The view of Godrevy Lighthouse (which inspired To the Lighthouse) from the hotel.
Last weekend I went all the way to St Ives in Cornwall with some friends for a fabulous time visiting the Virginia Woolf exhibition currently on at Tate St Ives. It’s the perfect place to explore Woolf’s ideas, landscape and feminist consciousness; St Ives is well known as an artists’ place, with its light and landscape which has inspired so many; and Woolf wrote so fondly of the inspiration and happiness provided by her early summers spent at Talland House (which we sought out, of course). A Londoner by birth, Woolf writes Cornwall into several of her novels, including Jacob’s Room, To the Lighthouse and The Waves. She wrote that
‘I went for a walk in Regent’s Park yesterday morning, and it suddenly struck me how absurd it was to stay in London, with Cornwall going on all the time,’ she records of her sudden train journey from London to Cornwall in 1909. I have been walking along the sands and sitting in the sun… I am so drugged with fresh air that I can’t write…As for the beauty of this place it surpasses every other season.
As someone who frequently feels the urge to hop on the Penzance train instead of going home at the end of a long day, I understand completely. For Woolf, Cornwall offered a kind of freedom from the social life and claustrophobia of London (which, equally, she
Talland House
thrived on), and this and so much more is reflected in the exhibition. Woolf’s life and work are situated in a web of cultural forms, from art to bookbinding, home furnishings to sculpture, and of course she had close ties to the women’s suffrage movement and wrote passionately about women’s creativity and education. This exhibition, then, in the year in which we mark 100 years of women’s suffrage, is particularly significant, and all the more so because it only features women’s work. Over the last decade attention has repeatedly been drawn to studies about the under-representation of women artists, and this has been repeatedly ignored, but here is an exhibition that makes a wonderful attempt to redress the balance.
(c) artcornwall.org
The show offers, consequently, an insight into the changing landscape of women’s lives over the last 100 years. Many of these insights are internal: there are some of Vanessa Bell’s wonderful still lives, which seem to echo Woolf’s novels is so many ways, as well as furnishing fabrics, ceramics and portraits. From Gwen John’s uncompromising stare in her self-portrait to Laura Knight’s The Dark Pool (one of my favourite paintings, but which does not appear in the catalogue, sadly), to photographs of Dora Carrington as a ‘living sculpture’, unconventional creative women are celebrated throughout. There are several wonderful ‘windowsill’ paintings, by Bell, Knight, Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham and others, which transform a woman’s point of view from a domestic centre by looking outwards. Some are almost mocking in their refusal of domestic life (such as Knight’s Cactus, complete with dead flies), and they indicate both the necessity of a ‘room of one’s own’ along with a denial of ‘traditional’ feminine values.
Woolf argued that, as women, we must ‘think back through our mothers’, indicating the need for a strong female tradition in art and literature to rival that of the male tradition. The exhibition offers a way to do this. Judy Chicago’s setting for Woolf from her famous work The Dinner Party (1978) offers a feminist approach to thinking about female creativity and sexuality, while other exhibits such as Claude Cahun’s fascinating photographic self-portraits explore multiple selves and aspects of gender which seem to echo Woolf’s Orlando. Gluck’s marvellous landscapes, meanwhile, so low and with so much sky, position the woman in the landscape itself. The many contradictions of social, personal and cultural constructions of womanhood are explored in their glorious, confusing multiplicity: women both is and isn’t a part of ‘nature’, for example; womanhood means many things and both is and isn’t an ‘essence’. Women are not necessarily mothers, or nurturing, but what we learn is that women are creative, and perhaps all the more so when this is against the odds. Perhaps women’s work looks different when it is not displayed alongside often larger and showier masculine artworks (although some of these are larger and showier, too!) but in some ways I left feeling that gender is perhaps less important to art than I thought: there are some wonderful works here, demonstrating female excellence in a range of media, and though the public and private faces of womanhood are central to many of them, they are not the only thing that matters.
Gluck, Before the races, St Buryan, Cornwall (1924, private collection)
I first encountered Vanessa Bell’s work when I was a student at the Courtauld, where I saw A Conversation and Arum Lilies, and fell in love with them. In fact, I haven’t seen that much more of her work since, so went to 
which we see out of a window across a room; the effect would have been cleverly to suggest that one was looking in a mirror, transforming the room in which the painting was hung, but also implying that there are hidden, other places we can glimpse through paintings, round corners, out of windows. Paintings such as this remind me that Bell’s art is all about art – about colour and form and design, about living it, about painting other artists. Everything she paints says something about her artistic theories and integrity – a conclusion I probably couldn’t have reached without this exhibition.
For Christmas one of the (many) books I received was Jans Ondaatje Rolls’ The Bloomsbury Cookbook: Recipes for Life, Love and Art. I have to admit that I’m not a particularly keen cook, but this is much more than a recipe book and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The rationale behind the book is that the Bloomsbury group, with their friendships and enthusiasm for communal living and intense talk, often did so over food. Virginia Woolf wrote in ‘A Room of One’s Own’ that ‘A good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.’ If their food was inspirational to their conversation, their work and their lives, this is the book to demonstrate that. From tea and biscuits to game, there is a Bloomsbury recipe for every occasion you might imagine, and some you couldn’t.
the food which appears in Woolf’s novels, pointing out her sensuous awareness of taste, creating a kind of epicurean realism for literary ends; given Woolf’s concern with women’s lives (and after all, food preparation was primarily the concern of women), this sets aspects of her novels in a slightly different light. Most of the figures who appear in the cookbook had domestic staff, of course, so if they cooked themselves it was for pleasure, perhaps even an affectation, but Woolf’s enthusiasm for baking bread and Bell’s desire to feed and care for her family, Carrington’s nourishing of Lytton Strachey, demonstrate aspects of their lives which are perhaps less radical than they might have wished.
of an assortment – like an old recipe book, perhaps, full of titbits, of gossip, anecdotes and suggestions as well as recipes. A consistent narrative of the lives of the Bloomsberries is constructed through the chronological development of the book, divided into chapters based on time periods, and as such it is remarkably wide-ranging. There is plenty here which doesn’t relate at all to cookery, and some of the links are rather tenuous, but it is written with such joy in food and conversation, and such good humour (there are some very funny anecdotes I hadn’t come across before) that it is a great read. One of the greatest pleasures of this book is the illustrations: it is lavishly full of full-page colour reproductions of paintings, especially by Bell and Duncan Grant, as well as photographs, book covers, pages of recipe books etc. 
of looking at these well-researched figures, then. The recent ‘Life in Squares’ indicates that there is still a great deal of interest in the personal lives of the Bloomsbury group, and what is more personal than cooking, eating and sharing food? It might make them seem more ordinary, growing vegetables, preparing them, cooking, eating; but it was all done with such panache and relish, according to Rolls, that it only continues the appeal of the group.
han the painting, or writing, in ‘Life in Squares’, despite claims that this series was not simply prurient about the lives of those involved (‘sniffing the bedsheets’, according to Virginia Nicholson, a descendant). There is a lot of sex, and conversation, much of it trite, and although we are occasionally reminded of art (a shot of Vanessa Bell painting, Virginia Woolf mentioning her writing) the priority is on relationships.
ging the way ahead, from the sisters throwing their corsets out of the window to a genuine sense of the women’s desire for what men had – education, freedom, power. This sense is lost somewhat by the second episode, though, as relationships become increasingly tangled and we see ahead to their future beyond the heady days of youth and freedom.
