As we reported back in 2011, Virginia Woolf’s Monk’s House photos are now online, thanks to Harvard University. You can view the entire 182 pages of the photo albums, page by page.
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.
Details from the catalog item description
The majority of the photographs in the album are snapshots possibly taken by Virginia Woolf or by her friends and family. The rest of the photographs include portraits or scenic landscapes of their homes or from their travels. Subjects include Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Julian Bell, Quentin Bell, Vanessa Bell, George Duckworth, Stella Duckworth, T. S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, Angelica Garnett, Duncan Grant, John Lehmann, Noel Olivier, William Plomer, V. (Victoria) Sackville-West, Adrian Stephen, Julia Duckworth Stephen and Sir Leslie Stephen. Some locations of the photographs were identified.
Some were taken at the home of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Monk’s House (Rodmell, England) and at their publishing business, Hogarth Press. Other family homes included is the childhood home of Virginia Woolf, Talland House in St. Ives (Cornwall, England) as well as the home of her sister, Vanessa Bell, Charleston Farmhouse (West Firle, England). Other locations included Sissinghurst Garden (England) as well as other locations. Virginia and Leonard Woolf also took photographs during their vacation in England, France and Germany. Most of these images are of landscapes or buildings.
More on the albums
Read more about the albums on Open Culture and on the My Modern Met website.
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