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.
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.
[…] we reported back in 2011, Virginia Woolf’s Monk’s House photos are now online, thanks to Harvard […]
[…] philosophers and artists including T.S. Eliot among others. Virginia documented most of her life at Monk’s House in photographs, including portraits and group pictures of many who visited the […]
Great way to spend a few hours in the afternoon, look at VW’s picture albums…lovely pictures of Julian Bell in particular and some unseen poses of Virginia…definitely a must!