NYSL TRAVELS
Virginia Woolf's London

WALK 1: Kensington SW7 WALK 2: Bloomsbury WC1 WALK 3: In the Steps of Mrs. Dalloway Excursions Beyond London: Virginia Woolf in the Country To the Suburbs: Richmond To East Sussex: Monk's House & Charleston Knole & Sissinghurst Bibliography

London itself perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play & a story & a poem, without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets... To walk alone in London is the greatest rest." [D v.3, 3/28/30]

Virginia Woolf navigated London preferably on foot, often from the upper deck of a bus and only when pressed for time, by the efficient underground. She took long walks along the Thames and hiked from respectable west to shabby east, from her home in Bloomsbury to The Tower of London. Like Martin Partiger in The Years, she might pause midway to admire St. Paul's Cathedral.

He crossed over and stood with his back against a shop window looking up at the great dome. All the weights in his body seemed to shift. He had a curious sense of something moving in his body in harmony with the building; it righted itself: it came to a full stop. It was exciting-this change of proportion. [TY 1914]

Virginia Woolf was an ardent walker and, as though London were her living room, she undertook serious conversations with friends while they were outdoors. She and her characters walked and talked, sat and talked in the parks and squares that afford London its breathtaking green relief. She gossiped with John Maynard Keynes in Gordon Square Garden, with Clive Bell in the Green Park and with Aldous Huxley in Kew Gardens. The reader meets Jacob Flanders in Jacob's Room discussing architecture and jurisprudence under a plane tree in Hyde Park. In Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked war veteran, has hallucinations as he sits on a bench in Regent's Park.

Woolf was energized by the glitter and bustle of Oxford Street and the clash of market peddler and elite cultures in Covent Garden where she dined at The Ivy and attended performances at the Royal Opera House. It is doubtful that she had to make reservations one month in advance as we do.

In a scene in The Years contemporaneous with George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, Lady Lasswade, in a silver evening dress, is driven to the Opera.

The car slowed down... Covent Garden porters, dingy little clerks in their ordinary working clothes, coarse-looking women in aprons stared in at her. The air smelt strongly of oranges and bananas. But the car was coming to a standstill. It drew up under the archway; she pushed through the glass doors and went in.[TY1910]

War and real estate development eradicated the food markets from Covent Garden and replaced them with a mid-scale shopping mall. Inside the Royal Opera House, mermaids still adorn the boxes and ticket prices are forever astronomical.

Virginia Woolf's writing is infused with London almost as much as James Joyce's is with Dublin and Marcel Proust's with Paris. Like Joyce in Ulysses, Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway plotted an urban novel that takes place on a single day in June while experimenting with the modernist technique of "stream of consciousness" or "interior monologue."

Despite her passion for her native city, Woolf was forced to spend considerable amounts of time away from it. Probably a victim of bipolar disorder before the discovery of pharmaceutical treatments, she was removed by her husband on advice of doctors to a rural environment after periodic breakdowns. They theorized that the "excitement" of the city brought on depression and suicide attempts. During the last six months of her life, after German bombs destroyed their London home, the Woolfs retreated to East Sussex where she died.

Fortunately for the literary pilgrim, most of the London Woolf inhabited and drew on for her fiction has survived bombs and real estate developers. In the belief that on-site visits enhance appreciation of a writer's work, I have delineated three walking tours and a few excursions to the countryside.

They are by no means comprehensive. I have chosen areas in which her life and her characters can be called up, as on a computer screen, for the reader's edification. I have left out districts like the City, the Docklands and other stretches on both sides of the Thames because they have been transformed beyond her recognition and this will continue into the 21st century. I urge investigations in other contexts.

I have omitted Cambridge and Oxford Universities, important influences in her life, and St.Ives in Cornwall where she spent her childhood summers and set her novel To the Lighthouse. Woolf's biographer Hermione Lee informs us that Talland House, the actual family home, has become a tourist attraction. I hope to visit it one day.

I have given the nearest underground station as a starting point for the city walks. These are bus stops as well for those who wish to approach in authentic Woolf mode (in which case I should say omnibus.)

Excerpts are identified as follows: The Letters of Virginia Woolf (L v.1); The Diary of Virginia Woolf (D v.1); Moments of Being (MB); A Room of One's Own (ROO); The Years (TY).

WALK 1:
KENSINGTON SW7
Underground: High Street Kensington

Virginia Woolf's nephew and biographer Quentin Bell places her family in the lower rung of the upper middle class, a construct with more resonance for English readers than Americans. Among her ancestors were lawyers, civil servants, writers and legendary Victorian beauties who inspired artists and married well. Virginia's father, Sir Leslie Stephen, a distinguished man of letters belonged to "an aristocracy of intellect," many of whom chose to nest in Kensington.

It is a proper residential neighborhood, little changed from Virginia's childhood except for the whir of motor vehicles replacing the clatter of horse-drawn cabs and buses and the conversion of many of the somber Victorian residences into elegant, airy flats. Tourists frequent South Kensington's great museums-Natural History, Science, and the Victoria & Albert (which Virginia knew as the South Kensington Museum.)

