Virginia Woolf hasn’t featured in my reading, but she does make an appearance in my music library via Jimmy Somerville’s
Coming, from the soundtrack to Orlando. “The longest and most charming
love-letter in literature” was set at Knole house, in Sevenoaks. My wife and I paid a visit.
They don't allow photography inside, so this concludes the exhibition.
Stretching out for a nap on the billiards table – now that
would've made National Trust history
Has enough rooms to make the typical British floorplan seem like a rounding error 
Later, thinking to find a picture of
a fish Woolf riding a bike, all I could locate was
"not even her disguise as a bicycle could deceive us"which wouldn’t look too far out of place in the
Today in history collection. My search did yield a nice
Guardian piece, complete with empowering vignette from the life of Simone de Beauvoir, who wasn't afraid of nuthin':
Forbidden to ride as a child (her mother equated it with other “sensual” pleasures), De Beauvoir learned in occupied Paris using the bike of her lover, Nathalie Sorokine: “I really handled it with ease, except one time I crashed into a dog and another time I collided with two women, and I was very happy.” Her mother might not have been wrong: De Beauvoir’s letters to Jean-Paul Sartre are full of the joys of bicycling, which she said made her like a “lusty wench”.
Vita Sackville-Wench
