Hatchard’s will celebrate the publication of Maggie Humm’s new book, The Bloomsbury Photographs (2024) with a special “lantern show” at 18:30 BST on Tuesday, Oct. 22, at its shop on Piccadilly.
About the event
At the event, Maggie Humm will offer a fresh portrait of the Bloomsbury Group by showing a curated selection of the thousands of photographs that shows them in a setting of domestic intimacy. Scenes include the pastimes, children, clothes, houses, servants, pets, and holidays of the group.
According to Hatchard’s: “Several photographs are blurred as if taken in a hurried moment of time, and unguarded close-ups reflect complex personal relationships – revealing them to be more than simply documents; they are testimonies of relationships, friendships, and the significance of empathetic lives.”
Humm is vice-chair of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and author of many monographs about Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury, including her novel Talland House, which is based on Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.
Join the sold-out crowd at the Sept. 11 unveiling of the Virginia Woolf heritage plaque at Talland House, her summertime home in St. Ives, Cornwall from 1882-1894.
Professor Maggie Humm, vice-chair of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, and Councillor Johnnie Wells, Deputy Mayor of St. Ives at the Talland House plaque unveiling. Photo: St. Ives September Festival
The plaque, which marks Woolf’s childhood time in St. Ives, was unveiled as part of the St. Ives September Festival last Sunday. The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain shared the video below to document the occasion. Tony Mason produced the film, which runs just under two minutes.
About the plaque
The first in the black and white colors of the Cornwall flag, the plaque is the product of a long-running campaign by the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, led by Woolf scholar Maggie Humm and the St. Ives Town Council.
The project received unanimous support from St. Ives Town Council as well as from local MP Derek Thomas.
The Council, together with Talland House’s owner Peter Eddy and the society, hosted the sold-out event, which was fully booked within hours of being announced. The event included a reading by Humm from her novel Talland House (2020).
Humm and others are pictured in the video below. In it, you will get a view of Godrevy Bay and the famous Godrevy Lighthouse.
The heritage plaque noting the literary historical significance of Talland House wasunveiled at 3 p.m. (BST) today before a capacity crowd at Talland House, Virginia Woolf’s summertime home in St. Ives from 1882-1894.
Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, had the lease on Talland House from 1878-1895.
About the plaque
The plaque, which marks Woolf’s childhood time in St. Ives, was unveiled as part of the St. Ives September Festival.
The first in the black and white colors of the Cornwall flag, the plaque is the product of a long-running campaign by the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, led by Woolf scholar Maggie Humm and the St. Ives Town Council.
The plague received unanimous support from St. Ives Town Council as well as from local MP Derek Thomas.
The Council, together with Talland House’s owner Peter Eddy and the society, hosted the sold-out event, which was fully booked within hours of being announced. The event included a reading by Humm from her novel Talland House (2020).
More Woolf events part of St. Ives September Festival
Two other events related to Woolf are part of the September Festival, which runs Sept. 10-24. They include:
A talk titled “Virginia Woolf: Memories of St Ives “by Sarah Latham Phillips, a member of the executive council of the Virginia Woolf Society, at 2 p.m. on Sept. 13 at Porthmeor Studios. Tickets are £6.
A tour of the Talland House Gardens conducted by Polly Carter at 10 a.m. on Sept. 21. Tickets are £6. Book by emailing poll.carter1@googlemail.com
Professor Maggie Humm, vice-chair of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, and Councillor Johnnie Wells, Deputy Mayor of St. Ives at the Talland House plaque unveiling today. Humm read from her 2020 novel Talland House at the event. Photo: St. Ives September Festival
On Sept. 11, one of England’s famous plaques noting the literary historical significance of a particular location will be unveiled at Talland House, Virginia Woolf’s summertime home in St. Ives from 1882-1894.
Blogging Woolf was part of a pilgrimage to Talland House in 2004. This photo depicts the front right corner of the home.
Unlike London’s Blue Plaques, this one will have a black background and white letters, the colors of the Cornish flag.
Although Woolf sets her 1927 novel To the Lighthouse in the Hebrides, St. Ives is its true location and inspiration. Godrevy Lighthouse, three miles out across the bay, was part of her view each summer and inspired the titular pilgrimage made by the novel’s family, the Ramsays.
Humm, author of the novel Talland House,was a major force behind the effort. She advocated for the move by providing St. Ives Town Council with useful and persuasive information about the summers Woolf spent at Talland House until the age of 12.
