Literature Cambridge lecturer Dr Karina Jakubowicz interviews Caroline and Jonathan Zoob about Monk’s House and garden, with an additional contribution from Alli Pritchard, the current resident curator.
‘The garden was the reason we were here: it was our total focus’
‘We were given this delightfully vague guidance to garden in the spirit of Bloomsbury’
‘[We] always had in mind what they would have liked’
‘This place was hugely important to [Virginia] . . . Leonard liked it in a practical sense. He liked to be in the garden gardening. [He wanted] to be let down like a child after tea to go out and play in the garden’
‘[Virginia] used to talk about the deep peace of Rodmell . . . it’s interesting how often, when she was ill, it was here they came’
‘They had two lives: the Bloomsbury life, where they went to a lot of events in London – the opening of art exhibitions, the ballet, the opera, concerts, theatre – and they had this incredibly intense and lively intellectual life with their friends . . . but that would become too much for Virginia’s mental state and so . . . they would come down here’
Hear Caroline Zoob, author of Virginia Woolf’s Garden, and Jonathan Zoob, in conversation with Literature Cambridge lecturer Karina Jakubowicz. In the year 2000, Caroline and Jonathan Zoob moved into Monk’s House, much-loved home of Virginia and Leonard Woolf from 1919 until the end of their lives. For more than ten years, the Zoobs looked after Monk’s House, restoring the garden in the spirit of the Woolfs.