Charleston and Monk's HouseThe Intimate House Museums of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell
£95.00
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About this book
The interwoven biographies of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell and the houses they lived in
- Reveals, through an emplaced investigation, the potential of Charleston and Monk's House to illuminate the shared histories of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell
- Provides new insights into aspects of Woolf's and Bell's lives
Explores the poetic relationship between house and dweller, and points the way to a richer interpretative response to house museums - Demonstrates the central role of embodied and sensory responses, alongside intellectual analysis, as tools in a multi-dimensional interpretation of the material world
What can we learn from a commemorative house? What biographical narratives emerge as we travel through the spaces of another's home? This new study unveils the revelatory potential of the house museum to inform and enrich our understanding of the lived past of its former inhabitants. It focuses on the emotionally textured interiors of Charleston and Monk's House, the literary/artistic house museums of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, seeking out traces of their shared biography.
Fresh perspectives unfold on Woolf's and Bell's' sisterhood and their continuous artistic exchange, as we shadow their daily lives through the richly painted rooms and atmospheric gardens of their former Sussex homes. Discover these celebrated artists in a different light - animated, moving, handling the tools of their related arts and brought vividly to life through the tangible fabric of their past living.
Reviews
...the argument is seemed with brilliant insights, and, if you stay the course,your future visits to Charleston and Monk's House will be immeasurably enriched and your experience of them profoundly altered....and the chapter on the gardens of both houses is sheer heaven.
A fascinating account of Bloomsbury and domestic space, traced through Bell's art, Woolf's prose and the tourist industry built on their lives.
Hancock's deep affinity with both houses is evident in this compelling and very elegantly written book...(her) experience of these two museum houses, and her own skill as a writer, have resulted in a fascinating book that fuses a loving, lyrical, intimate and subjective response with rigorous, objective, academic analysis and theoretical research. It will appeal to the devotee of the biographies and works of Woolf and Vanessa Bell, the common reader or viewer, and to the scholar engaged in the burgeoning area of material and cultural Museum Studies.
Table of contents
Acknowledgements; Introduction; Chapter 1: Biography and the literary/artistic house museum; Chapter 2: Spatial choreography: gestural bodies and the rhythms of living; Chapter 3: Spatial embodiment: the anatomy of the house; the architecture of inner space; Chapter 4: A poetics of gardens; Chapter 5: Spatial revelations: the artefact unveiled; Chapter 6: Museum space: space poetically reconstructed; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Sources of Illustrations; Index.