I have waited over a year for the release Talland House by Maggie Humm. According to the blurb, “Talland House takes Lily Briscoe from the pages of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and tells her story outside the confines of Woolf’s novel…” It is an honour to introduce you to Maggie Humm.
Maggie Humm is an international Woolf scholar, she is the author/editor of fourteen books, the last three of which focused on Woolf and the arts. Talland House was shortlisted for the Impress and Fresher Fiction prizes in 2017 (as Who Killed Mrs. Ramsay?) and the Retreat West and Eyelands prizes in 2018.
Jessie: Tell me more about Talland House.
Maggie: Talland House re-imagines Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse from the point of view of Lily Briscoe the artist character. Set between 1900 and 1919 in picturesque Cornwall and war-blasted London, the novel tells Lily’s emotional journey in becoming a professional artist: her love-life, mourning her dead mother, as a suffragette, nurse and solving the mystery of Mrs. Ramsay’s death. The novel contains a prequel to To the Lighthouse and many fictions of Woolf’s life, including her family, the artists and friends she knew.
Jessie: What was the initial inspiration for the novel?
Virginia Woolf’s wonderful, quasi-autobiographical To the Lighthouse. I first read it as an adolescent after the death of my mother and fell in love with the mother-figure Mrs. Ramsay. Only years later did I discover that Woolf’s mother Julia Stephen was 49 when she died and Virginia 13 – the exact ages of my mother and me when my mother died. There’s something so extraordinarily moving about mothering in To the Lighthouse. In the novel Mrs. Ramsay dies suddenly and in parentheses (apologies to those who haven’t read the book!). The death is unexplained – the most surprising death in 20th century literature. I knew I had to write a novel discovering how Mrs. Ramsay died!
Jessie: How long have you been working on the book? Did it involve any special research?
Years! I took a UEA/Guardian diploma in creative writing followed by nine months of mentoring with The Literary Consultancy and much revision.
The research was huge but so enjoyable. As a Woolf scholar (my last three books focus on Woolf and the arts) I’d read all Woolf’s writings and writings by her family and friends. For Talland House I read Cornish newspapers for the times Lily is in St. Ives for weather, incidents, and atmosphere. I loved being in the airy, light map room at the top of the British Library looking at old photos of St. Ives for housing types, street scenes. I read artists’ memoirs, art journals of the turn of the twentieth century for a sense of artists’ lives and studios. I read everything on-line about World War I in London and how it felt to be there, for example, when the Germans suddenly switched from Zeppelins to Gotha bombers in 1917. London and St. Ives almost became characters in Talland House. I googled about music halls, other leisure pursuits, clothes, transport, and the accurate names of buildings and visited all Lily’s places. Lily gradually took over my life, my feelings, even my physical characteristics. She’s always early for appointments, she’s an only child with a dead mother, and her fingers are the shape of mine. Sometimes I wondered if I existed outside the novel!
Jessie: I am intrigued and want to delve into your writing. Please present some extracts from the novel so that will transport us to the settings in Cornwall.
Talland House
“Lily glanced up at the house. Over the years, Talland House had come to mean more and more to her, a kind of home, a place where she’d always wanted to return, and she’d missed it with the sadness of missing an old friend, a real person. There was a special spot—the steps from the drawing room into the garden where Mrs. Ramsay liked to sit—at a specific moment of the day—early evening when the low sunlight caught the bright escallonia hedge—and it looked magnificent.”
St Ives
“Lily had a glorious view of St Ives’s harbour, the seagulls twisting iridescent in the sun, a lighthouse seemingly close enough to touch. The weeks ahead spread out before her like a freshly washed sheet. Here no one knew her, here there were no family responsibilities, here she could be herself or whatever herself would become.”
Beach and Godrevy
“The beach began to empty as families took their children home for tea, and Lily rested on the top bar of the promenade railings looking out over the glare of the sea at Godrevy Lighthouse, hearing distant cries, the pat-pat of sails flapping against the rigging, the waves lapping. Now she felt the whole of the past could be present, as if her childhood days inched forward as slowly as the tortoise in the garden at home.
Godrevy Lighthouse
“It was pure joy to be with Mrs. Ramsay, lit by gleams from Godrevy, the conversation from the dining room too faint to understand. Mrs. Ramsay’s face seemed atop a statue, marble and firm. She looked so commanding suddenly, and Lily felt the rich essence of female connection, a fervent intensity because they were both women and Mrs. Ramsay was a mother. She gave Talland House a point of view, a sense of life, of its odd but necessary capacity.”
“Maggie Humm has brilliantly filled in the edges beyond Woolf’s canvas; she has a deep, awe-inspiring understanding of the role of the visual in Woolf’s work, and here she reveals that she also has a novelist’s gift to create something new, that has its own imaginative life, from that understanding.”
-Lauren Elkin, author of the award-winning Flaneuse
Find out more about Maggie Humm and her writing at:
http://www.maggiehumm.net/
Please see all my author interviews at My Guests and my website and blog at JessieCahalin.com.
A copy of my novel is available here.
This sounds wonderful.
Fascinating to read about Ms.Humm’s writing process and connection with the characters and times. Thank you!