The New Yorker:
If one is to try to record one’s life truthfully, one must aim at getting into the record of it something of the disorderly discontinuity which makes it so absurd, unpredictable, bearable
—Leonard Woolf, “The Journey Not the Arrival Matters.”
The legend of Bloomsbury—the tale of how Virginia and Vanessa Stephen emerged from a grim, patriarchal Victorian background to become the pivotal figures in a luminous group of advanced and free-spirited writers and artists—takes its plot from the myth of modernism. Legend and myth alike trace a movement from darkness to light, turgid ugliness to plain beauty, tired realism to vital abstraction, social backwardness to social progress. Virginia Woolf chronicled her own and her sister’s coming of age in the early years of this century much as Nikolaus Pevsner celebrated the liberating simplifications of modern design in his once influential but now perhaps somewhat outdated classic “Pioneers of the Modern Movement: From William Morris to Walter Gropius” (1936). As Pevsner shuddered over the “coarseness and vulgar overcrowding” of a carpet shown in the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London (“We are forced to step over bulging scrolls and into large, unpleasantly realistic flowers. . . . And this barbarism was by no means limited to England. The other nations exhibiting were equally rich in atrocities”), so Virginia, in her memoir “Old Bloomsbury” (1922), recoiled from the suffocating closeness of her childhood home, at 22 Hyde Park Gate, in Kensington—a tall, narrow, begloomed house of small irregular rooms crammed with heavy Victorian furniture, where “eleven people aged between eight and sixty lived, and were waited upon by seven servants, while various old women and lame men did odd jobs with rakes and pails by day.” And, as Pevsner turned with relief to the spare, sachlich designs of the twentieth-century pioneers, so Virginia exulted in the airy and spacious house on Gordon Square, in Bloomsbury, where she and Vanessa and their brothers, Thoby and Adrian, went to live by themselves in 1904, after the death of their father. (Vanessa was twenty-five, Thoby was twenty-four, Virginia was twenty-two, and Adrian was twenty-one.) “We decorated our walls with washes of plain distemper,” Virginia wrote, and:
We were full of experiments and reforms. . . . We were going to paint; to write; to have coffee after dinner instead of tea at nine-o’clock. Everything was going to be new; everything was going to be different. Everything was on trial.
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