#rodmell

Virginia Woolf's Monk's House, Rodmell

The writer Virginia Woolf and her husband, the political activist, journalist and editor Leonard Woolf, bought the house in 1919, and received there many visitors connected to the Bloomsbury Group, including T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry and Lytton Strachey.

Originally a weekend retreat, the Woolfs spent more and more time in Rodmell, eventually living there full-time from 1940 when their flat in Mecklenburgh Square, Bloomsbury, London, was damaged during an air raid.

The solitude of village life allowed Virginia respite from the tumult of London, and it was in the small wooden lodge at the bottom of the garden that many of her novels took shape. Jacob's Room, published in 1922, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To The Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), The Waves (1931), The Years (1937) and Between The Acts (1941), as well as other works, were also written there. Her final novel, Between the Acts, published posthumously in July 1941, is steeped in references to Rodmell and the traditions and values of its villagers.