In this wonderful illustrated talk in the packed library, Karin Fernald
examined Virginia Woolf’s life and her engagement with art through selections from her letters, diaries, and novels.
Karin’s career as a professional actor shone through as she had memorised most of the extracts and became the characters she quoted. It wasn’t so much a lecture as a performance.
As she spoke, a succession of well-chosen images were projected to complement the words; photographs of Virginia and her family and many paintings from the Camden Group in which she was embedded. Included were some paintings by Robert Bevan who lived in Adamson Road. Other artists represented from the group included Walter Sickert, Spencer Gore, Charles Ginner and Malcolm Drummond.
This year was the 100th anniversary since the publication of one of Woolf’s best-known work, ‘Mrs Dalloway’, detailing the upper-class protagonist navigating her way through London one day in 1923; a world between two wars at a time of enormous social change. The other important character is a soldier shell-shocked in the Great War and Karin drew out the themes in the book of death and mental illness. Virginia Woolf had endured several close family deaths within a short space of time and most likely suffered from bipolar disorder – which led, after several breakdowns, to her eventual suicide in 1941. Both she and the fictional soldier experienced auditory hallucinations of birds singing in Greek.
Woolf had learned Greek at home, unable to attend university due to the restrictions on women’s education at the time but she held her own in her brother’s Cambridge intellectual circle and had the run of her father’s extensive library.
Her elder sister, Vanessa, started social ‘at homes’, gathering significant figures in literature and art such as Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, Leonard Woolf and Duncan Grant.
Vanessa was described by Karin as ‘a goer’ and though married to the art critic, Clive Bell, she (and he) had a series of open relationships, including most notably with the painter Duncan Grant .
The whole circle had ideas of experimental living and fluid sexuality and Lytton Strachey, who himself had proposed half-seriously to Virginia, persuaded Leonard Woolf, a friend of her brother, to cut short his civil service posting to Ceylon to marry Virginia.
Together they set up the Hogarth Press, teaching themselves the process of hand-printing, and published not only Virginia’s books but important works by TS Eliot, Sigmund Freud and others.
Karin’s beautifully spoken extracts certainly inspired many of us to read more of Virginia Woolf’s lyrical writing exploring the inner thoughts and perceptions of her characters often using experimental ‘streams of consciousness’.
Report by Committee member Alan Selwyn
