‘I wish you’d leave Wissett, and take Charleston,’ Virginia Woolf wrote to her sister Vanessa Bell in May 1916. ‘It has a charming garden, with a pond, fruit trees and vegetables, all now rather run wild… but you could make it lovely.’ These were the First World War years and Vanessa, having spent her summer in Suffolk, needed a country base where her lover, the artist Duncan Grant, and his lover, the author David Garnett, both conscientious objectors, could find farm work to avoid conscription.
Having discovered Firle near the South Downs, Vanessa wrote to her friend Roger Fry that the 16th-century Charleston farmhouse was ideal: ‘It’s most lovely, very solid & simple, with flat walls… & wonderful tiled roofs. The pond is most beautiful, a willow at one side…
