Blogging Woolf

Screen shot of one digitized album photo

What an age we live in. So many resources for the study of Virginia Woolf and her work are available online, and now we have another. The Monk’s House photograph albums, which include more than 1,000 photos taken by Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and others, have been digitized by Harvard University library staff.

The digitized material now available online includes all the images in Virginia Woolf’s photo albums, numbered one through six, that Frederick R. Koch gave to Harvard’s Houghton Library in 1983. They include the 1,000 photos in Maggie Humm’s 2006 book Snapshots of Bloomsbury: the Private Lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell.

Snapshots of Bloomsbury

In the albums are snapshots taken by Woolf and her friends and family, including portraits and scenic landscapes of their homes and travels. Virginia and Vanessa were avid photographers, using a portable Kodak to shoot their pictures. They also developed their photos, printed them and mounted them in albums.

Vara Neverow tracked down the URLs  for each album and asked Blogging Woolf to post them. And Stuart N. Clarke advises that you can find corrections and additions to the descriptions of the Greek photos in Martin Ferguson Smith’s, “Virginia Woolf’s Second Visit to Greece,” English Studies, XCII, 1 (2011), 55-83.

Please see the right sidebar under the heading “Digital Archives” for links to all five Monk’s House albums.