It is often forgotten that Virginia Woolf spent many of her formative years in St Ives. It was in 1881 that her father, Leslie Stephen, first saw a large house on the outskirts of the town overlooking Porthminster Beach on one of his walking tours. Marion Dell in her publication ‘Peering through the Escallonia: Virginia Woolf, Talland House and St Ives’ (1999), documents how he took a lease of Talland House and how the Stephens family spent their summers there. She describes in detail the inside and outside of the house and reproduces a number of photographs of the family at work and at play.

Virginia Woolf herself wrote of these carefree years very vividly in ‘A Sketch of the Past’ in her book ‘Moments of Being’:

            “I see it – the past – as an avenue lying behind; a long ribbon of scenes, emotions. There at the end of the avenue still, are the garden and the nursery. Instead of remembering here a scene and there a sound, I shall fit a plug into the wall; and listen in to the past.”

Woolf’s book ‘To the Lighthouse’ (1927), although ostensibly based in Scotland, is heavily influenced by St Ives and Godrevy Lighthouse. This would have been a prominent landmark from the house – as it still is from so many parts of the town.

In 1895 the lease of Talland House was given up. This came about for a number of reasons: the year previously the imposing Porthminster Hotel was built between the house and the beach, blocking off the fine view of the bay, and then Leslie Stephen’s wife Julia died, altering forever the lives of the Stephens family.

Virginia Woolf did return to the town a few times, and she also stayed at Eagles Nest, Zennor, with her friend Ka Cox who had married the painter, politician and writer Will Arnold-Forster. But she was never again to live in the area for any length of time, despite her continuing references to it.