Crumbs
Searching Under a Furze Bush
There are no archival remains evidencing Virginia Woolf spending time in Barnes. There are references to transits that could pass through Barnes– in particular, walks to Kew Gardens and Richmond from central London along the Thames, travel to Waterloo, driving past Mortlake. There are references to something ‘over there’: the sounds of artillery, the sound of music, streams of commuters. There are references to various facets of Surrey’s character. There are enough references over time that carve out specific routes between Barnes station and the commons and the prim little villas onto the pubs along the Thames. Routes that surface on public rights of way that cut diagonally from each one of these public spaces to the next. There is a route through Barnes for Virginia Woolf.
I am getting somewhere by fragment. Below is a crisis cross of some of those fragments – a start of a story about Virginia Woolf in Barnes.
A Barnes Story
On an imagined Barnes Common sometime around 1919, a civil servant called John searches for objects for his mantlepiece – he looks under a furse bush. John is an elected official – a middleman between the public and private. But though a ‘great man’ by popular vote, he fell from his platform, consumed by an obsession evidenced in a queer, different thoughts that drives all away, even his last remaining friend Charles[i]. During a 1918 nighttime walk in Richmond Park, she trespasses with Desmond MacCarthy[ii] onto the funeral grove of a female doctor whose body was found in October 1903. Desmond was drunk, speaks of the dead she says he ‘appears melancholy in a happy sort of way’[iii]. More than a decade earlier, a young Virginia writes to Emma Vaughn reporting that Miss Hickman has been spotted all over England. She will keep to four walls to prevent her own disappearance, entertaining herself with dodging toads and weeds, commenting on the unwell and unkept common acquaintance, Charles[iv].
First edition print of A Haunted House – a collection of short stories Virginia Woolf published in periodicals and literary journals. The collection was edited by Leonard Woolf, printed at the Hogarth Press in 1943. It is the first publication of Virignia Woolfs work after her death.
In 1927 Virginia Woolf writes of a stream of walkers near Waterloo on their way to their prim little villas in Barnes – she describes their state as one of narcotic dream[v]. Night and Day never happens in Barnes, yet all of Richmond-Upon-Thames sits in the distance as they cross in and out of it – always in a muddle. Mary and Katherine. The former sits in an office at the top of a Russell Square village, arranging a society fundraiser, a party, to pick out interesting persons from their worldly muddles to set in pursuit of a greater cause by catching the eyes of Cabinet Ministers and other men of influence[vi]. Katherine is a descendant of great men, living in a great house of Kensington. She looks at a clock on the mantlepiece in her mother’s room and is unconsciously affected, reflecting then on the unhappiness of a muddle[vii]. In Kew Gardens the muddle was a crossing point between the various forms of intimacy provided by family, friendship, work (both professional and creative), romance, travel – a muddle both desired and alarming[viii]. Virginia: From Tavistock Square in November 1924, shortly after departing Hogarth House, she writes to her friend Violet speaking of a celestial conflagration that would occur if her life became a muddle of small income, limited property, long-distance friendship, popular books and concerts at Byfeld Hall in Barnes[ix] – the direction from which bombs and artillery were headed to or heard from Paradise Road in at the end of the war[x].
Sir William Bradshaw of Mrs. Dalloway – he is from Surrey. A physician and loved a sense of proportion. He is a doctor, a scientist, a psychiatrist with a thirty year practice of treating the suicidal. Sir William puts things in proportion for his patients. He champions good society. He concerns himself with the prosperity of England and the unsocial impulses of those on the wrong side of enclosures – Sir William had a friend and they taught in Surrey about the art of proportion. He has an instinct to place madness in seclusion, penalise despair, and the preserve good blood (Woolf, 1996, p. 110). Sir William, as doctor of the nervous system and tiller rational thinking, concerns himself with the origins of unsocial behaviors. He treats maladies of the mind and manner with balanced proportions of rest, activity, solitude and the social.
(Is?) Balance is regained when one removes companions – books, places, people.
[i] Virginia Woolf, ‘Solid Objects’, The Athenaeum, no. 4721 (22 October 1920): 544–45.
[ii] A friend by way of Clive Bell and Lytton Strachey who met him at Cambridge. Desmond was a literary critic – frequently walking and corresponding with Virginia. See Clive Bell, Old Friends: Personal Recollections (The Hogarth Press, 1956; London: Cassell, 1988), 28, 30; Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf: The Complete Collection, ed. James M. Haule, Kindle (Hash Books, 2017).
[iii] Virginia Woolf, ‘Tuesday 28 May [1918]’, in The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume I: 1915 – 1919, ed. Anne Oliver Bell (1918; repr., London: Hogarth Press, 1977), 150.
[iv] Virginia Woolf, ‘99: To Emma Vaughan [Aug 30, 1903]’, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf Volume One: 1888-1912 (Virginia Stephen), ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (Netherhampton House, Salisbury, 1903; London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 92.
[v] Virginia Woolf, ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’, The Yale Review 17, no. 1 (October 1927): 59.
[vi] Virginia Woolf, Night and Day, ed. Suzanne Raitt (1919; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 77–78.
[vii] Woolf, 114.
[viii] Virginia Woolf, Night and Day, ed. Suzanne Raitt (1919; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 354.
[ix] Virginia Woolf, ‘1516: To Violet Dickinson [Nov 30, 1924]’, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf Volume Three: 1923–1928, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, vol. 3 (52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1, 1924; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 147.
[x] Virginia Woolf, ‘Thursday 6 December [1917]’, in Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 1: 1915-19, ed. Anne Oliver Bell (1917; repr., London: Granta Books, 2023), 106; Virginia Woolf, ‘Friday 8 March [1918]’, in Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 1: 1915-19, ed. Anne Oliver Bell (1918; repr., London: Granta Books, 2023), 158.
