[Virginia Woolf’s writing desk]

[Virginia Woolf’s writing desk]

Writer, printer, and feminist Virginia Woolf was at the center of the Bloomsbury Group during the first half of the twentieth century and was one of the leading figures of modernist literature. Woolf commissioned this oak writing desk while she was in her teens and used it until she was around thirty years old. She specifically requested a standing desk. In 1929, Woolf gave the desk to her nephew, Quentin Bell, an artist and member of the Bloomsbury Group. His wife Anne Olivier Bell, the editor of Virginia Wool’s diaries, cut six inches off the legs to make it a sitting desk. Quentin Bell painted Cleo, the muse of history, on the sloped top in the style of the Omega Workshops.

1890

[1890s]

Virginia Woolf — writer

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66

1800s