Virginia Woolf's Garden


Book Description

This chronological account takes you through the key events in the lives of Virginia and Leonard Woolf through a history of their home, Monk’s House in Sussex, where Virginia wrote most of her major novels. The story of this magical garden includes selected quotations from the writings of the Woolfs which reveal how important a role the garden played in their lives, as a source of both pleasure and inspiration. Bought by them in 1919 as a country retreat, Monk's House was somewhere they came to read, write and work in the garden. Virginia wrote first in a converted tool shed, and later in her purpose-built wooden writing lodge tucked into a corner of the orchard. Enriched with rare archive images and embroidered garden plans, the book takes the reader on a journey through the various garden ‘rooms’, (including the Italian Garden, the Fishpond Garden, the Millstone Terrace and the Walled Garden), each presented in the context of the lives of the Woolfs, with fascinating glimpses into their daily routines at Rodmell.




Kew Gardens


Book Description

»Kew Gardens« is a short story by Virginia Woolf, first published in 1919. VIRGINIA WOOLF [1882–1941] was an English author. With novels like Jacob’s Room [1922], Mrs Dalloway [1925], To the Lighthouse [1927], and Orlando [1928], she became a leading figure of modernism and is considered one of the most important English-language authors of the 20th century. As a thinker, with essays like A Room of One’s Own [1929], Woolf has influenced the women’s movement in many countries.




The White Garden


Book Description

In March 1941, Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with stones and drowned herself in England’s River Ouse. Her body was found three weeks later. What seemed like a tragic ending at the time was, in fact, just the beginning of a mystery. . . . Six decades after Virginia Woolf’s death, landscape designer Jo Bellamy has come to Sissinghurst Castle for two reasons: to study the celebrated White Garden created by Woolf’s lover Vita Sackville-West and to recover from the terrible wound of her grandfather’s unexplained suicide. In the shadow of one of England’s most famous castles, Jo makes a shocking find: Woolf’s last diary, its first entry dated the day after she allegedly killed herself. If authenticated, Jo’s discovery could shatter everything historians believe about Woolf’s final hours. But when the Woolf diary is suddenly stolen, Jo’s quest to uncover the truth will lead her on a perilous journey into the tumultuous inner life of a literary icon whose connection to the White Garden ultimately proved devastating. Rich with historical detail, The White Garden is an enthralling novel of literary suspense that explores the many ways the past haunts the present–and the dark secrets that lurk beneath the surface of the most carefully tended garden.




The Writer's Garden


Book Description

The Writer's Garden presents an intriguing study of the beautiful gardens and outdoor spaces of 30 history's greatest writers.




Life in the Garden


Book Description

From the Booker Prize winner and national bestselling author, reflections on gardening, art, literature, and life Penelope Lively takes up her key themes of time and memory, and her lifelong passions for art, literature, and gardening in this philosophical and poetic memoir. From the courtyards of her childhood home in Cairo to a family cottage in Somerset, to her own gardens in Oxford and London, Lively conducts an expert tour, taking us from Eden to Sissinghurst and into her own backyard, traversing the lives of writers like Virginia Woolf and Philip Larkin while imparting her own sly and spare wisdom. "Her body of work proves that certain themes never go out of fashion," writes the New York Times Book Review, as true of this beautiful volume as of the rest of the Lively canon. Now in her eighty-fourth year, Lively muses, "To garden is to elide past, present, and future; it is a defiance of time."




A Room of One's Own


Book Description

Virginia Woolf's playful exploration of a satirical »Oxbridge« became one of the world's most groundbreaking writings on women, writing, fiction, and gender. A Room of One's Own [1929] can be read as one or as six different essays, narrated from an intimate first-person perspective. Actual history blends with narrative and memoir. But perhaps most revolutionary was its address: the book is written by a woman for women. Male readers are compelled to read through women's eyes in a total inversion of the traditional male gaze. VIRGINIA WOOLF [1882–1941] was an English author. With novels like Jacob’s Room [1922], Mrs Dalloway [1925], To the Lighthouse [1927], and Orlando [1928], she became a leading figure of modernism and is considered one of the most important English-language authors of the 20th century. As a thinker, with essays like A Room of One’s Own [1929], Woolf has influenced the women’s movement in many countries.




Virginia Woolf and the Natural World


Book Description

Virginia Woolf and the Natural World is a compilation of thirty-one essays presented at the twentieth annual international conference on Virginia Woolf. This volume explores Woolf's complex engagement with the natural world, an engagement that was as political as it was aesthetic. The diversity of topics within this collection-ecofeminism, the nature of time, the nature of the self, nature and sporting, botany, climate, and landscape, just to name a few-fosters a deeper understanding of the nature of nature in Woolf's works. Contributors include Bonnie Kime Scott, Carrie Rohman, Diana Swanson, Elisa Kay Sparks, Beth Rigel Daugherty, Jane Goldman, and Diane Gillespie, among many others from the international community of Woolf scholars.




Nurse Lugton's Curtain


Book Description

As Nurse Lugton dozes, the animals on the patterned curtain she is sewing come alive.




Charleston


Book Description

Set in the heart of the Sussex Downs, Charleston Farmhouse is the most important remaining example of Bloomsbury decorative style, created by the painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Quentin Bell, the younger son of Clive and Vanessa Bell, and his daughter Virghinia Nicholson, tell the story of this unique house, linking it with some of the leading cultural figures who were invited there, including Vanessa's sister Virginia Woolf, the writer Lytton Strachey, the economist Maynard Keynes and the art critic Roger Fry. The house and garden are portrayed through Alen MacWeeney's atmostpheric photographs; pictures from Vanessa Bell's family album convey the flavour of the household in its heyday.




Virginia Woolf


Book Description

Julia Briggs has written a chronological exploration of Woolf's life that reads her life through her books, using the novels to create a new form of biography. Each chapter is illustrated with a sample of Woolf's original manuscript.