Ahead of Charlie Porter’s talk at the Garden Museum on Tuesday 3 September (tickets available to attend in person or watch online: book tickets), the writer shares an insight into his research into the photos of the Bloomsbury group:
During the research for my book Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion, I looked at photographs. There were many to study. Key protagonists from the Bloomsbury group left behind fulsome photo albums, often easily accessible to all: images from Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s photos, known as the Monk’s House Albums, have been digitised and are now free to download from Houghton Library, part of Harvard University. This is Virginia Woolf, in the garden of Monk’s House, her country home in East Sussex.
Because I was researching Bloomsbury’s relationship with clothing, I was primarily focused on their garments. But I soon realised I was also looking at was their gardens. Primarily this meant the garden at the Charleston farmhouse, which artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant first made their part-time, then later permanent, place of residence; Monk’s House, and the gardens at Garsington, once home of Lady Ottoline Morrell.
There were other gardens too, such as the garden of Talland House in Cornwall, where sisters Vanessa and Virginia Stephen, who would become Bell and Woolf, spent their childhood summers, or the Surrey garden of writer E.M. Forster’s mother, with whom Forster lived until her death aged 90, when Forster was 66.
I was looking for a particular reason. In my books, photographs are more than decorative. Images are used like sentences, placed within the text. They always appear at the end of a sentence, or a paragraph. The intention is to invite the reader to spend time with the image, rather than giving it a passing glance. I am specific in the words I put on a page, and I am specific in the images I choose. Like this one.
It’s of Virginia Woolf, smoking, in June 1923. She’s at a garden party at Garsington Manor, in Oxfordshire. With my garment focus, the image expresses Woolf’s dichotomy over her clothes: a disdain for fashion, yet titillation in the act of dressing up. I think it’s a dichotomy that many of us share.
But what does the garden tell us? One of my beliefs that emerged during the research of the book is that Woolf’s relationship with Lady Ottoline Morrell was intimate. But, by June 1923, Woolf had met Vita Sackville-West, and her head had been turned. Here was Woolf, dressed in her finest, in the garden of a woman about whom she had cared deeply.
The reasons for taking photographs in gardens are clear. The gardens of the Bloomsbury protagonists were beautiful. But also, the insides of their homes were dark and poorly lit. Much of my research for Bring No Clothes took place at Charleston in East Sussex. Indeed I have Charleston to thank for the whole project: I was asked by them to curate an exhibition on Bloomsbury’s relationship with fashion, which was held at Charleston in Lewes from Sept 2023-March 2024.
I spent days in the attic of the Charleston farmhouse, where the archive is kept. It was always on a Monday or Tuesday, when the house was closed to visitors. My first research trip was in winter, and I was advised to wrap up warm: there was no heating in that part of the house. This was in the 21st century: imagine its conditions one hundred years earlier. I took this photo of the attic windows: the outside was so much brighter.
The Bloomsbury group used gardens as outside rooms, better lit and often more spacious than their interior spaces. Certain of their gardens – Charleston, Garsington – gave them complete privacy, within which they could play and, on occasion, be naked. Their gardens stake out their privilege of class and wealth.
This is heightened when, in the various Bloomsbury photo albums, we catch glimpses of their domestic staff, who made their often chaotic lives run smoothly. This is a photograph of Annie and Lily, two of the Woolf’s domestic workers, picking apples. For them, the garden wasn’t about pleasure. It was about labour.
The labour of the domestic workers allowed the Bloomsbury group protagonists to engage in pleasure. It also allowed them to engage in gossip, bitchiness, vindictiveness. There was war of vitriol between Charleston and Garsington, with Lytton Strachey as the chief pot-stirrer. Strachey was meant to be good friends with Lady Ottoline Morrell, but in reality he loved to bitch about her. Often, Bloomsbury histories can get caught up in the hysteria of such gossip. I found it all so airless.
What happens when you turn the volume down on the tittle-tattle? Hidden stories emerge of humans attempting to live queer lives. By hidden, what I really mean is queer stories about women, which tend to be given less space than those of men. If we focus on the garden, and cut out the noise, we can let these stories come to light.
My book features over 150 images. There were so many more that I couldn’t include. On September 3, I’m presenting a new talk at The Garden Museum on Bloomsbury’s photographs of gardens. As well as the images with gardens that are included in Bring No Clothes, it gives me the chance to consider photographs that didn’t make the book. Like this one, of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, with dogs, at Monk’s House.
Here is Woolf with Ethel Smyth, a queer composer who once served prison time for her involvement in the women’s suffrage movement.
Or this incredibly telling image of T.S. Eliot, a friend of Woolf’s, with his first wife, Vivianne Haigh-Wood Eliot. The couple eventually separated in 1933.
We can also look more deeply at the role of domestic workers in the lives of Bloomsbury, such as Paddy, the gardener at Talland House. His photograph is in the Monk’s House photo album.
Gardens were often the backdrop to the actions of the Bloomsbury group. In the talk at the Garden Museum, I hope to bring these gardens to the fore.
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