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Welcome to the Poetry Pharmacy newsletter where in the UK, we're enjoying some beautiful May sunshine and are now settled into our new production Lab, working on lots of collaborations and looking forward to a busy Summer. We said goodbye this week to Esther Cooper-Wood who has been working with us for the last 6 months on some new designs and getting our Shropshire bookshop and coffee shop into good shape. We'll miss her, but wish her well as she sets of to work around Canada for a few months.
100 Years of Mrs Dalloway
It's 100 years since Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway was first published. Mrs Dalloway revolutionised fiction with its stream-of-consciousness narrative, revealing the inner lives of women. Four years later, A Room of One’s Own (1929) echoed its themes, championing space, time, and freedom for female creativity.
Pictured above is the original collage ' Mrs Dalloway at Bond Street' by Louisa Albani, featured in her pamphlet, Virginia Woolf in the City: Oxford Street Tide.
Virginia Woolf loved walking the streets of London, sometimes at night. Tavistock Square, where she lived with her husband Leonard from 1924 to 1939, was the place where she ‘made up’ her brilliant novels To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway. Her essay, Oxford Street Tide, revealed the impact of modernity on Oxford Street, in which she chronicled the seductive power of display alongside the invisible wheels of production, the constant destruction and rebuilding, the need for invention and ‘spectacle’ but also the relentless pressure of trying to make a living and keep ‘afloat on the bounding, careless, remorseless tide of the street.’
On Sunday May 11th we celebrate her walk down the iconic street, as well as mapping her within the literary landscape of Bloomsbury with a specially designed walk by editor Liz Ison in collaboration with Louisa Albani. There are a few spaces left for this delicious morning ending up at the Poetry Pharmacy for coffee and cake and a signed copy of the book by Louisa Albani and you can book your place here.
Prescription
This week we celebrate the idea of creative freedom with the launch of a bottle of poetic stimulants, A Room of One's Own which was an alchemical collaboration with Starcroft Farm Cabins in Sussex, whose creative retreat cabin Lucy, has a design that was itself informed by the bohemian artists, writers and thinkers, like Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville West, whose work was inspired by Sussex in the 1920s.
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
― Virginia Woolf
Stimulants for Reflection, the Creative Space & Intellectual Rebellion
A Room of One’s Own poetry pills contain powerful extracts by women—like Virginia Woolf—who championed the right to think, write, and create freely. A daily stimulant for reflection, to value the creative space, and for inspiring fearless intellectual rebellion. For internal liberation only.
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