From the underground station, bear right and follow Kensington High Street as it becomes Kensington Road on the south end of one of London's five royal parks, Kensington Gardens. The park is as meaningful in Virginia's childhood and in her writing as the Jardins des Champs Elysées were to Marcel Proust.

Along the road facing the park is a series of irregular cul de sacs. Turn right into Hyde Park Gate. Plaques on various houses proclaim that Enid Bagnold, author of National Velvet, Robert Baden-Powell, chief of Boy Scouts, and at No.22, Sir Leslie Stephen were residents once upon a time. No mention that on January 25, 1882 a daughter Virginia was born to Stephen and his wife Julia in that very tall house on the left hand side near the bottom which begins by being stucco and ends by being red brick...so rickety that it seems as if a very high wind would topple it over. [MB 159]

She lived there until the age of 22, experiencing a snug Victorian girlhood and a sorrowful adolescence marked by the death of her mother and an ambiguous form of sexual abuse from an older half-brother.

From her autobiographical writings, collected in the posthumous Moments of Being, it is possible to reconstruct what went on at 22 Hyde Park Gate more than a century ago and to deduce that the 1880 scenes in her novel The Years were based on that household.

The interior was divided into numerous small rooms to accommodate the Stephen family consisting of parents, eight children and as many servants. The gloomy décor of the lower floors was achieved by gaslight, dark woods and wine-colored plush. In the front drawing room on the first floor, Virginia recalled, " at 5 P.M. father must be given his tea." [MB 128]

Family and friends gathered around a round table set with cups, saucers and plates heaped with spice buns and buttered bread. Mother or older daughter presided. In The Years, fussing over the ancient tea kettle's failure to boil gives a hint of the Pargiter family's discontent. Rebellious little Rose sneaks out of the night nursery on the third floor on a forbidden errand. The nursery was converted to a study for Virginia in her teen years. She did her Greek lessons and began her serious writing, standing at a desk with a sloping top.

The floor above was dedicated to the father's book-lined study, the windows giving out on the Kensington landscape. On the very top floor, the servants slept in a warren of bare rooms. Their days were spent in the basement, a dark hole in which the kitchen and their sitting room were situated. Scattered on various landings were one room for the family bath and three water closets.

In scenes evoked by the Stephen children's sale of the house and by Virginia's raised consciousness about Victorian inequities, Eleanor Pargiter in the 1913 chapter of The Years feels ashamed of the servant's quarters as she confers with a real estate broker. He points out other shortcomings of the house.

Mr. Grice turned to her as they went downstairs.
"The fact is, our clients expect more lavatory accommodation nowadays," he said, stopping outside a bedroom door.
Why can't he say "baths" and have done with it, she thought.

Twice a day Virginia and her siblings escaped to their playground, Kensington Gardens. Their "monotonous" routine consisted of two walks from different entrances.

The nearest entrance, Queen's Gate, is directly across the road from Hyde Park Gate. Take a right toward the Albert Memorial, Queen Victoria's spare-no-expense tribute to her beloved husband. The riders still canter by on Rotten Row.

The procession through the gates into the Park was beginning. Everyone looked festive. Even the little dressmakers' apprentices with band-boxes looked as if they were taking part in some ceremonial. Green chairs were drawn up at the edge of the Row. They were full of people looking about them as if they had taken seats at a play. Riders cantered to the end of the Row; pulled up their horses; turned and cantered the other way. [TY 1914]

From the other entrance at the Gloucester Road (Palace Gate) make a sharp right turn into The Flower Walk. In a memoir and in The Years Woolf wrote of:

...one of the pleasures of scrunching the shells with which now and then the Flower walk was strewn. They had little ribs on them like the shells on the beach. [MB 76]

A century later, the shells are still crunchy, the loveliest gravel I have ever seen in a public park.

Turning back toward the entrance, proceed up the Broad Walk where the limpid expanse of the park unfolds. On the left is Kensington Palace, built in the 17th century for William III and his Queen Mary. In 1837, 18-year-old Victoria of Kent was awakened from her palace bed to be told she was queen. Diana, the Princess of Wales was the unhappy occupant in the 1990's. Virginia Woolf remembered an old woman selling sweets outside the palace grounds. I saw a Pakistani doing a brisk trade in jumbo hot dogs.

Toward the right of the Broad Walk is the Round Pond. Consider this vista from the 1914 chapter in The Years:

It was admirably composed. There was the white figure of Queen Victoria against a green bank; beyond, was the red brick of the old palace; the phantom church raised its spire, and the Round Pond made a pool of blue. A race of yachts was going forward. The boats leant on their sides so that the sails touched the water. There was a nice little breeze.

Children continue to sail their boats on the Pond and in winter skate over the ice. Beyond the Pond lies The Serpentine, a body of water that snakes diagonally across the park. En route to a grand party in Grosvenor Square, Martin Pargiter drives through the park to get to Mayfair.

Now he was crossing the bridge over the Serpentine. The water glowed with sunset light; twisted poles of lamp light lay on the water, and there, at the end the white bridge composed the scene. The cab entered the shadow of the trees, and joined the long line of cabs that was streaming toward the Marble Arch. People in evening dress were going to plays and parties. The light became yellower and yellower. The road was beaten to a metallic silver. Everything looked festive.

