Day 7: St. Ives, and Return to London (Monday)

Today we’ll visit Talland House, Woolf’s childhood home, possibly open to visitors (it depends; they rent apartments). From here we can see the Godrevy lighthouse. There are two art museums we may visit. We’ll return to London in the afternoon probably in time for evening theatre.

Talland House   Godrevy Lighthouse

The Stephen family leased this large house in a remote fishing village from the year of Virginia Woolf's birth (1882) until the year of her mother's death (1895).  Woolf's fifth novel To the Lighthouse (1927) evokes some of the spirit of those childhood summers with a large, rambunctious family and lots of house guests.

In "A Sketch of the Past," Woolf describes her father's first finding the house:

"Father on one of his walking tours, it must have been in 1881, I think—discovered St Ives. He must have stayed there, and seen Talland House to let. He must have seen the town almost as it had been in the sixteenth century, without hotels, or villas; and the Bay as it had been since time began. It was the first year, I think, that the line was made from St Erth to St Ives—before that, St Ives was eight miles from a railway. Munching his sandwiches up at Tregenna perhaps, he must have been impressed, in his silent way, by the beauty of the Bay; and thought: this might do for our summer holiday, and worked out with his usual caution ways and means. . . .  It proves the ease and amplitude of those days that a man to whom money was an obsession thought it feasible to take a house on the very toenail, as he called it, of England, so that every summer he would be faced with the expense of moving children, nurses, servants from one end of England to the other. Yet he did it. They rented the house from the Great Western Railway Company. . . .  [I]n retrospect nothing that we had as children made as much difference, was quite so important to us, as our summer in Cornwall. . . . 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 and see the red and yellow anemones flourishing their antennae; or stuck like blobs of jelly to the rock; to find a small fish flapping in a pool; to pick up cowries; to look over the grammar in the dining room and see the lights changing on the bay; the leaves of the escallonia grey or bright green. . ." (Moments of Being, p. 127, Harcourt edition)

 

 

A lighthouse is the central symbol in Woolf's novel, the destination that is delayed and deferred in part one, and then finally reached in part three.  Critics disagree about its meaning, and Woolf herself said it didn't mean anything.  Here is a main character Mrs. Ramsay (based on Woolf's mother), thinking about the lighthouse, which she can see from her window:

"Losing personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and there rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity; and pausing there she looked out to meet that stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke, for watching them in this mood always at this hour one could not help attaching oneself to one thing especially of the things one saw; and this thing, the long steady stroke, was her stroke.  Often she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking, with her work in her hands until she became the thing she looked at--that light for example. . . .  She looked up over her knitting and met the third stroke and it seemed to her like her own eyes meeting her own eyes, searching as she alone could search into her mind and her heart, purifying out of existence that lie, any lie.  She praised herself in praising the light, without vanity, for she was stern, she was searching, she was beautiful like that light." (Part 1, The Window, Chapter XI, p 63, Harcourt edition)

Return to England in the Footsteps of Virginia Woolf