Virginia Woolf’s relationship to and feelings about Kent are most often explored via her visits to Sissinghurst Castle Garden, where her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West crafted a literary bolthole amidst the crumbling towers and sprawling rose gardens. In a poem dedicated to Woolf, written in 1930, Vita elucidates:

“…[I]n and out of these decaying halls
I move, and not a ripple, not a quiver
shakes the reflection though the waters shiver”.

These themes of stagnancy and fluidity, of the shapes water makes metaphorically gesturing towards wider truth, are ones Virginia Woolf returns to repeatedly in her own texts, for example in The Waves (1931), where she writes: “The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself back with the energy of their fall. The waves were steeped in deep-blue save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs”. Woolf is fascinated by the shapes the water makes, in the same way as she is fascinated by the shape and organisation of words on the printed page. Her writing explores that which is transient: the shape of water, as well as that which is longer lasting: history, relationships, physical spaces. 

Vita’s purchase and reclamation of the Sissinghurst Castle estate was in direct response to the outmoded laws which prevented her from inheriting her family home, Knole Castle, also in Kent. As well as using houses and gardens as structural devices in several of her other texts, Virginia Woolf directly references this loss in Orlando (1928), where the themes of gender, inheritance and literary prowess both highlight Vita’s plight and gently mock the levels of aristocratic society her friend moved within. Woolf emphasises the link between Vita’s experiences and her ‘fictional biography’ by including several photos of Vita, with the text being one of the first to include photographs. 

The National Trust confirms that:

In ‘Orlando: A Biography’, the main character is always in possesion of their ancestral home, and this certainty was Virginia’s gift to Vita. On 6 December 1928 Virginia gave her original manuscript, written in distinctive purple ink, to Vita with a dedication on the first page. The manuscript was preserved in Vita’s secluded Tower Writing Room at Sissinghurst Castle until her death in 1962.¹

Virginia Woolf’s relationship with Kent is not limited to her relationship with Vita, however, and there are numerous references to visits to the country from her early diaries and letters, written long before she first met Vita in 1922. Most clearly, in a 1904 letter to Emma Vaughan, she said, ‘There is no lovelier place than Canterbury … that I say with my hand on my heart as I sit in Florence–and I have seen Venice too.’ (April 25th 1904, Letters [L] 1 138).

In a life often impacted by feelings of constraint, it is significant that Woolf found the city of Canterbury to be a place of refuge and relief and even fun. In the same letter to Vaughan, she jokes about the “sacred precincts” of the city, enquiring as to whether her friend had ‘run away with’ the Dean (of Canterbury Cathedral). Photographic and diary records suggest the young Woolf visited the area often as a child, with relatives living in Harbledown. In 1910, after one of her earlier periods of poor mental health, Woolf spent a longer period of time convalescing at Moat House in Blean, writing of the Tudor property in her letters:

we had our windows prised open. The decay of centuries had sealed them. No human force can now shut them. Thus we sit exposed to wind and wet by day and by night we are invaded by flocks of white moths. The rain falls, and the birds never give over singing, and hot sulphur fumes rise from the valleys, and the red cow in the field roars for her calf… 

Virginia Woolf references Canterbury very specifically in her 1925 short story ‘Together and Apart’ (published in the 1944 collection A Haunted House as ‘The Conversation’). The piece explores issues of ego and poor communication, centring around a conversation between two people at a party hosted by Mrs Dalloway, Mr Serle and Miss Anning. Their experiences of the city and how they felt about their visits are in stark comparison to what they say, and their thoughts about how this might appear to the listener. Woolf uses short sharp statements to capture the attention of the reader: ‘Do you know Canterbury yourself’, ‘“I loved Canterbury”, she said’, and  ‘Of course, whatever they may do, they can’t spoil Canterbury’, followed by much longer modernist reflections:

‘Yes, I know Canterbury,’ he said reminiscently, sentimentally, inviting, Miss Anning felt, discreet questions, and that was what made him interesting to so many people, and it was this extraordinary facility and responsiveness to talk on his part that had been his undoing, so he thought often, taking his studs out and putting his keys and small change on the dressing-table after one of these parties (and he went out sometimes almost every night in the season), and, going down to breakfast, becoming quite different, grumpy, unpleasant at breakfast to his wife, who was an invalid, and never went out, but had old friends to see her sometimes, women friends for the most part, interested in Indian philosophy and different cures and different doctors, which Roderick Serle snubbed off by some caustic remark too clever for her to meet, except by gentle expostulations and a tear or two–he had failed, he often thought, because he could not cut himself off utterly from society and the company of women, which was so necessary to him, and write. 

In the confusion and obfuscation of the communication between the pair, it is the existence and description of Canterbury which feels the most clear and true, ‘And always she saw Canterbury, all thundercloud and livid apple blossom, and the long grey backs of the buildings.’

References