Visual Notes on A Room of One's Own

Looking out from Woolf's Writing Studio at Monk's House, Sussex

A few years after she wrote Room

Addition to Monk's House (1928); after financial success of Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927)

Early 30's

Vita with Virginia and with her two sons.  Radclyffe Hall, author of The Well of Loneliness, on trial for obscenity while Woolf was writing Room

Although Woolf call the campus "Oxbridge," specific visual details make clear that it is based on Cambridge; her brothers and their friends all went to King's or Trinity Colleges

Milton's draft of "Lycidas" is indeed held in the Wren Library

Newnham was one of the two Cambridge Colleges for women.  Located across the river from the other colleges on a side street, it is still easy to miss today.

Pernel Strachey, sister of Lytton, was Head of Newnham college from 1927 on, and in 1928 invited Woolf to deliver the first of several lectures which became A Room of One's Own

At a 2004 lecture by Dame Gillian Beer, in the same hall where Woolf spoke.  Anne Oliver Bell edited Woolf's diaries, and Frances Spaulding has written definitive biographies of all the Bloomsbury artists: Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Frye

Maps of various Bloomsbury Sqs in which Woolf resided.  She lived longest at Tavistock Sq (1924-39), pictured above.  It was destroyed during the blitz.

The names of  (male) writers and thinkers appeared under the windows

A refurbished reading room left off the names

It has been suggested that Vanessa Bell's cover replicates a window of the reading room, with Woolf's name inserted in the pantheon, and the clock appropriately pictured at V-time.

Books and Manuscripts previously held at The British Museum are now housed at The British Library, including the notebook of Mrs Dalloway, childhood newspapers, and Woolf's suicide note