Want to stay in a Bloomsbury bedroom dedicated to Virginia Woolf that is also on the site of a home formerly occupied by Virginia and Leonard Woolf? Maybe you can.
The site of the building at 37 Mecklenburgh Square in which Virginia Woolf lived.
The Woolfs lived on the top floor at 37 Mecklenburgh Square, Bloomsbury, during the London blitz from 1939-1940, according to Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s Virginia Woolf Life and London: Bloomsbury and Beyond (1987/2011).
Now on that site is the William Goodenough House, which is part of Goodenough College. It has one student-style bedroom dedicated to Virginia, and each year that room is allocated to a literary student who, upon arrival, finds a copy of A Room of One’s Own on their bedside table.
Naida Babic was a student at Goodenough College in 2021. She recently met up with College Director Alice Walpole and friends to install a framed copy of one of her poems outside the room dedicated to Woolf, next to Woolf’s commemorative plaque.
She contacted Blogging Woolf to tell us about it and directed us to a story posted on the college website, where you can read the poem she wrote.
She explains: “I was living at Goodenough College while completing the last term of my MA Creative Writing programme at Birkbeck University, London. I wrote my poem “In the Hand of Virginia” during my poetry module.”
To commemorate the occasion, Maggie Humm, emeritus professor of cultural studies at the University of East London and the author or editor of 14 scholarly books and two novels, as well as Vice-Chair of the Virginia Woolf’s Society of Great Britain, gave a lecture on “The Photography of the Writer Virginia Woolf and Her Sister, the Artist Vanessa Bell.”
Maggie Humm talks about Woolf’s photography and how it relates to her writing at Dalloway Day 2018 at Gower Street Waterstones.
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