“I do not know whether pilgrimages to the shrines of famous men ought not to be condemned as sentimental journeys… The curiosity is only legitimate when the house of a great writer or the country in which it is set adds something to our understanding of the books.” Virginia Woolf
It’s curious that this piece of writing starts Woolf’s first published piece (according to Jeanette Winterton it was in the Guardian in 1904). Could she have known then how her own home might have become a place of pilgrimage many years later? Just a weeks ago I visited Rodmell for the first time. It was a glorious day. There was a special brightness to the light. Everything seemed more vivid in the garden than one would imagine. It seemed entirely right. At the foot of the garden is her ‘lodge’, the place where she would retreat to do her writing. It was also the last place she left before walking across the fields to the River Ouse where she drowned herself (28 March 1941).
Today the lodge has been restored so that one can gaze in at the writing table chair and desk items through a glass screen. My photograph somehow manages to combine a view in with a reflection, as if it was a double exposure. Unconsciously the image seems to capture something of Woolf’s literary juxtapositions.
“Here is a genius, an exquisite writer who knew the pitch of colours as assuredly as Van Gogh.” Winterton
“She thought in colour” Winterton
“Virginia Woolf apparently told Rupert Brooke that the sky between leaves was the brightest thing in nature…” Geoff Dyer
