Virginia Woolf was, by her own confession, “incredibly and incurably romantic about Cornwall”. She spent her long childhood summers on its ruggedly dramatic coasts. And although in 1895, after her mother died, the family holiday house in St Ives was sold, the landscapes of Cornwall remained lodged in her memory. As an adult, prone to bouts of ill health — often brought on by the effort of completing a book — she would frequently return to them to rest and recover. She found not just solace, but also a deep source of inspiration in this remote outcrop of Britain where land meets sea and sky, where wind and light merge.
“I went for a walk in Regent’s Park yesterday morning,” Woolf wrote in her diary in 1909, “and it suddenly struck me how absurd it was to stay in London, with Cornwall going on all the time.” So despite having no coat, nor her chequebook or spectacles, she hastened to Paddington and jumped on the next train. “I have been walking along the sands and sitting in the sun,” she recorded upon her arrival. “I am so drugged with fresh air that I can’t write . . . As for the beauty of this place it surpasses every other season.”
Woolf’s love of Cornwall was the catalyst for a new exhibition, Virginia Woolf: An Exhibition Inspired by Her Writings, which opens at Tate St Ives next month. “We are always speaking about the visual artists who came here,” explains its curator, Laura Smith, referring to the famous members of the St Ives school (Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore among them) who came to Cornwall to set up a modernist colony, and the younger generation (Peter Lanyon, Roger Hilton and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham) who followed in their wake. “We don’t so often speak about the writers who are affiliated with this area [Henry James stayed in Tregenna Castle Hotel in the 1880s, while during the First World War DH Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield found remote refuge in Higher Tregarthen]. It is not so often that we consider Cornwall’s literary legacy.”
“Probably nothing that we had as children was quite so important to us as our summer in Cornwall,” Woolf declared. “To have our own house, our own garden — to have that bay, that sea . . . Clodgy; Halestown Bog; Carbis Bay; Lelant; Trevail; Zennor; the Gurnard’s Head . . . to hear the waves breaking that first night behind the yellow blind; to dig in the sand; to go sailing in a fishing boat; to scrabble over the rocks. . . I could fill pages remembering one thing after another. All together made the summer at St Ives the best beginning to life conceivable.”
Woolf was only 13 when her mother died. But again and again she would return to Cornwall in her imagination. She conjured it up in her work, most notably in 1922 in Jacob’s Room, her first modernist novel; in To the Lighthouse in 1927, in which she recalls the glittering views across the bay of St Ives towards the rocks of Godrevy and recreates her own family in the form of the Ramsays; and in 1931 in The Waves, an experimental series of soliloquies bound by the images and rhythms of a coastal scene as it changes from sunrise to sunset.
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Virginia Woolf: An Exhibition Inspired by Her Writings will not be an exhibition about her life per se. Rather, spanning the period 1850 to the present day, it will use her work as a prism through which to look at her influences. About 250 works by 80 or so female artists, many well known, a few largely forgotten, some only now emerging, will reflect her ideas about the depictions of landscape, about domesticity and ways of representing the feminine persona. And, given that Woolf was a pioneering feminist — from an early age she had strong ties with groups such as the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies — this will have a pronounced feminist perspective.
It will pay homage to the woman who found in her writing a female alternative to the masculine voice, who unpicked the “egotistical I” of the monolithic narrator and presented instead a multiplicity of narratives that could, together, embody a more feminine way of approaching the world.
“Woolf’s novels,” says Smith, “depict dynamic relationships between rooms and houses, between people and landscapes, between land and sea. She is always pointing out the dichotomies between interior and exterior, setting up opposing metaphors between being inside and looking out or being outside in nature and, literally and metaphorically, looking in. I thought this would be a good way of structuring the show.”
The big gallery space of a recently expanded Tate St Ives will be divided into four sections. These will look at landscapes, the portrait, the still life and domestic world, and the psychological persona. “But the show will basically be divided into two parts,” says Smith, “one looking at the outside world, the other at the interior.”
