Search for Museums and Paintings

Monk's House

Lewes / United Kingdom

Monk's House is a 16th-century weatherboarded cottage in the village of Rodmell, three miles south of Lewes, East Sussex, England. The writer Virginia Woolf and her husband, the political activist, journalist and editor Leonard Woolf, bought the house by auction at the White Hart Hotel, Lewes, on 1 July 1919 for 700 pounds, and received there many visitors connected to the Bloomsbury Group, including T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry and Lytton Strachey. The purchase is described in detail in her Diary, vol. 1, pp. 286–8. Virginia's sister, the artist Vanessa Bell, lived at nearby Charleston Farmhouse in Firle from 1916, and though contrasting in style, both houses became important outposts of the Bloomsbury Group. The National Trust now operates the building as a writer's house museum.