In the summer of 2018 I travelled to London and St Ives to explore Virginia Woolf’s England. The trip was funded through the Barbara Rooke Travel Prize, a prize awarded to a graduating English major by my alma mater’s Department of English Literature.
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.
Great West Rail took me from London to St Ives and back, just like it did Woolf over a century before. She returned to St Ives at 23 in 1905, a decade after her mother’s death and the last time her family had vacationed in St Ives for the summer. In her journal, she describes the train as “the wizard who was to transport us into another world, almost into another age.”
She stood in a square near her London home, and wrote a novel in her head.
My B&B hosts were thrilled when I told them I was in St Ives for Virginia. They showed me on their makeshift map (drawn over the town distributed map) how to get to my ‘mate’s house’ (Talland House).
St Ives has a long history of influencing artists—not just writers like Woolf, whose novel To the Lighthouse was based on her childhood experiences in St Ives, but visual artists as well. The Tate St Ives works to showcase and celebrate these artists, for example, like Alfred Wallis.
This painting, called ‘The Hold House Port Mear Square Island Port Mear Beach’ struck me as something Woolf might’ve liked; it’s essentially a subjective landscape of St Ives, arranged according to what Wallis defined as significant to him. I found that thinking about St Ives, or any place, in this way can really emphasize the differences in how we perceive a specific space. From Wallis, to Woolf, to me, to the person standing next to me at the gallery.
Barbara Hepworth’s studio in St Ives (a garden-studio, really), which is associated with the Tate St Ives, is yet another reminder of how much art is influenced by the space it’s made in, how places have their personalities, and how their artists can change how they’re remembered; it’s a cycle, like anything else is. Hepworth’s sculptures live amongst her plants in calm, natural light, the weathered material of the sculptures the only note of time passing.
Something soft about time in a place like this. In London, the chime of Big Ben tolls heavily with the city’s cacophony. In Cornwall, the humble beat of the lighthouse.
The crux of my journey–the second last day of my trip to Woolf’s England, I went to the lighthouse.
More specifically, to Godrevy Lighthouse, whose beam of light can be seen in the distance from St Ives, and that Virginia saw from Talland House over 100 years ago. I’d planned to go but hadn’t planned how; I wanted James’ struggle to reach it to be mine, and it was. Somehow, after a few hours of wandering and waiting, I persuaded a local bus driver to drive off route and drop me off on a road nearby the water, and he gave me two hours to meet him back exactly where he’d left me.
Walking toward the water and the lighthouse was so memorable despite being so brief. By the time I’d made it to the cliffside, I only had about half an hour with the lighthouse before I had to go back. What I felt when I saw it, so much larger than it seemed from the beaches of St Ives, was an inherited love; the kind grandmothers pass down to their granddaughters, the kind that can be pressed in a book for decades and still retain its punch. And I couldn’t help but think about Lily’s revelation, learned from Mrs Ramsay: “making of the moment something permanent.” So I sat with the lighthouse for a moment, and from there I moved in small but sure gestures toward home.
Transposing memory onto memory, she stands in a square and writes in her head.
