The Captive Reader

Iris Origo at La Foce in the 1930s (via http://www.lafoce.com)

One of the great delights of reading Iris Origo by Caroline Moorehead this week has been discovering how well connected Origo was. Born to an American father and an Anglo-Irish mother, Origo grew up outside Florence in the vibrant Anglo-Florentine community. In her early twenties, she married Antonio Origo and together they bought La Foce, the estate in Southern Tuscany that remains famous for both its garden (designed by Cecil Pinsent, who had known Iris since childhood) and for the work Iris and Antonio did there during the war, recorded in Iris’s famous war diaries (War in Val D’Orcia).  But, particularly before the war, Iris travelled widely and in the 1930s she stumbled across the Bloomsbury set.  Iris was used to the company of intellectuals and writers from childhood (Edith Wharton, among others, was a family friend and Iris’ stepfather had an affair with Vita Sackville-West) but as a young married woman she had been isolated from the rich intellectual world she grew up in.  Bloomsbury was a welcome change from the more prosaic concerns of her life in Tuscany:

In Florence, she [Iris] had pined for the company of intelligent women friends; in London there was everything that attracted and amused her, particularly people who talked her language and read the same books. Iris called at the Hogarth Press offices to see if Leonard Woolf had accepted Allegra [Iris’ book about Byron’s daughter], as she was leaving, she heard Virginia’s voice from upstairs, shouting to Leonard to bring Iris up to see her. Iris found this first encounter extremely disconcerting. ‘What does it feel like,’ Virginia immediately asked, ‘to wake up in the morning in a Tuscan farmhouse?’ Iris was too confused to answer, not knowing that this was the sort of question Virginia put to everyone. (She was reputed to have asked a seller of apples: ‘What do you feel, in the dark, in fog, selling apples?’) All Iris was able to say was: ‘Come and see’. At the time, as Iris wrote many years later, ‘Virginia was writing an essay on Highbrows and Lowbrows, saying “Look what a mess the Highbrows make of their lives; when I sit in a bus I always sit next to the conductor. I try to find out what it is like to be a prostitute, a working class woman with seven children…All the things, in short, that I am not able to do for myself.”’ Iris came away impressed by what she considered to be Virginia Woolf’s ‘intense desire to enter into the minds of others, but often as if looking down a microscope, through glass.’

Virginia called Iris ‘a gifted, sincere and I think rather charming young woman’ and through her Iris met T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bowen, and, most significantly, her future lover Leo Myers.