Hogarth House, home to Virginia and Leonard Woolf

While walking down Paradise Road in Richmond, my wife and I passed a splendid eighteenth century house with a blue plaque outside. I discover it is Hogarth House, home to Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and the place where they founded the Hogarth Press. I am fascinated by the houses of authors. Perhaps I imagine a little of their spirit remains, or perhaps I think the building may have influenced the author.

I have always associated the Woolfs with Bloomsbury, and this opulent suburban villa seems curiously unliterary. It looks like, and I imagine is, the creation of a successful local merchant. Maybe she thought so too, it seems Virginia’s mental health deteriorated here, and she finally committed suicide in Sussex.

There is a line from the movie The Hours (as far as I know fictional) which is attributed to her: “If it is a choice between Richmond and death, I choose death.”

This is what she wrote on “Peace Night” in 1919:

“After sitting through the procession and the peace bells unmoved, I began after dinner to feel that if something was going on, perhaps one had better be in it…The doors of the public house at the corner were open and the room crowded; couples waltzing; songs being shouted, waveringly, as if one must be drunk to sing. A troop of little boys with lanterns were parading the Green, beating sticks. Not many shops went to the expense of electric light. A woman of the upper classes was supported dead drunk between two men partially drunk. We followed a moderate stream flowing up the Hill.”