Virginia Woolf by Quentin Bell

Author:Quentin Bell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1996-03-07T05:00:00+00:00

The catastrophes at Charleston had in fact involved Virginia in a great deal of fatiguing exertion at a time when she was not at all well. She could not resist, but could not but be exasperated by the demands which her sister made (demands which were all the more eloquent for being unspoken). When things got too bad, Nelly was sent to Charleston to save the situation but, as usual, Leonard had to intervene in order to protect Virginia from the effects of her own generosity.

It was not until early March that Virginia was able to go to Sussex to inspect her new niece and see for herself how Vanessa was managing. Living, she noted, was rather bare at Charleston – “nothing but wind and rain and no coal in the cellar.”2 All the same there was something attractive and soothing about that bleak interior. It was disorderly and might fairly be called disreputable; but the atmosphere was congenial and in some moods, comparing it with her own relatively well-regulated and completely irreproachable domesticity, Virginia could find it enviably romantic.

On the first of June Virginia again spent a night at Charleston. This visit was important, for reasons which must be explained by returning to the events of the spring.

It will be remembered that, in her letter to Ka, Virginia was deploring the probable loss of Asham, though there was then still a ray of hope. This hope was extinguished on 1 March when Mr Gunn the farmer gave them six months’ notice. Leonard and Virginia at once began house-hunting–an occupation which she confessed was always a source of great pleasure to her–hoping to find something in the same district. From Katherine Mansfield however she heard of three adjacent cottages near Zennor to let at £5 a year each. D. H. Lawrence had lived in them, and this was the only occasion that the two novelists entered into any kind of correspondence. Virginia could not resist the temptation of Cornwall, and took them, but must soon have recognised that Higher Tregerthen was too far from London to be a practical proposition. I do not think the Woolfs ever went there, and no more was heard of this plan.

Meanwhile they had printed three small books: T. S. Eliot’s Poems, Middleton Murry’s The Critic in Judgment, and Virginia’s Kew Gardens–and these were all published on 12 May. By 31 May only 49 copies of Kew Gardens had been sold, while business in Eliot and Murry was fairly brisk. Virginia blamed Leonard a little for having persuaded her that Kew Gardens was worth publishing.

Thus it was in a rather discontented frame of mind, her book unwanted, her house problem unsolved, that she returned to Charleston. The domestic situation there had by this time more or less resolved itself, but another sisterly dispute arose. This time it was aesthetic and concerned the production of Kew Gardens. Vanessa, who had made the woodcuts for this book, did not at all like the way in which they had been printed.

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