After the death of their parents, the fictional Pargiters and their cousins dispersed from Kensington to other districts keyed to their places in the social firmament: Martin to somewhat fashionable Chelsea; Kitty, the cousin who married a lord, to Mayfair; Maggie and her French husband to Westminster in "one of the obscure little streets under the shadow of the Abbey." Sara, a lost soul, ends up in slums on the banks of the Thames. Delia, the wife of an Irish country gentleman, returns to London to give a party in their house which has been half rented out to offices. It resembles the home of Virginia and Leonard Woolf and their Hogarth Press at 52 Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury after 1924.

In 1904, following the death of Sir Leslie Stephen, the last lugubrious event at 22 Hyde Park Gate, his children left Kensington never to return. As Virginia wrote in her diary:

...the gulf which we crossed between Kensington & Bloomsbury was the gulf between respectable mummified humbug & life cruder & impertinent perhaps, but living. [D v.1, 10/23/18]

WALK 2:
BLOOMSBURY WC1
Underground: Tottenham Court Road

Consult a map of London. Bloomsbury lies east of Tottenham Court Road, north of New Oxford Street, west of Gray's Inn Road and south of Euston Road. When the young Stephens, Vanessa and Virginia, Thoby and Adrian moved into the district, it was considered bohemian, not quite respectable by Kensington standards.

Bloomsbury came to represent a small but influential niche in early 20th century cultural history. The meetings of young graduates of Cambridge University and their friends on Thursday evenings in 1905 to talk over buns, coffee and whisky in a house on Gordon Square caused a spontaneous combustion of ideas and new attitudes. Virginia Woolf, initially more a wide-eyed observer than a generator, was a sister of the host Thoby Stephen. Later, she acknowledged how difficult it was to pin down what they had wrought:

Talk-even talk of this interest and importance is as elusive as smoke. It flies up the chimney and is gone. [MB 165]

True, but some members of the Bloomsbury Group were vital contributors to the arts and literature and to economic theory. The aura of that "Old Bloomsbury" as Woolf entitled a memoir read to friends in 1922, can be recaptured in a walk through its streets. It would be helpful to take a diagram of Bloomsbury's cat's cradle of sexual relationships for reference with a map of London.

From the underground station proceed along New Oxford Street to Bloomsbury Street, the spine of a sector that contains the sprawling universe of the University of London, The Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and the British Museum plus assorted boutiques, art galleries, bookstores and restaurants.

"...the streets in the neighborhood of the Museum were full of open coal-holes, down which sacks were showering; four-wheeled cabs were drawing up and depositing on the pavement corded boxes containing, presumably, the entire wardrobe of some Swiss or Italian family seeking fortune or refuge or some other desirable commodity which is to be found in the boarding-houses of Bloomsbury in the winter. The usual hoarse-voiced men paraded the streets with plants on barrows. Some shouted; others sang. London was like a workshop... [ROO Chapter 2]

Proceed two blocks up Bloomsbury Street and turn right into Great Russell Street where the gates of the British Museum come into view. One of the great repositories of ancient art including the Elgin Marbles, the Museum also housed the British Library and its scholar's lair, the Round Reading Room.

"...and there one stood under the vast dome, as if one were a thought in the huge bald forehead which is so splendidly encircled by a band of famous names."

Karl Marx, Mohandas K. Gandhi, W.B. Yeats, Bertrand Russell and Woolf herself had labored under the blue and gold-lettered ceiling. Jacob Flanders, the hero of her Jacob's Room, collated the works of Christopher Marlowe in that hallowed space amid a flock of British eccentrics. The Round Reading Room was converted into a visitor's center after the Library was transferred to a new site on the fringe of Bloomsbury in 1997.

Leaving the Museum on its far side, Montague Place, one should take a left for a peek at Bedford Square. At No.44, Lady Ottoline Morrell, an affiliate of the Bloomsbury Group in a manner of speaking (among her lovers were Augustus John, Bertrand Russell and Roger Fry,) held her salons for artists and writers. The atmosphere, Virginia rhapsodized, was "full of lustre and illusion." [MB 178]

At the opposite end of Montague Place is Russell Square. On its far side, the Victorian Gothic Hotel Russell has installed a Virginia Woolf Pub.

Proceed from the center of Russell Square along Bedford Way to Gordon Square. No.46, the house rented by the Stephen children in 1904, is considered the cradle of the Bloomsbury Group. Thoby started his "Thursday evenings" here with Lytton Strachey, Desmond MacCarthy, Saxon Sydney-Turner, and Clive Bell; John Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry came in a second wave. Vanessa, an artist, inaugurated a "Friday Club" to discuss what was new in painting.

We were full of experiments and reforms. We were going to do without table napkins...we were going to paint; to write; to have coffee after dinner instead of tea at nine o'clock. Everything was going to be new; everything was going to be different. Everything was on trial. [MB 163]

Thoby died of typhoid in 1906. The following year, Vanessa married Clive Bell and they took over the lease of the house, later sharing it with Maynard Keynes. It was in the drawing room of No.46 that Lytton Strachey jocularly uttered the word semen in mixed company. Not for another 90 years, when it figured in impeachment hearings in the United States House of Representatives, would the word carry such weight.

