Why are we so attracted to writers’ houses, like Woolf? Why do we love seeing their ‘things’? A writer’s ‘things’ can include archives, inventories, lists, rooms, lanes, hauntings. The authors Harriet Baker and Maggie Humm will talk about the importance of place to Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. They will be in conversation with Helen Taylor.
Harriet Baker’s new book is Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann. Baker, who read English at Oxford and has a PhD from Queen Mary, University of London, has written for the London Review of Books, the Paris Review, the New Statesman, the TLS, Apollo and frieze. In 2018, she was awarded the Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian Prize. Maggie Humm is Professor Emeritus, University of East London and the author/editor of many academic books. She has published two award-winning novels, Talland House and Radical Woman: Gwen John & Rodin. Her new book is The Bloomsbury Photographs, 2024.

Tickets are £12 and available via Eventbrite using the link below or in person at the library during opening hours – cash only. Tickets will also be available outside library opening hours, in the library, on a Wednesday morning 10.30 – 12.30 when card payments will also be accepted.

Harriet Baker and Maggie Humm  Virginia Woolf; A Life in Two Places

17th November 11.00am until 12.00pm - (60 mins)