As lovely as the sunshine is, I hate the heat. My Northern Irish skin was never meant to cope with high temperatures, so I’ve been struggling with the weather in Kent. In my head, it’s Autumn going into Winter, or the ‘ber’ months as they’re strangely called on TikTok. When it’s very warm I tend to stay indoors and sit in front of a fan, but I’ve taken a few day trips where, to my surprise, I’ve enjoyed being out in the sunshine!
We visited Sissinghurst Castle Gardens and it was so soothing and cooling to walk in Vita’s garden rooms. Usually, we would take a walk around the estate, but the shady spots in the garden were very inviting.
Sissinghurst was a wreck when Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson bought it in early 1930. The buildings were uninhabitable, and the grounds were full of rubbish, but Vita saw the potential and realised her dream of overflowing gardens. She said, “I fell in love; love at first sight. I saw what might be made of it. It was Sleeping Beauty’s Castle...”
I was delighted to see a new exhibition at Sissinghurst – Radical Relationships. It explores the relationship between Vita and Harold, plus the wider Bloomsbury Group. It’s a small exhibition in the library and gives a flavour of the group’s impact on art and writing as well as the relationships that underpin everything they did. They followed their hearts rather than societal norms which caused speculation and scandal. The Hogarth Press was founded by Virginia and Leonard Woolf and published the works of the Bloomsbury Group members. It is still going to this day.
There’s a lot of controversy around the Bloomsbury Group and the question of whether they were great writers and artists, or if they simply managed to convince everyone that they were geniuses, is still asked. I love Vanessa Bell’s art and the writings of E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, and I do think they were important early 20th century thinkers.
Vanessa Bell was an artist, interior designer and the sister of Virginia Woolf. Her early work, is mainly conventional, but then she began to work with bright colours and designs. It’s said that she was influenced by Roger Fry (a member of the Bloomsbury Group) with whom she had an affair.
Virginia Woolf, probably the best known of this group, was a prolific writer and essayist. One of her most famous works, A Room of One’s Own, addresses the status of women and asserts that a woman must have a room of her own if she is to succeed as a writer. It had a profound impact on me when I first read it many years ago.
Another favourite is one of her short stories, Kew Gardens. Written in 1919 and inspired by the view from the top floor of her home on Paradise Road, the story takes us on a walk through the gardens, where we hear the recollections and conversations of the visitors.
The Bloomsbury Group left behind a mountain of writing and art, not all of it well received, but definitely worth a look.