flour, coerce a cow to milk itself, & then mixing the ingredients toss them 20 times high up over the skyline, & catch them as they fell in dozens & dozens & dozens of pancakes.” 

“Eminent Charlestonians” in the Charleston Bulletin

*****

Aunt Virginia is a publisher herself. She and her husband, Leonard Woolf, 42, started their own Hogarth Press about five years ago. Currently they are having a difficult time hand printing an epic poem called The Waste Land, by their friend, American ex-patriate Tom Eliot, 34. Some 14-point letters have been tossed into boxes with 12-point letters and they’ve had to delay publication by a whole week.

Back in her own East Sussex home, Monk’s House, in nearby Rodmell, Aunt Virginia is working on her writing. Virginia’s latest short story, “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” is appearing in the July issue of the American literary magazine The Dial, along with a positive review of her latest novel, Jacob’s Room, which the Hogarth Press published last fall.

This short story has evolved into her next novel, The Hours, which she is working out now. Virginia confides to her diary that she is afraid it may be

sheer weak dribble…so queer & so masterful…I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work at its most intense…Am I writing The Hours from deep emotion? Of course the mad part tries me so much, makes my mind squirt so badly that I can hardly face spending the next weeks at it…I daresay it’s true, however, that I haven’t that ‘reality’ gift. I insubstantise, willfully to some extent, distrusting reality—its cheapness. But to get further. Have I the power of conveying the true reality? Or do I write essays about myself?”

Manuscript of The Hours by Virginia Woolf

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, and as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This month I will be talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.