In the latest Camden History Review Robert Todd describes the relationship between the facts and the fiction of the places where novelist and critic Virginia Woolf spent twenty-four years living.
From 1904 to 1912 she lived at Gordon, Fitzroy and Brunswick Squares; and then from 1924 to 1940 at Tavistock and Mecklenburgh Squares.
The facts of these places are revealed in her letters and diaries, and the fiction in three of her novels: Night and Day, Mrs Dalloway, and Jacob’s Room.
Many of the places that Woolf got to know on her walks around what is now Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia became rubble during the Blitz but live on in her fiction.
Camden History Review 45, is published by Camden History Society.