Can one really say it? I thought and we burst out laughing. With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down. A flood of the sacred fluid seemed to overwhelm us. Sex permeated our conversation. The word bugger was never far from our lips. [MB 173]

In the 1930's Keynes and his wife Lydia Lopokova, a Russian ballet dancer, assumed the lease of No.47 and joined the first floors of the two houses to increase the space for their parties.

Before she married the economist, Lopokova rented rooms at No.41, the home of the Strachey family and members of Lytton's ménage â trois, Dora Carrington and her husband Ralph Partridge. Strachey, author of Eminent Victorians, nudged another Cambridge classmate Leonard Woolf into marrying Virginia Stephen.

At various times the Bells inhabited No.50 as did Adrian Stephen and his wife Karin Costelloe, both psychiatrists, while Strachey for a time lived at No.51.

Gordon Square Garden is one of my favorite oases for meditation and for summoning the Bloomsbury phantoms.

"I sat in Gordon Square yesterday for an hour and a half talking to Maynard," Virginia recorded in her diary of May 1921. They explored the issue of praise, why they all craved it and why Keynes, at the pinnacle of success, needed to boast.

Leaving Gordon Square, turn left at Byng Place and proceed to Tavistock Square. The Tavistock Hotel stands on the site of No.52, the home of the Woolfs and their Hogarth Press from 1924 to 1939. The house was bombed in October 1940. It is not worth the effort, except for a Woolf compulsive, to walk due south and east to gaze at Brunswick Square where Virginia shared lodgings in 1911-12 with Keynes, Duncan Grant, and with Leonard Woolf before their marriage, and to Mecklenburgh Square, the Woolfs's very last London residence. Both areas have lost their Old Bloomsbury character.

It would be better to return to Gordon Square and swing around the semicircle of University College to Gower Street, an extension of Bloomsbury Street. Turn right on Gower Street to Grafton Way, continuing across Tottenham Court Road to Fitzroy Square.

Second only to Gordon Square in Bloomsbury Group sentiment, Fitzroy Square was designed by Robert Adam as a circle within a square. By 1907 when Virginia and Adrian rented No.29 after leaving their sister and her bridegroom in possession of the house in Gordon Square, the neighborhood of Fitzroy Square had deteriorated. A plaque on the exterior of No.29 informs us that George Bernard Shaw had been a previous tenant with his mother. Virginia resumed the "Thursday evenings" at the new address with additional recruits such as E. M. Forster and she began writing her first novel The Voyage Out.

From 1908 to 1911, Keynes took rooms at No.21 for himself and his lover, the artist Duncan Grant, whom he had wooed away from Lytton Strachey. Grant was to become Vanessa Bell's lifelong obsession and the father of her daughter, Angelica.

At No.33, the critic Roger Fry established the Omega Workshop in 1913. Vanessa and Duncan were leading associates in the decorative arts cooperative. Three years before, Fry had introduced London to French Post-Impressionist painting in an exhibition at the Grafton Galleries. In her 1940 biography of Fry, Virginia invested the show with historic consequence.

From here the walker has two options besides calling it a day. Leaving Fitzroy Square at Fitzroy Street and turning north to Euston Road takes one within sight of Regent's Park to the left. Virginia loved to walk within its captivating acres and in Mrs. Dalloway (subject of another walk) she had Septimus Warren Smith battle his World War I demons from a bench on the Broad Walk.

A more fitting conclusion to this Bloomsbury walk would be to turn right on Euston Road and march to the new British Library abutting the Victorian Gothic St.Pancras Station. Thirty-six years in the making, the Library's design by Colin St.John Wilson drew lightning bolts of criticism including the predictable fury of Prince Charles, constant foe of post-modern aesthetics. Its squat red brick exterior reminds this writer of the Forbidden City in Beijing. A monumental bronze sculpture of Isaac Newton in the piazza furthers the brutalist sensibility.

The new reading rooms, coldly efficient, can be glimpsed only by signing on for one of the guided tours that are given infrequently a few days of the week. Use of the rooms requires a pass obtainable on proof of scholarly intent.

The exhibition rooms, however, are impressive and welcoming to the public. Great treasures such as the Magna Carta, a Gutenberg Bible, Shakespeare's First Folio of 1623, and the manuscript, in Paul McCartney's handwriting, of the lyrics of the Beatles' single "I Want to Hold Your Hand" are on permanent display.

I was stirred by listening through earphones in the National Sound Archive room to recordings of my idols reading from their own works. W.B. Yeats recites The Lake Isle of Innisfree and Coole Park and Ballylee; James Joyce delivers the Aeolus episode of Ulysses and a segment of Finnegans Wake, softly rolling his r's in a mellifluous tenor. Virginia Woolf gives a BBC radio talk on Craftsmanship in the marble tones of South Kensington.

In a strategic irony, Woolf's and Joyce's earphones are placed next to each other. I could not help recalling the contempt she expressed for him when Ulysses was published.

