Virginia Woolf is perhaps the most famous resident of Bloomsbury and she pops up all over the place. There is a blue plaque on a house on the house on the south side of Tavistock square where she lived for a while with her husband, a bust in the square itself, and a road named after her, Woolf Mews, off to the east.
She pioneered the use of stream of consciousness narratives, as if you're sitting inside her head listening to her thoughts, like this passage from Mrs Dalloway:
“For this is the truth about our soul, he thought, who fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her way between the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and on and on into gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable; suddenly she shoots to the surface and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves; that is, has a positive need to brush, scrape, kindle herself, gossiping”
She was a revolutionary feminist, writing in A Room of One's Own of the systemic obstacles women face due to gender inequality. She was also a founding memory of the Bloomsbury Set, but we'll meet more of them later.
Walk down through Woburn square until you find the statue of the Green Man by the artist Lydia Kapinska, based on the poem “The Waves” by Virginia Woolf.
Loading