Who's Afraid of the English Countryside?

This weekend, two of my lady friends, Sam and Becca, and I went on a little trip through the English countryside in search of Virginia Woolf. Thankfully, though she's been dead for a few years, there are a number of places around England where one can get the real Woolf experience. The only problem is that that experience requires a trip through the untold expanses of Sussex.

Sussex, we found, was a land of mystical things, a county of dragons and faeries, and the like. Also mystical in Sussex, we found, were street signs. Though there were no lack of roads, certainly, they seemed only to bare names known to the locals, as if there were some sort of closely kept secret engendered to keep city folk like ourselves literally guessing at every turn. We were only driving from Cranleigh, south of Guilford, making it a journey of less than 40 miles. Our directions, via googlemaps, however, were almost more a hindrance than a help. After a number of unmarked turns, we ended up resorting to frustrated statements like, "Well, if this IS the right road, then there may be another left coming up in three miles, which may or may not be called Mayes Road, if it is called anything at all." Needless to say, we had no map.

We eventually stopped at a village store we'd happened upon, only to find they sold no maps at all. What we received instead, was this hand written "map" from the counter attendant
You know you are navigating in the con-treh when they give you directions based on local pubs, rather than streets. A left at the Boor's Head, apparently. was our ticket out of that particular village, and back on track toward Lewes, and eventually Rodmell, where the Woolf house is located.

Monk's house is a little country house that Virginia and Leonard Woolf bought for 700 pounds back in 1919. The two writers kept the place as a country home for many years, slowly renovating it: adding an indoor toilet and various other improvements, adding a private writing studio for Virginia in the back garden. I don't know, but by looking at the picture below, I should guess that Virginia's private bedroom (on the right) must also have been an addition to the original house. The house came into National Trust in the 1980s, and since then was restored to how it would have been while the couple were still living there. It was one of the country centers of Bloomsbury life outside of London, with Charleston (which we also visited) as the other.


It was really a very modest place, I thought. Having read through many of Virginia's diaries, I knew that the task of fixing up Monk's House was one of their ongoing projects. The furniture is very plain and functional, though clearly it couldn't be mistaken for the home of anyone untouched by the forces of art. By this I mean that there are influences all throughout the house--both in expected places like paintings and sculpture, and in less expected places like the tables and furniture themselves--resonating with the artistic legacy of their lives. For example, there were a few really stunning busts of the happy couple on the estate:
The house experience entails being allowed to walk through a few rooms of the house as they would have been back in the day, with quite painstaking attention paid to the minutiae of everyday life.
My favorite part was certainly the back garden, with its expansive lawn and apple trees. The view is absolutely stunning, especially considering the English weather was kind enough to grace us with a touch of sunlight for our afternoon. I can only imagine having a place like that to work in, or to have the constant social gatherings the couple was known for. What better place could there be simply to chat?

Charleston Farmhouse was a completely different animal altogether. Charleston was the house where Vanessa Bell (Virginia's sister) lived with her two sons. She also lived there with Duncan Grant (her friend and father of their daughter Angelica). Over a period of many decades, the house was populated by many artists and thinker associated with the Bloomsbury group, notably Vanessa Bell (a visual artist [in love with Duncan Grant]), Duncan Grant (a Scottish post-impressionist painter), John Maynard Keynes (an economist and lover of Duncan), and from time to time Clive Bell (Vanessa's husband and art critic [who apparently brought his mistress along sometimes, Mary Hutchinson]). The house was also home of the Omega Workshops, a sort of post-impressionist artist collective.

All the sexual confusion aside, it is a very odd house of its own accord. Since it was inhabited by a pair of VERY active artists, and all their artistic friends, family, and lovers, it is truly a sight to behold.
This is a photo I found on the web of what must be one of the more mundane rooms. (We were not allowed to take photographs during the tour.) Every surface that one could imagine applying paint to was covered in some pattern, some mural, some design of their own creation. All the curtains are designed by Grant or Bell; half the pottery are made by Vanessa's son Quintin Bell; Picasso paintings (or their hand-made copies of them) hang on the walls. Everything, from the arms of chairs to bedposts to the doors to the fireplace screens, everything is covered in art. It is an amazing place, really, though you can only imagine how gaudy and tacky most of it is. If there was an unadorned square inch in that entire house, I didn't find it.

Becca made a point during our journey that seems intriguing, and it's a question I'm not sure I have an answer to yet. So much of the appeal of these places is that they are intricate recreations of the intimate lives of these dead artists and writers. With the everyday things like sketchpads and silverware, come the very personal aspects of these long-dead individuals who lead very complicated, if sensational, lives. There seems to be something unsettleingly macabre in setting these people's lives on display for anyone willing to pay the 5 quid entry fee to traipse through. Perhaps there is a touch of voyeurism in the whole affair that seems a little off. Still, it is an inside look in the most visceral way into the world that helped to shape some of the century's most important artistic productions, so there is certainly a legitimate reason for its restoration. My interest was certainly peaked to learn more about this unique and intriguing group of individuals. Someday I'd like to brave the countryside again and visit these historic houses. There may be a touch of the voyeur in the experience, but I think there is so much else as well.