"...a self taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating..." [D v.2, 8/16/22]

It would appear, alas, that the gulf between Bloomsbury and North Dublin was unbridgeable.

WALK 3:
IN THE STEPS OF MRS. DALLOWAY
Underground: Westminster

"I love walking in London," said Mrs. Dalloway. "Really it's better than walking in the country."

Fans of Virginia Woolf may argue over which of her books is THE London novel. I would toss a coin between Mrs. Dalloway and The Years. In both stories geography spells destiny. Where characters live defines their places in the English class system and consequently in which direction fate is taking them.

For this London walk, heads are up for Mrs. Dalloway. The novel has withstood the test of time more successfully than the other family saga and, as it takes place on a single day in June 1923, is easily traced by a pedestrian in one round. Because Woolf's narrative can be as full of holes as crocheted lace, I have sometimes had to construe a path from which she omitted mention of connecting streets.

The world of Clarissa Dalloway is concentrated in adjacent areas of social power. Westminster SW1 embodies the monarchy and its political arm; Mayfair W1 signifies wealth and "high society." Characters who are "outsiders" to her world are seen in outlying areas; Septimus Warren Smith plunges to his death from a rooming house off Tottenham Court Road in Bloomsbury. Peter Walsh, Clarissa's rejected suitor just back from India, also finds lodging in Bloomsbury. When Mrs. Dalloway's daughter Elizabeth impulsively boards a bus on Victoria Street to ride up Whitehall and the Strand to Chancery Lane, she experiences a sense of freedom and also fear.

For no Dalloway came down the Strand daily; she was a pioneer, a stray, venturing, trusting.

Since the novel begins and ends in Mrs. Dalloway's home in Westminster, let us start in front of the underground station at Parliament Square. To our left are the Houses of Parliament (Clarissa's husband Richard Dalloway is a Conservative Member of the House of Commons) and Big Ben. The clock serves as a structural device to move the reader through the day and to shift from one character to another.

Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolve in the air.

Westminster Abbey is on the south side of the square and outside its west front an archway leads to the Dean's Yard. Woolf does not reveal the Dalloways's address but tells us that Richard enters the Yard to reach their house. Number 1 Dean's Yard on the far end of the immaculate Green is a fine Georgian house with a blue door that fits the bill. I can imagine the Prime Minister arriving to attend Mrs. Dalloway's party. One literary sleuth, David Daiches, deduces from Peter Walsh's observation as he draws near that the Dalloways live in Great College Street just beyond the Yard:

"But it was her street, this, Clarissa's: cabs were rushing round the corner, like water round the piers of a bridge, drawn together, it seemed to him, because they bore people going to her party, Clarissa's party."

Granted, the cabs seem to rule out situating the house in an enclosure like the Yard. Another tracer has fixed the Dalloway house in Barton Street which runs out of Daiches's Great College Street. Take your pick. I shall indulge in Woolf-esque impressionism and stick with the house in the Yard.

Mrs. Dalloway opens with Clarissa setting out to buy flowers for her party. She crosses Victoria Street, heading for St. James Park. Later in the day, her daughter Elizabeth will shop for petticoats and have tea with Miss Doris Kilman at the Army and Navy Stores further up Victoria Street. Woolf herself, a dowdy dresser, patronized the plain vanilla emporium as did several of her characters. The Stores are still there, greatly expanded though hardly chic. "I'd say it's a place for a bloke like me," a taxi driver said when I asked him for an assessment. I found it to be a trove for Christmas stocking stuffers.

Returning to Clarissa Dalloway, we find her advancing from Victoria Street to Birdcage Walk on the south side of St. James Park. She meets her old friend Hugh Whitbread

-coming along with his back against the Government buildings, most appropriately, carrying a despatch box stamped with the Royal Arms.

Clarissa and Hugh exchange chitchat and go their separate ways. She walks straight through the park musing about Peter Walsh and whether she had been right not to marry him. Hugh Whitbread bears left toward Buckingham Palace. Clarissa must have kept going beyond St. James Park into the contiguous Green Park because Woolf tells us:

She had reached the Park gates. She stood for a moment, looking at the omnibuses in Piccadilly.

The red double-deckers, universal symbol of London, still roar through its winding streets. Mrs. Dalloway turns right into Piccadilly, walking towards Bond Street in the heart of Mayfair.

But what was she dreaming as she looked into Hatchard's shop window?

Virginia Woolf, a bibliophile in book paradise, would spend an entire afternoon and a windfall in reviewer's fees to browse and buy in half a dozen bookstores. Regrettably, many have vanished, particularly most of the picturesque shops strung along Charing Cross Road. Praise be, Hatchard's has not budged in 76 years. Only some of the inventory has changed.

Mrs. Dalloway crosses to the other side of Piccadilly and into Bond Street.

Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in the morning in the season; its flags flying; its shops; no splash; no glitter; one roll of tweed in the shop where her father had bought his suits for fifty years; a few pearls; salmon on an iceblock.

She buys her flowers in a shop that no longer exists, hears the backfire of a mysterious motor car and is caught in traffic at the corner of New Bond and Brook Streets. It is half past 10 and in two hours her husband and Hugh Whitbread will be having lunch with the formidable Lady Bruton in her house in Brook Street.

