This afternoon, as part of our Literature Cambridge course on Virginia Woolf’s Gardens, we visited Newnham College in search of Virginia Woolf. We found her in several places.
Garden walk
Lottie Collis leads us on a garden tour.
First, we found her in the gardens, as we were led on a walking tour of the college’s four gardens by Lottie Collis, head of the garden team. We went from the original mid-Victorian garden with winding paths to the Arts and Crafts garden focused on form and function, to the sunken rose garden. All were in place in 1928 when Woolf visited.
Each garden was peaceful and beautiful in its own way, providing sensual stimulation to the eye as well as the nose, particularly when among the roses. In that outdoor space, the air smelled like heaven.
Site of the talk
But the most exciting part of the tour for me was our visit to Newnham’s dining hall, the site where Virginia Woolf gave her October 1928 talk on women and fiction. That talk, along with one given at Girton College, became A Room of One’s Own (1929), a landmark text for feminists worldwide.
The size, grandeur, and light-filled beauty of the room took my breath away. It was a room fitting for someone of Woolf’s current stature and the women who came before her. It was completely unlike the small, dim setting I had imagined for Woolf’s famous talk about the poorly treated women students she described.
Reactions to Woolf’s Newnham College talk
Woolf came to Newnham at the invitation of the Newnham Arts Society. Her audience that day is estimated at roughly around 40, but since no records were kept of the luncheon menu or the participants, it is difficult to be certain of the number or of the food served at the lunch.
Reactions to her talk about women and fiction were mixed. The first, published in the student magazine Thersites during the Michaelman Term of 1928, was positive. The next one, published years later in A Newnham Anthology of 1970, was not.
The woman who led our tour of the dining hall shared them both with our class and with Blogging Woolf. And we share them below, along with photos from our garden tour and our visit to the dining hall.
Exhibit of Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group
The Newnham College Library has a special exhibit of Hogarth Press books by Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group on the second floor of the new wing of the library. We viewed the exhibit. But sadly, photographs were not permitted. All of the materials are housed in the library’s special collections.
1928 commentary on Woolf’s talk.
Commentary on Woolf’s talk published in the Newnham Anthologies of 1970.
Mid-Victorian style garden outside Newnham’s Old Hall.
Students in the Literature Cambridge class, Virginia Woolf’s Gardens, walk the path on a tour of Newnham College gardens.
Just one view of one of the Newnham Hall gardens.
Students in the Literature Cambridge Virginia Woolf’s Gardens course In the Sunken Rose Garden at Newnham College.
Closeup of a yellow rose in bud in the Sunken Rose Garden at Newnham College
A perennial bed at Newnham College
The Newnham College dining hall where Virginia Woolf gave her famous talk on women and fiction in 1928.
Another view of the Newnham College dining hall where Woolf spoke in 1928.
A view of the elaborate, light-filled dining hall ceiling at Newnham College.
Alcove in the Newnham College dining hall.
View of the gardens from along the corridor leading to the Newnham College dining hall where Woolf gave her famous 1928 talk.
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