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Fourth edition. Octavo. 64pp. (38pp. of text; with 26pp. of ads for local businesses). Illustrated throughout with black-and-white photographs and printer s decorations. Fold-out map bound in at front as issued. Printed light blue wrappers. Light toning and soil to spine and edges, a very nice copy. From 1882, when she was only a few months old, to 1894, when she was 12, the year before her mother died, Virginia Woolf spent two or three months each summer in Talland House, located on the outskirts of the small fishing town of St. Ives on the Cornish coast. In an 1884 letter, Virginia s father, the renowned literary critic and historian Sir Leslie Stephen, described the house as "a pocket-paradise with a sheltered cove of sand in easy reach (for Ginia even) just below," and in 1940, at the age of 58, Woolf herself recalled in her autobiographical essay, "A Sketch of the Past," that "In retrospect nothing that we had as children made as much difference, was quite so important to us, as our summer in Cornwall," adding that, after the previous months in London, it formed "the best beginning to life conceivable." The lasting impact of these trips is evident in the presence of Cornwall in some of Woolf s most celebrated novels, among them *Jacob s Room, The Waves,* and *To the Lighthouse,* which, though based on the Isle of Skye, was inspired by the local landmark in St. Ives Bay, Godrevy Light. She wrote: "For the great plateful of blue water was before her; the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst; and on the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft low pleats, the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them, which always seemed to be running away into some moon country, uninhabited of men." The original edition of Martin Cock s Guide to St. Ives was published in 1884, and was very likely used by the Stephen family during their stays in the area. This fourth edition, revised by John Hobson Matthews in 1909, features updated information on a variety of local landmarks, villages, and sights; numerous black-and-white photographs, including one of Godrevy Light; a fold-out map of the area bound in at front; and 26 pages of advertisements for local merchants and vacation rentals, which may have been consulted by Woolf during her 1909 and 1910 stays in Cornwall. The first of those trips occurred rather suddenly: as Woolf wrote to her sister, Vanessa Bell, on Christmas Day, 1909, "I went for a walk in Regents Park yesterday morning, and it suddenly struck me how absurd it was to stay in London, with Cornwall going on all the time," so she impulsively purchased a train ticket and arrived at the Lelant station, near St. Ives, at 10:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve, without "spectacles, cheque book, looking glass, or coat." She found a room at the Lelant Inn, up the hill from the station, and added, "I am so drugged with the fresh air that I can t write, and now my ink fails. As for the beauty of this place, it surpasses every other season. I have the hotel to myself and get a very nice sitting room for nothing." Her subsequent stay one year later was in the wake of a nervous breakdown that occurred as she was completing her first novel, *The Voyage Out*, which resulting in her being admitted to Burley Park, a home for mentally ill women outside the city. As part of her recuperation, she spent the summer on a walking tour around Zennor, a tiny village just southwest of St. Ives, with a nurse, Jean Thomas. Woolf s last visit to Cornwall, with her husband Leonard in May 1936, was an attempt to keep yet another breakdown at bay. He wrote that they spent their time wandering around St. Ives, and one evening even crept into the garden of Talland House, where, poignantly, "Virginia peered through the ground-floor windows to see the ghosts of her childhood." A wonderful resource for background on Woolf s summer retreats in Cornwall, and one of the few guides limited solely to St. Ives. Very scarce.
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