Meanwhile, the car which Clarissa has surmised belongs to the Queen, is moving south. So shall we inasmuch as Woolf has whisked Mrs. Dalloway out of sight only to let us find her many pages later at home.

Gliding across Piccadilly, the car turned down St. James Street. Tall men, men of robust physique, well-dressed men with their tail-coats and their white slips and their hair raked back who, for reasons difficult to discriminate, were standing in the bow window of Brook's, with their hands behind the tails of their coats, looking out, perceived instinctively that greatness was passing...

Tailcoats no longer, at least not in the morning, but Brook's still stands, a Georgian brick stronghold in the elegant quarter of St. James. The name is synonymous with men's clubs, men's tailors and haberdashers and the residence of the male heir to the throne. Traffic invariably jams along St. James Street. The London Library, to which Virginia Woolf subscribed, is in St. James Square.

A small crowd meanwhile had gathered at the gates of Buckingham Palace. Listlessly, yet confidently, poor people all of them, they waited; looked at the Palace itself with the flag flying; at Victoria billowing on her mound, admired her shelves of running water, her geraniums; singled out from the motor cars in the Mall first this one, then that... The Prince lived at St.James's; but he might come along in the morning to visit his mother.

The crowds are there, neither poor nor small in number but tourists in the global travel uniform of sweat pants and sneakers. In the late summer of 1997 a carpet of floral tributes was laid down by ordinary citizens from the Mall practically to Victoria's feet in memory of Princess Diana killed in a car accident in Paris.

We might as well stop here for we have completed the orbit of Mrs. Dalloway's world. How narrow a circle it was and how clear it is now why Virginia Woolf mocked her.

EXCURSIONS BEYOND LONDON:
VIRGINIA WOOLF IN THE COUNTRY

I decided to go to London, for the sake of hearing the Strand roar, which I think one does want, after a day or two of Richmond. Somehow, one can't take Richmond seriously. One has always come here for an outing, I suppose; & that is part of its charm, but one wants serious life sometime. [D v.1, 1/28/15]

Virginia Woolf was living in the suburbs to regain her health but nipping up to London to relieve her boredom, as she confided to her diary. Natives of the civilization which invented the mandatory weekend in the country, she and her husband maintained a house in East Sussex as well, within one and a half hours commuting distance of the city. Her sister Vanessa Bell was ensconced in a fascinating communal arrangement a few miles away and other friends had houses nearby in the rolling countryside south of London.

I am proposing two or more excursions to these Woolf outposts, all of which can be accomplished by public transportation. An outing by car, however, would permit combining Richmond (reachable separately by underground) with two places in the country. These trips should be made between April and the end of October. During the winter, the gardens are closed and visiting hours sharply curtailed.

TO THE SUBURBS:
RICHMOND
Underground: District Line to Richmond or
British Rail from Waterloo Station to Richmond.

Richmond is a small, elegant English town in which one can see the antecedents of the upscale suburbs of New York and Boston.

Climbing the hill from the station through the business district one arrives at Number 17 The Green, the Woolfs's first address in Richmond. Charming alleys of shops lead off from the massive stretch of emerald turf. A Tudor gateway frames a housing development incorporating a palace of Henry VIII. A stroll up Richmond Hill leads to a familiar landscape, Turner's View From Richmond Hill in the National Gallery in London.

In March 1915, the Woolfs moved to Hogarth House on Paradise Road, a few minutes from Richmond High Street. They occupied half of the double brick Georgian house until 1924. During German air raids Virginia slept in the basement which became the press room after they founded their publishing venture, Hogarth Press in 1917. Here Virginia set the type for T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land in 1923. From the back windows of the house she could see Kew Gardens, one of her favorite walking spots and the setting for her short story of the same name. Kew Gardens, in which she started her "probings of the mind," was the first commercial success of the Hogarth Press.

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew's official name, contains within its 300 acres 19th century greenhouses and the 1987 Princess of Wales Conservatory. The residence of King George III and his queen, Kew Palace as well as their summer house Queen Charlotte's Cottage are worth visits. Underground: Kew Gardens.

TO EAST SUSSEX:
MONK'S HOUSE AND CHARLESTON

Back from a good week end at Rodmell--a week end of no talking, sinking at once into deep safe book reading; & then sleep: clear transparent; with the may tree like a breaking wave outside; & all the garden green tunnels, mounds of green: & then to wake into the hot still day, & never a person to be seen, never an interruption: the place to ourselves:the long hours. [D v.4,6/13/32]

Virginia and Leonard bought Monk's House in 1919 and worked hard on the house and on their writings, entertained and rested there for the remainder of their lives. The modest property was their refuge.

Rodmell, a village descended from a Saxon settlement, figures in Virginia Woolf's short stories and sketches. She drew on the villagers for her last novel Between the Acts, written during recurrent depression and published after her death. On the morning of March 28, 1941, she left the house and walked down to the River Ouse. With a stone in the pocket of her fur coat, she waded in and drowned. Leonard continued to live at Monk's House until his death in 1969. Their ashes are buried in the garden.