Landscapes, as might be expected, will be prominent. A striking selection will hang in the opening section. Some of these will have a direct association with Woolf. In 1909, for example, her sister, Vanessa Bell, returning to Cornwall for the first time after the death of their mother, painted a whitewashed thatched cottage perched on the brink of a dazzling blue sea. Laura Knight, whose images were often used to illustrate Woolf’s books, depicts two women perched on a precipitous outcrop of rock. Romaine Brooks captures an image of the Cornish town that echoes Woolf’s memory of the curve of St Ives, which “seemed to enclose a great sweep of bay”.
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However, connections to Woolf are broader. As a writer she was influenced by her familiarity with the way in which painters, particularly her sister, worked. She often compared and contrasted their techniques. When she discussed the potential symbolism of a lighthouse with the artist and critic Roger Fry, she did so in abstract, almost painterly terms as a “central line down the middle of the book” that could be used to “hold the design together”.
What marked out her approach, explains Smith, was the way that, when she wrote about landscape, it was very much from the point of view not of the detached onlooker, but of someone who was situated within it. And it is from this quintessentially embedded perspective that the landscapes in this show work. Spectators of Barns-Graham’s huge painting of a rock physically sense that it is planted, a solid blockade, right before them. On the other hand, Hannah Gluckstein, known as Gluck, opts for a very low horizon so that lookers almost feel as if they are floating. What emerges is a multifaceted patchwork of possibilities that challenges the clear divisions of the conventional — and perhaps typically masculine — viewpoint that tends to bisect the landscape with a horizon line right across the middle.
This awareness of multiple perspectives will be picked up in a display of portraits. A 20m length of wall will be hung with pictures that speak of the many ways in which women have chosen to portray themselves, to “perform” their personas to an audience. It will run the gamut from a Julia Margaret Cameron photograph of Woolf’s mother (her niece), through a diffident Gwen John painting and sculpted busts by the surrealist Eileen Agar, to a picture of the first British strongwoman (she performed in theatres, a tug of war with a group of men from the audience being her party piece) or Birgit Jürgenssen’s 1980 series 10 Days — 100 Photos in which, excluding her face or camouflaging it with fur, she speaks of male fantasies that fetishise the female.
The diversity echoes that of Woolf’s gender-shifting, time-travelling character Orlando. The mood varies from the diffident through the fierce to the contemplative. But what you won’t find is the conventionally flattering. The women are strong, intellectual, self-assured.
The exhibition will then move on to explore an inner female world. At first this is literal. Still lives and interior scenes, textiles, furniture and ceramic pieces — notably Bell’s Famous Women dinner service, commissioned by Kenneth Clarke, on which she painted famous women from history, from the biblical Queen of Sheba to Woolf herself — reclaim the domestic space of woman, reflecting themes explored by Woolf in her famous essay A Room of One’s Own.
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Such physical enclosures find metaphorical echoes in the psychological domain. Woolf consistently — perhaps most notably in The Waves or Between the Acts — located herself in the thoughts of her characters. She created fragmented streams of consciousness, capable of embracing conflicting feelings, desires and emotions. The final section of the show will lead us into this interior realm, most saliently by looking at the work of the surrealists Woolf was getting interested in at the end of her life, but also in the work of contemporary artists.
The result will be an exhibition that captures a plurality of female voices, tracing the flow of connections that can be drawn between them and building up what comes to feel like a communal experience. “Masterpieces,” said Woolf, “are not a single and solitary birth; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”
You will have plenty of opportunity to experience this yourself. This is a travelling exhibition that, after St Ives, will move to Pallant House in Chichester, West Sussex (not far from Monk’s House, Woolf’s adult home), and from there to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, where she first delivered the lecture that would eventually become A Room of One’s Own. So forget about going home for your overcoat, about fetching your chequebook or spectacles; jump straight on a train and travel into Virginia Woolf’s world.
Virginia Woolf: An Exhibition Inspired by Her Writings will be at Tate St Ives (01736 796 226), from February 10 to April 29