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Monks
House Rodmell, In 1919 Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard, leading lights of the literary Bloomsbury Group, bought this modest weatherboarded house in the main street of Rodmell as a retreat from London life. The large garden and beautiful view across the river Ouse to the hills beyond made up for some of the disadvantages of the house. These included a well as the only source of water and oil lamps for lighting. During their years at Monk's House the Woolfs entertained some of the best-known literary and artistic figures of the day. Among the visitors were Vita Sackville-West, Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster, Maynard Keynes, T.S. Eliot and Roger Fry. Many were members of the Bloomsbury Group which Virginia and Vanessa founded with their brother Thoby. There are only echoes of Virginia Woolf at Monk's house but the house is full of reminders of the talented circle in which she moved. At Monk's House there are pieces of painted furniture by Vanessa and Duncan Grant in post-Impressionist style. In the sitting room there is a table and chairs in muted abstract designs relieved by a panel of peaches on the back of each chair. Decorated china by Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and her son Quentin is displayed on the mantlepiece and in the dresser in the tiny kitchen. Every room is hung with paintings by the family circle. There are paintings and portraits by Vanessa including a haunting likeness of Virginia. The garden is still as the couple left it. There is a large open lawn where they played bowls, some fine old trees and three ponds. Near the house there is a formal garden where paths, yew hedges and flint walls shelter a herbaceous area. Virginia and Leonard Woolf divided their time between Monk's House and their London house until 1940 when the latter was bombed. After the novelist Virginia Woolf took her life in 1941, drowning in the River Ouse, her ashes were scattered under an elm just beyond the garden of Monks House. The plaque
which her husband, Leonard, raised to her memory is now inside the garden.
It has a quotation from her novel 'The Waves': |
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