Built in 1707, the house sits smack up against the tiny main street of the village on three-fourths of an acre. It was a wreck when the Woolfs acquired it at auction.

"Monk's House will be perhaps the ugliest house in Sussex-not plain ugliness, either, but cultured ugliness, which is worse," Virginia wrote to Vanessa when they took possession. [L v.2,7/17/19]

It struck me as one of the most uncomfortable houses of 20th century habitation I had ever seen until a docent in another writer's house owned by the National Trust assured me that the English still liked their country houses spartan even to the lack of central heating. The Woolfs succumbed to installing electricity and after seven years retired the two outhouses. "And, dearest Vita," Virginia wrote to Vita Sackville-West, "we are having two waterclosets made, one paid for by Mrs. Dalloway, the other by The Common Reader: both dedicated to you." [L v.3, 2/17/26]

Yet the house speaks volumes, explicating the soul of this most contradictory writer and the complexities of her marriage.

Low ceilings and wooden beams make the interior seem cramped. The walls, painted a bilious green favored by Virginia and deplored by Vanessa, contribute to the gloom. Decorations by Vanessa and Duncan Grant, her lover and artistic partner, compensate for the physical defects of the house and display the cheerful spirit of the Omega Workshop philosophy. They painted chairs and tables, framed mirrors and the backs of chairs in needlework. For the hearth in Virginia's bedroom, Vanessa composed a landscape of a lighthouse and a sailing ship, in tribute to the publication of To the Lighthouse in 1927. The room, in which Virginia slept alone in a narrow bed, looking up at the sky on sleepless nights, is an extension of the house entered only from the garden.

The garden was "the point" of the house, Leonard's preserve and Virginia's to enjoy and share with friends like Lytton Strachey, T. S. Eliot and E.M. Forster. "This is going to be the pride of our hearts; I warn you;" she confided to Janet Case, her classics tutor and lifelong friend. [L v.2, 7/23/19]

Everything is small in scale: stone walls and a planted border, a walled patch of green lawn, the orchard consisting of three apple trees bearing the pallor of old age, a fig tree, a tiny pond ("clinique for ailing fish,") a lawn for bowls.

A view of the South Downs, those intriguing undulations of land streaked with patches of chalk, gives the garden its splendor. Virginia exulted at the sight, after rain, of the "sun coming out and stroking the downs...how they turn from green to blue, like opals?" [L v.3, 2/17/26]

At the end of the garden abutting the village church (whose pealing bells annoyed her) is a wooden lodge, originally constructed as a studio for Virginia. Here she worked on several of her novels, starting with Jacob's Room.

But to write a novel in the heart of London is next to an impossibility. I feel as if I were nailing a flag to the top of a mast in a raging gale. [L v.3, 3/2/26]

Windows on two sides of the lodge overlook The Downs. Virginia sat at a large desk in the middle of the room on a chair with a hard rush seat. She wrote on blue paper against a green blotter. She composed letters to Leonard and Vanessa here just before she walked out to commit suicide.

The lodge was enlarged by Trekkie Parsons, a painter with whom Leonard shared his life for many of his years after Virginia's death. It houses an exhibition of photographs and letters.

Visiting hours for Monk's House are rationed to two afternoons a week from April to the end of October. Telephone for information to the National Trust of East Sussex: 1 892 890651

Nessa presides over the most astonishing menage; Belgian hares, governesses, children, gardeners, hens, ducks and painting all the time, till every inch of the house is a different colour. [L v.2, 5/5/19]

Four miles from Rodmell outside the village of Firle is Charleston Farm, the property which served as country retreat and eventually permanent home for Vanessa Bell and her complicated family of spouse, lover, their mutual friends and lovers, and assorted children. Leonard Woolf recommended the farm to Vanessa in 1916 when her beloved Duncan Grant and his inamorato David (Bunny) Garnett were looking for agricultural work to excuse them from military service. Maynard Keynes, out of harm's way in a post at the Treasury, spent his weekends at the farm. There in 1919 he worked on The Economic Consequences of the Peace, his prophetic attack on the punitive terms of the peace treaty leveled by the Allies upon the Germans.

According to Keynes's biographer Robert Skidelsky, Charleston was to become "Bloomsbury's chief rural outpost." Vanessa--earth mother, bawdy conversationalist and free-spirited artist--was a more relaxed hostess than her sister at Monk's House.

The Woolfs, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey and E.M. Forster were frequent guests. Seeking safety for himself and his library at the outbreak of World War II, Clive Bell moved down from London and took over Vanessa's spacious bedroom.

The renovation of the main house, a 16th century relic, by the Charleston Trust after Duncan's death in 1978, has preserved the effervescence and wit of the Omega philosophy. Bold nudes, trompe l'oeil flowerings and mythical scenes decorate nearly every surface amenable to paint. Vanessa's studio, filled with paintings, photographs and memorablilia, is the focal spot of the house. One can almost hear the laughter--and the sobs--ringing down through the decades. Charleston is a house of lively ghosts. The docents are enthusiastic in clarifying art history and the Bloomsbury maze of sexual liaisons.

