Nino Strachey

Curator and writer Nino Strachey explores the Bloomsbury Group homes of Virginia Woolf, of her lover Vita Sackville-West, and of Vita’s cousin Eddy Sackville-West and shows how they reflected changing social and moral attitudes towards sexuality and gender in the 1920s and 30s.

Woolf famously said ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’. She filled her own house with works of art produced by the artistic collaboration of the unconventional couple Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. Vita’s own interiors harked back to the Elizabethan age, and her writing room was filled with the relics of past lovers. Eddy’s own design choices were boldly counter-cultural in an age when homosexuality was illegal.

Strachey is head of research and specialist advice for the National Trust and researches expression of personality through place. She has curated the homes of Darwin, Churchill and Bernard Shaw. She is descended from a family at the heart of the Bloomsbury Group.

This event is part of the festival’s women in society programme sponsored by HSBC.

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