DAY 6: OF TWO WARS AND THE WARS WITHIN

Ftom 9:00 until 19:00 = 1914 to 1960

Introduction: This second to last day of our tour will take place in the years between the Victorian and the Postmodernist Periods. This time brings to mind the greats of our language: T.S Eliot, Yeats, Orwell, Forster, and (perhaps one of the most famous manic-depressives and suicides in literature) Virginia Woolf. In this period, we see what is easily recognisable as the ascendance of literature as we know it now. But we must forego the introduction to immediately delve into the lives of Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway... and their premature deaths.
Locations: The Life and Death of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) Our first location will be the Talland House, St Ives, Cornwall: Adeline Virginia Woolf spent every summer here until she was thirteen, and this is the place of her most vivid memories. So vivid, in fact, that the impressions and landscapes found here can also be found littered in her works (The Lighthouse, in particular.) After repeated sexual abuse by her half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth, and the deaths of both parents and a sister which led to two consequent nervous breakdowns, Virginia moved to 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury: our second location. While she stayed there, she attended King's College, Cambridge. It was there that she found a group of friends, and one close friend in particular: a man called Leondard Woolf. She married him two years after meeting him, and they shared a close and intimate marriage. They even started a publishing company together. But the encouragement of her husband couldn't save this talented woman from her inner demons: her periodic depression and hypermania drove her to frequent breakdowns...and a lot of writing. Our final destination in her life will be her home in Rodmell, Sussex. It was here on the morning of 28 March 1941 that Virginia Woolf filled her overcoat pockets with stones, left a letter to her husband, and then drowned herself in the River Ouse. Here, while sitting on the green banks of the river, we can eat lunch and imagine the depths of despair into which this genius of literature plummeted.

Above: Virginia Woolf

Above: A map of the area that Virginia Woolf must've once explored

Above: Virginia and Leonard Woolf

2. The Life and Death of Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) This writer was born in Oak Park, Illonois (Chicago): this upper-class, strictly Protestant suburb will be our first location. As a young boy, and all through his long life, Hemingway had an eye for adventure... always in some scrape or other. This spirit led him all over the globe: New York, Italy, Paris, Toronto, Chicago, Kansas City, Nairobi, Kenya, the Bahamas, Cuba, Spain and finally Idaho. So many locations that his presence was felt... so many memorials left where his heavy foot trod... why not visit all of 'em? We will go on a wild, wacky and wonderful worldwide tour of every strange place that Ernest Hemingway visited, wrote and got (greviously) injured! This will undoubtedly exhaust us... but perhaps we can handle one more location: where he committed suicide. Two days after being released from hospital after his first attempt, and five bouts of EST (Electroshock Therapy), he grabbed a gun from the cabinet in his home in Ketchum, Idaho and shot himself. So ended the eventful life of Ernest Hemingway: alcoholic, writer, American, adventurer, and sorely missed by his fans.

Above: Ernest Hemingway with his favourite shotgun that he used for hunting... and to kill himself.

DAY 3: REVOLUTIONS, RESTORATIONS AND THE MOTHER OF THE MOTHER OF FRANKENSTEIN

Day 3: From 9:00 until 19:00 = 1660 - 1798
Introduction: From the optimistic, baroque, Shakespearian (Christopher Marlowe wouldn't approve of me saying that!) and unashamedly "art-y" Renaissance, we travel to the years of political turmoil: The Restoration Period. Sometimes called the Neoclassical Period, this stage in our language's developement was a bit more... restrained. Society in general was busy trying to repress the memories of the nasty things that had happened in the past. Writers of the time loved the sharp pen of wit, and used it with an ordered and structured style that was a deliberate turn away from the grandeur of the Golden Age. Not to say that this period was boring: this was the time of John Milton (poor devil, ha ha), Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. Writers such as those, in the midst of all the chaos that they revelled in or hated at turn, still suffered most keenly from the wounds of life... which tragically led some to attempt to or succeed (?!) in ending their own.

Locations: 1. The life of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) Beginning the day bright and early, we will journey into the life of Mary Wollstonecraft: a writer, philosopher and feminist. Our first location will be where she was born... Spitalfileds, London. We will travel the streets she once did and visit the house she was forced to leave after her abusive, alchoholic father squandered the family savings. If time allows us (for we have so far to go, and so little time to get there!), we might visit the tavern he frequented for most of her youth. Jumping ahead in her troubled life, we will visit the school for young girls that Wollenstonecraft and a childhood friend set up in Newtington Green. She later abandoned the school, devastated by her friend's sudden death, for a job as a governess. Near that building, which still stands today and whose history books read fondly of "Mistress Mary", we will have a picnic in the flowering gardens.The next location will be even more grim: after multiple rejections and broken relationships, she attempted to poison herself with laudanum in her small apartment in London, which we will visit. Next, we will walk along the River Thames in which she had jumped and was subsequently saved by a stranger. But her soulmate, the solemn William Godwin, prevented further attempts at suicide: she died, at the age of thirty eight, a week after giving birth to a child called Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin... later Mary Shelly, authoress of Frankenstein! At the end of a very long and eventful day, we can eat supper at her memorial site at Old Saint Pancreas Churchyard, where this poem by William Roscoe can be read:

"Hard was thy fate in all scenes of life
As daughter, sister, mother, friend and wife;
But harder still, thy fate in death we own,
Thus mourn'd by Godwin whose heart seem'd of stone."


Above: Mary Wollstonecraft


Above: Woodcut by William Blake for Mary Wollstonecraft's "Original Stories From Real Life"



Above: William Godwin never recovered from his wife's death