A barn has been converted into the Charleston Shop. It has a seductive inventory of books, textiles, ceramics, painted furniture and some items of clothing. A small teahouse across the road serves beverages and cookies.

Visiting, by guided tour only, is on Wednesdays to Saturdays from the end of March to the end of October.Telephone:1 323 811265.

Transportation from London: To Knole: British Rail service every 30 minutes to Sevenoaks; half hour ride. Walk one and a half miles to the castle. Also taxi and hourly bus service. Open from April through October, Wednesday through Friday and Sunday. Telephone: 1 732 450608. To Sissinghurst Castle Gardens: British Rail service twice hourly to Staplehurst, a 55-minute trip. Taxi to the Gardens, five miles distant. Telephone: 1 580 715330.

One goes to the Kentish countryside, closer to London than East Sussex, not to find Virginia Woolf herself but rather to discover Vita Sackville-West, the aristocratic writer with whom she had an affair over several years. Vita was the inspiration for Woolf's Orlando: A Biography, a fantasy about an Elizabethan man who becomes a woman at the age of 30 and proceeds to romp through four centuries accreting adventures until, in October 1928, she settles down at Knole. Vita's son Nigel Nicholson called Orlando "the longest and most charming love letter in literature."

Knole is one of those vast domains the English insist on calling a private house. The 365-room Tudor building set in a 1,000-acre deer park had been in the hands of the Sackville family for three centuries. Vita was raised on the estate and loved it passionately but was prevented by her gender from inheriting it when her father died.

Orlando loved it as well and his/her story takes place mostly at Knole.

There it lay in the early sunshine of spring. It looked a town rather than a house, but a town built, not hither and thither, as this man wished or that, but circumspectly, by a single architect with one idea in his head. Courts and buildings, grey, red, plum colour, lay orderly and symmetrical;...the buildings were some of them low, some pointed; here was a chapel, there a belfry; ...while smoke from innumerable chimneys curled perpetually into the air.

At first sight, disbelief is likely to take the visitor's breath away particularly when a doe and her fawn skitter across the path to the front door. A facsimile of the bound manuscript of the novel on display in the Great Hall brings one down to literary ground.

It's all there for the reader to see through Virginia's infrequently displayed reportorial skill: the Great Staircase and the vast oak-panelled galleries hung with the portraits of kings and earls painted by Gainsborough and Reynolds, the Billiard Table Court, the King's Bedroom with James II's silver furniture, and the Venetian Ambassador's Room:

The room...shone like a shell that has lain at the bottom of the sea for centuries and has been crusted over and painted a million tints by the water; it was rose and yellow, green and sand-coloured. It was frail as a shell, as iridescent and as empty. No Ambassador would ever sleep there again. Ah, but she knew where the heart of the house still beat.

Even the bowls of pot pourri "which was made as the Conqueror had taught them many hundred years ago and from the same roses..." are placed on window sills and tables. Same recipe, the official brochure declares.

Deprived of Knole, Vita and her husband Harold Nicholson, a diplomat and historian, had to make do with a lesser country abode. When they bought it in 1930, Sissinghurst in the Weald (or wooded lands) of Kent, was a shambles of an Elizabethan castle built by relatives of the Sackvilles. The Nicholsons transformed it into a comfortable home in which industrious writers could work and collaborate on the creation of a series of spectacular gardens.

There is very little of Virginia Woolf at Sissinghurst Castle Gardens except an insight into another unconventional marriage like hers and Leonard's. Vita chose a solitary life in the country and the Woolfs paid few visits. In the exhibition hall is the second-hand Minerva platen machine, operated by a treadle which did the printing for the Hogarth Press. Virginia gave it to Vita in 1930.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Biography, Memoirs, Diaries, Letters

• Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1972. 92 W9137B
• Bloomsbury Recalled, New York, Columbia University Press, 1995. 920B 6535B
• Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. 92W 9137L
• Nigel Nicholson, Portrait of a Marriage, New York, Atheneum, 1973. 92 S1217N
• Sidelsky, Robert, John Maynard Keynes: A Biography. Vol.1 Hopes Betrayed, 1883-1920, New York, Viking, 1983. 92 K446S

• Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicholson and Joanne Trautmann, 6 vols, London, Hogarth Press, 1975-80. 92 W9137W
• Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie, 5 vols, London, Hogarth Press, 1977-84. 92 W9137W
• Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by Leonard Woolf, New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1954. 92 W9137W

Fiction and Essays by Virginia Woolf

• Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts, New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1941. FW
• Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room, London, Hogarth Press, 1929. FW
• Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being, New York and London, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. 92 W9137W
• Virginia Woolf, Monday or Tuesday, a collection of short stories including Kew Gardens, New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1921. FW
• Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1925. FW
• Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography, New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929. FW
• Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, London, Hogarth Press, 1978. 828W
• Virginia Woolf, The Years, London, Hogarth Press, 1937. FW
• Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, London, Hogarth Press, 1982. FW

Miscellaneous

• David Daiches & John Flower, Literary Landscapes of the British Isles: A Narrative Atlas, New York, Paddington Press, c1979 820.9D
• Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Virginia Woolf, Life and London/ A Biography of Place, New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1987. 92 W9137W

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