The stories behind stories are often fascinating. Why did the story end that way? What happened to the characters after the final pages are turned? What about before – what happened before the author picked up a pen?
Set between 1900 and 1919 in picturesque Cornwall and war-blasted London, Maggie Humm’s Talland House takes Lily Briscoe from the pages of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and tells her story outside the confines of Woolf’s novel—as a student in 1900, as a young woman becoming a professional artist, her loves and friendships, mourning her dead mother, and solving the mystery of her friend Mrs. Ramsay’s sudden death.
It’s evocative and engaging, sweeping landscapes simmering next to psychological interior exploration. Picturesque Cornwall and busy London are the backdrop for a young woman growing up, and an older woman reflecting back. We’re treated to details about the captivating Lily Briscoe and her relationship with herself, her art, and the women and men in her life. It’s a great read, from a clearly very knowledgeable writer.
I caught up with Maggie to find out more.
Why did you decide to write Talland House?
Everyone has a novel inside themselves somewhere. I wrote my first ‘novel’ aged eight, told from the point of view of an encyclopaedia who dropped on the head of a burglar to save a library. I didn’t get a gold star because the teacher said it was unrealistic ‘no-one burgles libraries Margaret.’ But libraries were my world and so I’ve always written books – before Talland House academic books. They say write about what you know and as an academic specialist in Woolf, I know about Woolf and about myself (all debut novels are autobiographical in some way).
Virginia Woolf has a very distinctive style – were you trying to echo this at all?
Initially, and almost subconsciously, I wrote with Woolf’s indirect discourse and use of multiple viewpoints. At my first reading in my Diploma of Creative Writing course the tutor Gillian Slovo quite rightly advised me to choose a less confusing style so that readers could identify with Lily. But Talland House is full of events, people and places Woolf knew and some vocabulary (‘granite and rainbow’ feature!).
Why are you interested in Virginia Woolf?
My first book Feminist Criticism: Women as Contemporary Critics has a chapter on Woolf and my interest grew from there. Like many people, I identify with Woolf’s politics: feminism, pacifism, socialism and her ideas about democratic education and living in touch with each other and with nature. In addition the Woolf societies around the world are very welcoming and sustaining with annual conferences which trigger further interest. This year even the fashion world loves Woolf with the 2020 Met Gala and Givenchy’s collection devoted to her novel Orlando.
Why did you take To the Lighthouse as your starting point, rather than another novel?
I first read To the Lighthouse as an adolescent after the death of my mother and fell in love with the mother-figure Mrs Ramsay. Later I discovered that Woolf’s mother Julia Stephen was 49 when she died and Virginia 13 – the exact ages of my mother and me when my mother died. There’s something so extraordinarily moving about mothering in To the Lighthouse, but Mrs. Ramsay dies suddenly and in parentheses (apologies to those who haven’t yet read the book!) and I knew I had to write a novel discovering how Mrs. Ramsay dies.
The book centres around Lily Briscoe’s painting – what interests you about this art form, as well as writing?
Although not trained as an art historian, I have long been a devotee of the arts in particular Bloomsbury’s dedication to different genres: murals, textiles, pottery, book design, as well as paintings, and to collaborative, decorative projects. Lily Briscoe paints Mrs. Ramsay’s portrait twice in the novel with the final version a more abstract painting, described by Woolf in terms of shapes, mass and colours, rather than only representational figures, much like her sister Vanessa Bell’s approach to art for example, Bell’s 1912 portrait of Woolf – Virginia Woolf. As Vanessa Bell said “artists, in the opinion of many are little better than lunatics [but] besides being rather mad, artists are apt to be revolutionaries”.
Did you have to do lots of historical research?
The research was huge but so enjoyable. As a Woolf scholar (my last three books focus on Woolf and the arts) I’d read all Woolf’s writings and writings by her family and friends. For Talland House I read Cornish newspapers for the times Lily is in St. Ives for weather, incidents, and atmosphere. I loved being in the airy map room at the top of the British Library looking at old photos of St. Ives for housing types and street scenes. I read artists’ memoirs, turn of the twentieth century art journals for a sense of artists’ lives and studios. I read everything on-line about World War I in London and how it felt to be there, for example, when the Germans suddenly switched from Zeppelins to Gotha bombers in 1917. Virginia Woolf herself experienced Gothas in Richmond December 1917. She wrote in her diary: “discussed the raid, which, according to the Star I bought, was the work of 25 Gothas, attacking in 5 squadrons & 2 were brought down”. I googled about music halls, other leisure pursuits, clothes, transport, and the accurate names of buildings. St. Ives and London became characters in my novel.
The most difficult task was keeping the research to a discreet underpinning not, as academics often do, glorifying it in long footnotes. Also difficult was that Lily gradually took over my life, my feelings, even my physical characteristics. She’s always early for appointments, she’s an only child herself with a dead mother, and her fingers are the shape of mine. Sometimes I wondered if I existed outside the novel.
But what the research did do was to bring me much closer than ever before, to a fuller sensation of Woolf’s worlds—the smell and feel of Talland House’s escallonia hedge, an almost bodily sense of the impact of bombs on London’s buildings, streets and inhabitants. This feeling for history and sensory experiences hopefully continues in my second novel, Rodin’s Mistress, about the tumultuous love affair of the sculptor Auguste Rodin and the painter Gwen John.