Virginia Woolf, Mills and Boon and London

I hated the film "The Hours". Julianne Moore's period housewife was okay but oh Nicole and that putty nose. Perhaps I had a slight over-reaction because this is the one literary location that deals with the place where I grew up. The London Borough of Richmond upon Thames has been, variously, home to Mick Jagger, Richard Attenborough, Queen Elizabeth the First (a small part of her palace remains by the Thames) even Alan Bennett's 'Mad' King George had his palace within the borough just down this wide and pastoral stretch of the river at Kew.

Virginia Woolf lived in Richmond for a while and it is here that she and husband, Leonard Woolf, set up the Hogarth Press which would go on to launch the literary careers of Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, Clive Bell, C. Day Lewis, Robert Graves, E.M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, John Maynard Keynes. And the Woolf's quite literally "set up" the press - starting with a small handpress that they operated out of their dining room at 34 Paradise Road in Richmond.


But when I taught creative writing, very briefly, in the borough's continuing ed programme, it was a publisher at a 18-24 Paradise Road who seemed to excite my students' imagination: Mills and Boon, (motto - 'pure reading pleasure') the UK equivalent of Harlequin Romance occupies offices just yards from the Woolf's old home. And students would pass through my classes reciting the same old mantra: "well, we wouldn't read one but we've heard that they are easy to write and that the money is good." I never knew what to say to that. I sensed that you probably had to believe in that kind of romance to write that kind of romance. It would have been interesting to hear what Virginia Woolf would have thought of the neighbours.

The Hogarth Press house and the Mills and Boon offices are on either side of a busy T-junction. The Woolf's old home is not open to visitors. You have to head down to Rodmell in East Sussex and visit Monks' House. We'll save that for another post.

Richmond is worth a visit anyway. In one scene in 'The Hours', Kidman is filmed at the top of Richmond Hill with the Thames, winding through meadows and round woodsy islands towards the horizon. It is still one of the loveliest views in London but these days you are more likely to glimpse Mick Jagger out for a stroll.