Bloomsbury by Lamplight, 2

Virginia Woolf is a tantalising figure, as close as she is, just out of reach - she died in 1941, at the age of 59, and had she lived a little longer she might have left more to the media age that we live in today than a handful of meandering novels, diaries and essays.

      From 1904 to 1912 Virginia Stephen lived in Gordon Square, which she left following her marriage to Leonard Woolf (with whom she would ultimately found her own publishing house, the Hogarth Press). In 1924 the Woolfs returned to neighbouring Tavistock Square, in which she'd live until the outbreak of the Second World War, when they moved again to nearby Mecklenburgh Square. The Tavistock Hotel now stands on the site of the house.
      In those days a publishing house would have been just this - a house with a printing press inside it.

      In 1940 the house at Mecklenburgh Square was bombed, necessitating a move to the country. Poetically enough, as it turns out, the end of Virginia's association with the area also marked the beginning of her own end, as in 1941, in the darkest days of the war, suffering from depression again, she drowned herself in the River Ouse in Sussex.

Her literary afterlife began with her books falling out of fashion, lacking in relevance to the common reader, but, ironically, she was quickly rehabilitated by the kind of leftist critics who had rejected her, as one of the original names in feminist literature. In the sixties and seventies. Virginia became, if not a popular culture figure, than at least a cult figure. 

      Patti Smith has written poetry about her, and Nicole Kidman portrayed her on film. Along with Slyvia Plath she exerts a particular and almost unique kind of fascination. And yet, in an age where you can get cross-platform stars like Nick Cave reading their own book aloud on your iphone (and actually playing music to go with it as well), in which this kind of gimmick is almost expected of authors, Virginia exists, almost alone, on the printed page.

      There is the work, the letters, and what nephew Quentin Bell told us in her biography, and another follow-up book about the Bloomsbury 'set'. Virginia's extensive diaries were published in an edition of five volumes from 1977-84. No doubt one could get as good an idea of what was going on behind these closed doors in Gordon Square in 1910 as you could about Lady Gaga from reading a modern day gossip column. 

Gordon Square 

The first house that we come to belonged to Virginia & her sister, Vanessa Bell, the painter (also her brother Adrian, who would, it's worth noting for fans of such footnotes, go on to become one of the first British psychoanalysts). Most of these houses seem to be offices or classrooms for the UCL today. The blue plaque on the door here commemorates not the prodigal Stephen children but their friend the economist Maynard Keynes, who lived here after them.

50 Gordon Sq.

      Keynes was an influential figure, a liberal thinker who invented Keynesian economics and had a building named after him at my old university for his trouble. He seems to have lived more-or-less openly as a homosexual until he met a ballarina, called Lydia Lopokova, whom he married in 1925, and thus became a more-or-less ordinary establishment figure. 

      Keynes essentially suggested that if there are not enough jobs to go round, the government should bury some dollar bills down a hole and pay men to dig them up. Some of my friends at Housman's bookshop would perhaps agree with this kind of keen thinking. Others might less kindly suggest we should bury Keynes down a hole.

     Not far down, at number 50, another plaque mentions Virginia, Clive Bell and the Stracheys. Clive was an art critic and formalist who married Vanessa. He seems to have been, by all accounts, rather a prig, but perhaps he gets a thin crack of the whip by reputation as he was married to Vanessa Bell in only a legal sense for the majority of their relationship. Although they never divorced, they lived separately, had many other lovers, and allowed her daughter Angelica to grow up believing she was Clive's until the age of 17. Her real father, the painter Duncan Grant, another colourful character in the Bloomsbury tableaux, was a former lover of Maynard's!

      Lytton Strachey was another author, one of ten surviving children, who wrote a satirical work of biography, Eminent Victorians, that laid some of the ground for Virginia's Orlando. He never married, but conducted affairs with Keynes and the artist Dora Carrington (allegedly), although, according to friends, he was more interested in her husband Ralph Partridge. After Strachey died, at 51, Carrington killed herself, seeing no reason to go on. Today she is perhaps best known for designing woodcuts for the Hogarth Press (and for being played on film by Emma Thompson).

    

Next: A stop at the Tavistock Hotel