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The long-awaited life-sized bronze statue of Virginia Woolf officially arrived in Richmond today, the place where Virginia and her husband Leonard lived from 1914-1924 and where they established their famous Hogarth Press in 1917.

Woolf’s great niece Emma Woolf and Emma’s 2-year-old son Ludovic Cecil Woolf, along with Sophie Partridge, great, great niece of Virginia Woolf, were set to unveil the statue.

Designed by acclaimed artist Laury Dizengremel, the sculpture is located on the upper terraces of Richmond Riverside.

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Virginia Woolf will officially arrive in Richmond, where Woolf lived for 10 years, on Nov. 16. The life-sized bronze statue of the famous author will be unveiled at 2:30 p.m. by her great niece Emma Woolf and Emma’s 2-year-old son Ludovic Cecil Woolf, along with Sophie Partridge, great, great niece of Virginia Woolf, who is making the trip to Richmond from France.

Emma is the daughter of the late publisher Cecil Woolf, Leonard Woolf’s nephew, and Jean Moorcroft Wilson, the noted biographer of World War I poets.

Designed by acclaimed artist Laury Dizengremel, the sculpture will be installed on the upper terraces of Richmond Riverside. No tickets are required for the event. Note: The closest London Underground station is Richmond (on the District line and London Overground).

More at Books on the Rise

After the unveiling, Peter Fullagar, author of Virginia Woolf in Richmond, will  speak at 4 p.m. at Books on the Rise, a new local book shop, about Woolf’s years in Richmond. Tickets are required.

The shop is also selling all things related to Woolf, from books to maquettes and merchandise.

Project background

In 2017, arts and education charity Aurora Metro launched the project to commission, fund and erect a statue of Woolf in Richmond Upon Thames. It recognizes Woolf’s life in Richmond from 1915 to 1924, along with her founding of the Hogarth Press with husband Leonard and the publication of her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915.

Aurora Metro raised £50,000 to fund the statue. The charity’s sister company is Aurora Metro Publications, a local publisher with three decades of publishing original voices and promoting work in translation.

Aurora Metro is still soliciting funds to cover the installation, associated literary events and maintenance of the statue, which is the only full-sized statue of Woolf in the UK.

Follow on social media

For the latest news about the statue, follow on Twitter @VWoolfstatue or on Facebook/VWoolfStatue.

 

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Virginia Woolf has arrived in Richmond. The life-sized bronze statue of Woolf arrived this week and will be installed in November in the heart of the London borough where Woolf lived for 10 years.

Arts and education charity Aurora Metro launched the project to commission, fund and erect a statue of Woolf in Richmond Upon Thames in 2017. It recognizes Woolf’s life in Richmond from 1915 to 1924, along with her founding of The Hogarth Press with husband Leonard and the publication of her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915.

Aurora Metro raised £50,000 to fund the statue, designed by award-winning sculptor Laury Dizengremel. It features Woolf sitting on a bench and will be installed at Richmond Riverside near the entrance to Heron Court.

Aurora Metro is still soliciting funds to cover the installation, associated literary events and maintenance of the statue, which is the only full-sized statue of Woolf in the UK. Anyone who would like to be invited to the launch can do so by making a donation of £100 or more.

For the latest news about the statue, follow on Twitter @VWoolfstatue or on Facebook/VWoolfStatue.

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Got £3.5 million? If you do, you can buy Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s home in Richmond. The site where they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917 is up for sale again, but this time at a lower price.

In the fall of 2017, the refurbished home, where the Woolfs lived from 1915-1924, was on the market for a price of £4.4 million. It sold in 2019 for £2.95 million, property records show.

Before the redo

Emma Woolf in front of a vine-covered Hogarth House in Richmond in 2016.

The Woolfs’ former home on The Green wasn’t always pristine. Back in June of 2016, when I visited it with Emma Woolf, the Woolfs’ great-niece and the daughter of publisher Cecil Woolf, the front was covered with thick, overgrown vine that nearly obscured the blue plaque marking it as an historic site.

At that time, unpainted plywood covered the main entrance and a list of “Site Safety” cautions was plastered to the front door of the Georgian brick home in south west London.

A lot has changed since then, as you will see when you take a look at the recent stories picturing the luxurious new state of the Paradise Road home.

A bit of Hogarth House history

I wrote about the Woolfs in Richmond back in 2010, as follows.

According to Julia Briggs in Virginia Woolf an Inner Life (2005), the Woolfs took the lease on the property on Virginia’s 33rd birthday. Hogarth House was part of the present Suffield House, which at that time was divided into two separate homes. The Woolfs occupied half of the Georgian brick home, moving there in early March of 1915.

One of England’s famous blue plaques, added in 1976, is affixed to the house to commemorate the Woolfs’ residency. The plaque is one of 15 in Richmond.

Richmond, Woolf’s writing, and the Great War

The Hogarth Press began publishing at Hogarth House in July 1917. Woolf published Two Stories, Kew Gardens, Monday or Tuesday and Jacob’s Room between 1917 and 1924. Interestingly enough, Woolf could see Kew Gardens from the rear windows of Hogarth House.

