The Autographs of Saint Mary's: Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell
Kew Gardens was written by Virginia and illustrated by Vanessa Bell.
Written by Virginia Woolf
Kew Gardens (1919) was written by Virginia and illustrated by Vanessa Bell. Virginia Woolf was an essential figure in British literature culture during the Bloomsbury era. Like her sister Vanessa, she was a founding member of the Bloomsbury group. Virginia Woolf battled mental illness throughout her life. She struggled to get adequate health care during the early twentieth century, which was an important influence on her writing. She started off as a journalist and a teacher before fully immersing herself in this new intellectual literature and artistic circle.
During the early 1910s, she was close friends with many other authors, playwrights, and artists and she lived with some of them, most of whom were men. Which was very scandalous at the time. Eventually, Woolf married Leonard Woolf in 1912. But Woolf herself had little sexual attraction towards her husband and wrote books talking about the inequalities and expectations placed on women in marriages. She created the Hogarth Press (with her husband) in 1917, where she published herself and many other authors like T. S. Eliot, Roger Fry, and Clive Bell. The Hogarth Press also produced the first English translation of Sigmund Freud but they missed out on Ulysses by James Joyce.
Woolf had multiple relationships with women throughout her life. Her most prominent was a relationship with Vita Sackville-West (an author who published through the Hogarth Press) from 1922 to.Woolf’s death in 1941. Vita did not belong to the Bloomsbury club and rejected the label of “Lesbian.” She was well known as a “Sapphist”, a reference to the classical poet Sappho and the Sapphist movement does not identify themselves as “lesbians” because they want their lab to be more gender neutral. Vita also did not care for Virginia’s feminism. Vita was the inspiration behind one of Virginia Woolf’s biggest successes, Orlando, and it cemented Woolf as one of the most well-known authors in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century.
In the 1930s, Woolf lost multiple friends. Lytton Strachey, a founding member of the Bloomsbury club, committed suicide in 1932 as well as his long-term partner. In 1934, Roger Fry died. By the 1940s, Woolf was struggling with depression and finishing her books Between the Acts. She did not like Between the Acts and did not want to publish it. On March 28th, 1941, Virginia Woolf committed suicide. In one of her suicide letters, Virginia Woolf wrote to Leonard to destroy Between the Acts, which he did not. He also kept all of her diaries, letters, and anything else she wrote. Saint Mary’s has many of her books, including Orlando, Between the Acts, and Mrs. Dalloway.
