"Don't think I am sending [this photograph of ] Virginia Woolf's house out as my Christmas card - this is just for you and one other and me. It is not when she was alive - it shows I think. But nobody was home, and so I thought it would be all right if I took a picture [...]"
Eudora Welty to William Maxwell, December 21, 1955
"The photograph of Virginia Woolf's house [in Rodmell] is so beautiful, so full of unanswered questions, and the fact that you took it makes it like a twosided gold coin [...]
I don't know how to tell you how much the photograph of Rodmell means to me. I live so much by these magical properties - how much my life as a writer depends on them, the voice of artefacts."
William Maxwell to Eudora Welty, late December, 1955; both extracts are from letters collected in What there is to say we have said, edited by Suzanne Marrs.
If this remark is anything to go by, Mr. Maxwell was on the same wavelength as VW herself. (There's another short passage from that book here.)
The picture of Monk's House is from the National Trust site.
