A Literary Tube map of London by In the Book replaces Tube stations with famous novels based on the area in which they were set. The site asks, “How many have you read?” and includes Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.
Close-up of the Westminster Tube station near the home where Mrs. Dalloway prepares for her party.
The map was designed to act as a definitive virtual book tour of London for both locals and tourists, according to developers. They “believe literature has the wonderful ability to color a certain area like nothing else!”
Here’s what In the Book has to say about their latest creation:
The literary Tube map shows upper-class housewife Clarissa Dalloway preparing for her party near Westminster station, as well as Sherlock Holmes about to embark on another mystery near Baker Street. We can also see Roald Dahl’s famous tale The BFG two stops away from J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, two timeless children’s classics that are situated on the central line.
Developers say they “found it fascinating how certain genres and authors were married with certain parts of the map: Dickens’ London dominates the Central Line, while gothic Victorian works Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Picture of Dorian Gray can all be found haunting the Piccadilly Line. Zadie Smith’s works were located on the northwest Jubilee Line while Martin Amis’ novels were more prominent around West London.”
In The Book is a personalized book company based in Hertfordshire.
What: Study Day on Reading The Waves When: Saturday 21 September 2019 Where: Stapleford Granary Cost: £90/£80 students and Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain members.
What: Ellie Mitchell, Talk on Reading Ritual in The Waves When: Tuesday 15 October 2019 Where: Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge Cost: Free talks for Town and Gown
What: All-day reading of The Waves When: Sun. 27 October 2019 Where: Cambridge Cost: Free but places are limited. Email info@literaturecambridge.co.uk if you would like to attend.
Summer 2020 Courses
Virginia Woolf’s Women, 19-24 July 2020. An intensive week of lectures, seminars, tutorials, walks, talks, and visits to places of interest in Cambridge.
Reading the 1920s, 26-31 July 2020. An intensive study week on literature from the decade following the First World War. Authors include T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Lawrence, Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, Helen Zenna Smith, Edmund Blunden.
Discount for early bookings. Members of the VWSGB can book at the student rate, subject to availability.
Once our Literature Cambridge course on Virginia Woolf’s Gardens was over, it was time for a pilgrimage. So on a bright and sunny July Saturday, we climbed aboard our coach and headed to Monk’s House from Cambridge.
Our driver dropped us off in Rodmell after our three-hour trip and we literally headed down The Street. After a brief walk, we arrived at the front gate of the country home that Virginia and Leonard occupied, beginning in 1919.
It was magical. Walking through the gate and down the path, I felt as though I was on hallowed ground, following in the footsteps the Woolfs had made.
We ate lunch in the garden, watched a dramatic reading of a scene from Between the Acts, with Virginia’s Writing Lodge as a backdrop, toured the ground floor of the home fitted out with the Woolfs’ belongings, and wandered through the garden filled with colorful and profuse blooms.
Follow along as I share some photos from our day.
Front gate of Monk’s House
The path behind the Monk’s House gate
As the Monk’s House guidebook states, “Books dominated the house.” And books are the first thing you see as you enter through the low back doorway. They line the stairs to the second floor.
Off to the left is the original Monk’s House sitting room, furnished with pieces ranging from the 17th to the 20th centuries. The still life design on the fire screen is by Duncan Grant, with the needlework by his mother, Ethel Bartle Grant. The upholstered armchair to its right was Virginia’s favorite, featuring a print by Vanessa Bell.
Another view of the original Monk’s House sitting room, which was created when the Woolfs knocked down a partition wall in 1926. It combined areas for reading, writing, and eating. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant painted the dining table — with its geometric design of criss-cross strokes — and four chairs in the early 1930s.
The square coffee table in the center of the room is topped with tiles by Duncan Grant. They depict Venus at her toilet.
A table and six painted chairs with needlework panels designed by Vanessa Bell dominate the dining room. The needlework panels depict bowls of flowers against a window. Grant’s mother completed the embroidery.
The Monk’s House dining room fireplace
The oil portrait of Virginia Woolf painted by Vanessa Bell in 1912. It hangs on a wall between the stairway and the dining room at Monk’s House.
The doorway, framed with roses, that leads from the garden to Virginia Woolf’s bedroom at Monk’s House
Virginia Woolf’s bedroom was part of an extension to Monk’s House built in 1929. It truly was a room of her own as one had to enter it from the garden, as in the photo above.
The fireplace in Virginia Woolf’s ground floor bedroom is decorated with tiles that were a gift from Vanessa Bell. They depict a ship with a lighthouse in the distance.
Virginia Woolf’s Writing Lodge, built in 1934 and and extended in the 1950s by Leonard for his companion Trekkie Parsons. The new space is now used as an exhibition room.
This table sits inside the Writing Lodge covered with her tortoiseshell glasses, folders with handwritten labels that she used for her manuscripts, pen and ink, newspapers, and wads of rumpled paper.
Just one view of the extensive Monk’s House garden, lovingly tended by Leonard, with the central part consisting of a series of small spaces enclosed by plants and joined by a network of narrow paths.
The Millstone Terrace, whose name comes from the millstones the Woolfs found in the garden.
The Fish Pond, one of three ponds Leonard installed, this one on a narrow strip of south-facing garden enclosed on three sides by flint walls.
The lawn at Monk’s House where the Woolfs played bowls and visitors today continue the tradition.
Chanya Button’s new film Vita And Virginia will be shown at 8:15 p.m July 30 at the Barn Cinema, Dartington Hall, Devon, followed by a post-screening discussion of the film with Dr. Kirsty Martin, senior lecturer in English Literature at the University of Exeter.
The discussion will consider how Chanya Button’s film portrays the two main characters and their relationship, in connection with Kirsty’s own research into Virginia Woolf, as seen in her first book, Modernism and the Rhythms of Sympathy.
Dartington and the Bloomsbury group
The event will also provide an opportunity for attendees to learn more about Dartington’s connections with the Bloomsbury group, and the founders of the Dartington experiment, Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst, and the Arts department there.
The Q&A will be hosted by The Dartington Hall Trust’s Arts Correspondent, William Kemp, who before joining Dartington worked at Charleston in Sussex, the home of Bloomsbury Group artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.
Our marvelous Literature Cambridge course on Virginia Woolf’s Gardens ended last Friday. But perhaps the best was yet to come.
Our class, along with some of those enrolled in this week’s Fictions of Home class, went on an all-day outing to Monk’s House, Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s home in Rodmell, and Charleston, the nearby home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant and others. Beautiful, incredibly moving, and breathtaking.
I’m traveling today, so only have time to post these tweets. But I promise to provide more about the trip after I am back in a room of my own.
From brilliant scholar to good sport & impromptu actress, @KJakubowicz shines “on stage” @MonksHouseNT in impromptu performance of scene from Virginia Woolf’s “Between the Acts” during our @LitCamb outing today. Bravo! pic.twitter.com/BMUweT0UFt