When German air raids during World War I disturbed the sleep and the safety of the Woolfs and their servants, they moved to the basement at night. And when peace came, Woolf celebrated along with other Richmond residents.

On July 20, 1919, she wrote her diary entry about the “peace” celebrations:

After sitting through the procession and the peace bells unmoved, I began after dinner to feel that if something was going on, perhaps one had better be in it…The doors of the public house at the corner were open and the room crowded; couples waltzing; songs being shouted, waveringly, as if one must be drunk to sing. A troop of little boys with lanterns were parading the Green, beating sticks. Not many shops went to the expense of electric light. A woman of the upper classes was supported dead drunk between two men partially drunk. We followed a moderate stream flowing up the Hill.

Richmond makes its way into Woolf’s later novels as well. In The Waves (1931), for example, the reunion dinner at the end takes place at Hampton Court, which is located in Richmond. In the novel, Bernard calls it the  “meeting-place” for the group of six longtime friends.

Likes and dislikes

Like most things in life, though, Woolf wavered between liking and disliking Richmond. Briggs says that even though Woolf described Hogarth House in one of her diaries as “a perfect house, if ever there was one,” by June of 1923 she was anxious to move back to London. In a diary entry that month, she wrote, “we must leave Richmond and set up in London.”

In March of 1924, the Woolfs left Richmond to move back to London. They set up housekeeping and publishing at 52 Tavistock Square.

More on Virginia Woolf in Richmond

For an in-depth look at Woolf and Richmond, read Peter Fullager’s 2018 book Virginia Woolf in Richmond. Published by Aurora Metro Books, it provides an overview of the 10 years that Virginia and Leonard spent in Richmond, just a 15-minute train trip from central London.

In it, Fullagar explores Virginia’s diaries and letters, along with Leonard’s autobiography, to reveal how Richmond influenced Virginia’s personal life, as well as her writing life, from 1914-1924.

Hogarth House in June of 2016, overgrown with vines and with its front entrance boarded up and papered with “Site Safety’ cautions.

The blue plaque noting the historical significance of the Woolfs’ residency in Hogarth House was nearly obscured by overgrown vines in June of 2016.

Sign directing visitors to parking for Paradise Road, the location of Hogarth House.

Booth in the train station welcoming visitors to Richmond.

Richmond train station

 

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Today, no matter where we live in the world, we are feeling the effects of the coronavirus Viral Modernismpandemic. Events are cancelled or postponed and travel is curtailed. We are told to stay home and only go out when necessary, maintaining physical distancing when we venture outside to buy groceries or medicine or get some much-needed exercise.

Virginia and Leonard Woolf lived through the pandemic of their time, the Spanish flu, which raged worldwide from 1918-1919, while the couple were living in Richmond.

Estimated to have killed 100 million people around the globe and more than 250,000 in Britain alone, the Spanish flu also affected people close to the Woolfs. In July 1918 diary entries, Virginia notes that their London neighbor has influenza, later reporting that she has succumbed to the disease.

Virginia and influenza

Virginia herself contracted influenza at the end of 1919, confining her to her bed, and that episode is thought to be part of the pandemic strain. It was not her first bout with the flu; nor would it be her last. She suffered from it in 1916, in the early months of 1918 before the Spanish flu had reached Britain, and again in 1922, 1923, and 1925.

On Oct. 20 of 1918, Woolf’s diary entry includes this report:

Pain is abhorrent to all Stracheys, but making all allowances for the exaggerations and terrors of the poor creature, Lytton has had a sufficient dose of horror, I imagine, and the doctor privately warns Carrington that shingles may last months. However, Lytton, is probably… avoiding London, because of the influenza (we are, by the way, in the midst of a plague unmatched since The Black Death, according to the Times, who seem to tremble lest it may seize upon Lord Northcliffe & thus precipitate us into peace.)

Illness in the essay

Virginia’s experiences with illness led her to write the essay On Being Ill, published in 1930 by the Hogarth Press. And now that our own pandemic has taken center stage worldwide, some scholars are writing about how past epidemics have been described in literature, film, and the arts.

One such piece by Laura Cernat centers on Woolf’s essay. And Ane Thon Knutsen, a Norwegian typesetter and Woolf scholar, is in the midst of an art project focused on the work. But more on that later.

Illness in the novel

The 1918 pandemic also made its way into one of Virginia’s most famous novels — Mrs. Dalloway (1925) — but that fact often attracts minimal notice. When it comes to debilitating health conditions in that novel, the shell shock of Septimus Smith gets most of the attention from critics and readers. However, in Viral Modernism, the Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature, Elizabeth Outka argues that Woolf has centered the novel on influenza and presents Clarissa Dalloway as a pandemic survivor.

A post on the British Library website takes a similar tack and includes a quote from the novel.

“Clarissa is almost certainly a victim of the influenza pandemic of 1918–20, but she is also to be one of the novel’s lingering wraiths: ‘Since her illness she had turned almost white’ (31).

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