Virginia woolf at monk’s house 63

canvas. Could you re-paint it if I brought this? [Raymond] Mortimer admired it so much that I half suspect him.’24

One of these cushions can be glimpsed in the background of a photograph of Leonard’s niece Molly Sturgeon (Fig. 9). Sitting in the Woolfs’ comfortable upstairs sitting room, Molly leans forward towards the camera, revealing an embroidery of a heraldic figure, surrounded by one of Vanessa Bell’s distinctive circle borders. Similar patterns of repeating circles appear on the set of chairs Bell designed for the ‘combined drawing eating room’ downstairs.25 By the late 1930s, Bell’s daughter Angelica was developing her own artistic output, and Woolf seems to have enjoyed the sensuous quality of her human figures. A chair seat by Angelica depicting a full-breasted Leda embracing a lascivious swan is the only example of Woolf’s work to survive at Monk’s House today (Fig. 10). This voluptuous depiction of Leda was once accompanied by an equally daring male scene. In August 1940 Woolf wrote to Angelica from Monk’s House suggesting that she ‘take a meal here, and examine your naked boys – the embroidery I mean. I’ve picked out private parts bright red. But its a bit of a muddle [sic].’26

Less than a year later, Virginia Woolf was dead, having drowned in the river near her Sussex home. Many friends made the pilgrimage to Monk’s House to pay their respects to her grieving husband. In April 1941 Vita Sackville-West left a moving account of her final visit, revealing her sense of the intimate link between Woolf’s creativity as a female writer and a female maker: for Vita, Woolf’s spirit was embedded equally in her writing and her needlework. She found Leonard alone: ‘He was having his tea – just one tea-cup on the table where they always had tea. The house full of his flowers and all Woolf’s things

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lying about as usual. He said Let us go somewhere more comfortable, and took me up to her sitting-room. There was her needlework on a chair and all her coloured wools hanging over a sort of little towel-horse that she had made for them. Her thimble on the table. Her scribbling-block with her writing on it. The window from which one can see the river. I said Leonard, I do not like you being alone like this. He turned those piercing blue eyes on me and said it’s the only way.’27

Nino Strachey is Head of Research and Specialist Advice for the National Trust.

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FIG 7 Newhaven Harbour, 1936, Vanessa Bell, oil on canvas, 50 x 59cm, Monk’s House, East Sussex Photo: © National Trust Images © Estate of Vanessa Bell; courtesy Henrietta Garnett FIG 8 Embroidered chair back designed by Vanessa Bell for the ‘Music Room’ exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery, London, 1932, Monk’s House, East Sussex Photo: © National Trust Images © Estate of Vanessa Bell; courtesy Henrietta Garnett