Charleston and Monk's House: The Intimate House Museums of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell

by Nuala Hancock

Overview

The interwoven biographies of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell and the houses they lived in. What can we learn from a commemorative house? What biographical narratives emerge as we travel through the spaces of another's home? This new study unveils the revelatory potential of the house museum to inform and enrich our understanding of the lived past of its former inhabitants. It focuses on the emotionally textured interiors of Charleston and Monk's House, the literary/artistic house museums of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, seeking out traces of their shared biography.Fresh perspectives unfold on Woolf's and Bell's' sisterhood and their continuous artistic exchange, as we shadow their daily lives through the richly painted rooms and atmospheric gardens of their former Sussex homes. Discover these celebrated artists in a different light - animated, moving, handling the tools of their related arts and brought vividly to life through the tangible fabric of their past living.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780748664849
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	06/27/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Nuala Hancock is a writer and researcher whose work explores the interrelated fields of architecture and garden history, art and literature. Her recent work has centered on the correspondence between biography, space and place. She has published in the areas of Museum Studies, Garden History and Woolf Scholarship.Her writing on Virginia Woolf includes a chapter on 'Virginia Woolf and Gardens'in The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, edited by Maggie Humm (Edinburgh UniversityPress 2010).

Table of Contents

List of Figures vi

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1

1 Biography and the literary artistic house museum 12

2 Spatial choreography: gestural bodies and the rhythms of living 30

3 Spatial embodiment: the anatomy of the house: the architecture of interior space 55

4 A poetics of gardens 90

5 Spatial revelations: the artefact unveiled 114

6 Museum space: space poetically reconstructed 142

Conclusion 165

Notes 174

Bibliography 208

Sources of Illustrations 218

Index 221

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This extraordinarily evocative book not only draws us into the lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell with empathy and sensitivity, but also provides a richly textured new viewpoint on house museums. Anyone interested in spaces, objects and interpretation in the museum would find their perspective invigorated by reading it."

Dr Sandra Dudley, School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester

"Hancock sensually evokes the materiality of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell’s lives and houses. Like a detective writer, she unveils the vivid histories of Charleston and Monk’s House in fascinating detail."

Professor Maggie Humm, University of East London, Author of Modernist Women and Snapshots of Bloomsbury and Editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts

Editorial Reviews

A fascinating account of Bloomsbury and domestic space, traced through Bell's art, Woolf's prose and the tourist industry built on their lives.

TLS - Amber K. Regis

This collection of essays should be a 'must' for those whose interests focus on the late Victorian cultural world, as it is observed through the lense of the Gothic. In private or in academic and public libraries, this book will doubtless enjoy a long shelf life.

Benjamin F. Fisher

...the argument is seemed with brilliant insights, and, if you stay the course,your future visits to Charleston and Monk's House will be immeasurably enriched and your experience of them profoundly altered....and the chapter on the gardens of both houses is sheer heaven.

Canvas - Francis Spalding

Hancock's deep affinity with both houses is evident in this compelling and very elegantly written book...(her) experience of these two museum houses, and her own skill as a writer, have resulted in a fascinating book that fuses a loving, lyrical, intimate and subjective response with rigorous, objective, academic analysis and theoretical research. It will appeal to the devotee of the biographies and works of Woolf and Vanessa Bell, the common reader or viewer, and to the scholar engaged in the burgeoning area of material and cultural Museum Studies.

Virginia Woolf Bulletin No 42 - Marion Dell

Very professionally edited by two world leaders in Gothic studies, this collection offers well-written, sharply documented, and "heart of the matter" accounts by experts on each significant realm of the Victorian Gothic, along with an excellent bibliography of further readings. It is therefore a highly valuable book for students of the Gothic world-wide.

Jerrold E. Hogle