Bohemian & Libertine · Firle, East Sussex
Charleston Farmhouse (Bloomsbury Group)
The Sussex farmhouse where the Bloomsbury Group 'lived in squares and loved in triangles' — Vanessa Bell, her lover Duncan Grant and his lover David Garnett under one painted roof, a laboratory of open relationships and bisexual love.
The story
In 1916 Vanessa Bell took Charleston, a farmhouse below the Downs, so that Duncan Grant — the man she loved — and his lover David "Bunny" Garnett could work as conscientious objectors on a nearby farm. Vanessa's husband Clive visited at weekends. The household was frank, complicated and permanent. On Christmas Day 1918 Vanessa bore Duncan's daughter, Angelica; Keynes and Garnett were both staying in the house. Days later Garnett wrote that he might marry the baby when she grew up — and in 1942, aged fifty, he married the twenty-three-year-old Angelica, who had been told only at eighteen that Duncan, not Clive, was her father, and was never told that her husband had been her father's lover. Her memoir Deceived with Kindness (1984) counts the cost. The house itself is a total work of art — every surface painted by Bell and Grant in the Omega manner — and is now open to the public, saved by a trust Angelica helped found.
More stories at this spot
Sources
- Wikipedia
- Tate
- Virginia Woolf, "Old Bloomsbury," in Moments of Being
- Wikipedia, Angelica Garnett
- Quote Investigator, "lived in squares… loved in triangles"
- The Gay & Lesbian Review, "The Sex Diaries of John Maynard Keynes"
Nearby on the map
A 235ft chalk giant clasping two staves, a focus for neo-pagan and May-Day fertility ritual where the Long Man Morris Men dance at dawn. A 2003 excavation led by Professor Martin Bell of the University of Reading (with the Open University's Landscape Mysteries) strongly suggested the figure dates from the Early Modern period — the 16th or 17th century AD.
Documented + folkloreRoyal LiaisonRoyal Pavilion, Brighton (George IV & Maria Fitzherbert)Brighton, East Sussex · EnglandGeorge IV built his fantastical pleasure-palace at Brighton while conducting his relationship with Maria Fitzherbert, whom he had secretly and illegally married in 1785 — 'the wife of my heart and soul'. Brighton, then and now, is a hot spot of romance and scandal.
Documented historyHot spotRoyal LiaisonHever Castle (Henry VIII courts Anne Boleyn)Hever, Edenbridge, Kent · EnglandAnne Boleyn's girlhood home, where Henry VIII rode out to press a courtship that would break England from Rome. The castle keeps his love letters' story alive — 'I would you were in mine arms, or I in yours' — the correspondence of a king undone by a woman who knew the value of waiting.
Documented historySpotted an error, or hold a better source? Write to marquis@marquisdemayfair.com — corrections are made, never defended. Our methodology.