29 Bradshaw, “Virginia Woolf’s London”
If Cornwall captured Woolf’s soul, London bagged her heart. Writing to a cousin from Hampshire on 18 August 1898, she confessed that she was ‘counting the weeks till the 22nd September when we return to our beloved city’.[1] Her love affair with London, and especially the City of London, would never cool, and when parts of it were reduced to rubble during the Blitz of 1940–41 she lamented its devastation like a grief-stricken widow.
Virginia Woolf’s travel and literary notebook, 1906–09
Virginia Woolf’s connection to London is evident in this travel notebook that she kept in her twenties. She writes of her ‘longing’ for the city and the beauty of ‘a wet London street, with lamplight twisted on the pavement’.
‘The geniality, sisterhood, motherhood, brotherhood of this uproar’
London, indeed, was nothing less than Woolf’s imaginative lifeblood. Visiting its landmarks, parks and gardens was one of her favourite diversions, and she was arguably at her happiest when swept up by its clamorous, teeming thoroughfares. ‘Personally,’ she wrote in a 1916 review of a book about London, ‘we should be willing to read one volume about every street in the city, and should still ask for more. From the bones of extinct monsters and the coins of Roman emperors in the cellars to the name of the shopman over the door, the whole story is fascinating and the material endless’.[2] This entrancement with London was epitomised in her never dipping delight in the raucous brouhaha of the Strand and Oxford Street – ‘What shall I think of that[s] liberating & refreshing?’ Woolf wrote in her diary on 29 March 1940. ‘… The river. Say the Thames at London bridge; & buying a notebook; & then walking along the Strand & letting each face give me a buffet’.[3]
The London Scene essays by Virginia Woolf, from Good Housekeeping magazine
Virginia Woolf’s vivid sketch of the London Docks and River Thames from the London Scene essays, 1931.
Letter from Virginia Woolf to Frances Cornford about A Room of One’s Own, 1929
In this letter written on 29 December 1929 Virginia Woolf comments upon the ‘chaos of London’ at Christmas time.
This invigorating ‘buffet’ is also experienced by a number of her characters. We read in the ‘1891’ chapter of The Years (1937), for example, that:
The uproar, the confusion, the space of the Strand came upon [Eleanor Pargiter] with the shock of relief. She felt herself expand … a turmoil of variegated life came racing towards her. It was as if something had broken loose – in her, in the world.[4]
Similarly, when the patrician Elizabeth Dalloway travels to the Strand she feels a colossal sense of release from her class-bound and gendered destiny, and a potent sense of what her future might hold:
It was quite different here from Westminster, she thought, getting off at Chancery Lane. It was so serious; it was so busy. In short, she would like to have a profession. She would become a doctor, a farmer, possibly go into Parliamen