The society proposed the idea for a plaque 20 years ago but stepped up its efforts during the past four years. The St. Ives Town Council approved the idea in March.
We first reported about this effort in October of 2021.
Community response
The proposal for the plaque elicited more than a dozen comments from supporters, local and otherwise.
Here is one from the woman who has restored the Talland House gardens to the glory of Woolf’s time:
The research I have undertaken to inform me about which heritage plants to use in the garden has revealed, beyond my initial imaginings, just how important Talland House and St Ives were to Woolf and to what was to become a groundbreaking new form of literature and key component of Modernism. In her memoirs she describes a philosophy of life that was formed in the garden at Talland house, that she carried with her throughout her life and that fed into her work, informed it even. The house, and gardens, significance cannot be underestimated! – Polly Carter
And here is another from a St. Ives resident and a former resident of Talland House:
As an ex-resident of the house I met many people who had travelled to St. Ives purely for the Virginia Woolf connection; often I would see them in the road looking up to the house and would go and talk to them. Seeing how much the house and surrounding area meant to these people, a plaque honouring Virginia and marking the place that inspired her so much would be perfect. I spoke to previous owners of the building who said Virginia Woolf fans have been coming for years. Chris Roberts
Note: Talland House sits above Porthminster beach. This blog’s header photo depicts a 2004 view of the beach from just below Talland House.
If you can get to Cambridge or London this month or next, you are in luck. You have two chances to learn more about the relationship between Maynard Keynes and ballerina Lydia Lopokova, straight from Susan Sellers, author of Firebird: A Bloomsbury Love Story, which explores the couple’s love story.
Maggie Humm, whose recent novel Talland House explores the life of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse heroine, Lily Briscoe, joins Sellers for both conversations, the first in Cambridge and the second in London.
Here are the details for both events.
A Bloomsbury Love Story
When: Sunday 24 April 2022, 10-11 a.m. BST Where: The Cambridge Union Society, 9a Bridge Street, Cambridge CB2 1UB Why: Part of the Cambridge Literary Festival Cost: Tickets £12. Book here.
Susan Sellers and Maggie Humm, two world-leading experts talk about the women of Bloomsbury, and what a lifetime of reading, researching, teaching and writing about Virginia Woolf has taught them.
An Evening in Bloomsbury with Susan Sellers and Maggie Humm
When: Thursday 5 May 2022, 6.30 p.m. BST Where: Hatchards, 187 Piccadilly, London W1J 9LE Cost: Tickets £10 Book here.
Join Susan Sellers discussing the lives of Bloomsbury’s most unlikely lovers, Maynard Keynes and Lydia Lopokova, with Maggie Humm.
It is the winter of 1921 and Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes launch a flamboyant new production at London’s Alhambra Theatre. Maynard Keynes is in the audience, though he expects little from the evening. Despite Lydia’s many triumphs, including the title role in Stravinsky’s Firebird, Maynard’s mind is made up – he considers her ‘a rotten dancer’. Besides, Lydia has at least one husband in tow and Maynard has only ever loved men.
Tonight, however, as Susan Sellers relates, that is all about to change and while The Firebird is a fictional re-imagining, life is often stranger and more surprising. Especially, perhaps, when it comes to the lives of theBloomsbury Group.
About the speakers
Susan Sellers
Susan Sellers is professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of St. Andrews. Her first Bloomsbury-inspired novel, Vanessa and Virginia, was an editor’s pick for The New York Times and has been translated into 16 languages.
Maggie Humm
Maggie Humm is an Emeritus Professor, international Woolf scholar and novelist. She has written many books on feminism, art and Virginia Woolf, and in 2020 published her debut novel Talland House, a gripping historical romance/detective fiction set in picturesque Cornwall and London during World War I. Shortlisted for several prizes including Eyelands and Impress, Talland Housewas chosen by the Washington Independent Review of Books as one of its ’51 Favorite Books’ of 2020.
When the don met the dancer – this is the story of how Maynard Keynes, the great economist, fell for Lydia Lopokova, celebrity ballerina and Russian émigrée. And it is also a story of resistances, when a different kind of woman stepped into the settled world of Virginia, Vanessa, and all the rest of their English entourage. – In Firebird, Susan Sellers restages the bright Bloomsbury years of the early 1920s as they have never been seen before. – Rachel Bowlby
