In the Guardian today there's photo of Virginia Woolf's study in Monk's House. It was in this room that she wrote many of her books, including her best, Mrs Dalloway - a masterpiece, not least because of its account of how differing forms of consciousness may regularly fail to connect. Woolf was radical for her time in appreciating how different other people's forms of consciousness can be.
It was in this house that she went mad for the final time, and from it she took the short walk to her suicide.
There have been many volumes written trying to explain her painful decline, but i heard an alternative explanation a few years ago, when following a pair of old women round on a tour of the house. In contrast to Charleston Farmhouse down the road, which all the major Bloomsbury painters helped to decorate, painting every available surface, every table, every pot, Monk House is for the most part plainly, even monotonously decorated. One of the women said 'All this green - it would drive you mad!'
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