a room of her own
I’m writing this update from my new desk. New to me, that is - it’s actually an Edwardian-era English-made writing desk that I bought off Facebook Marketplace.
And lord, she’s a beaut:
Even prettier in the light.
And look at the details in the woodwork!! (Can you tell I’ve watched a lot of The Repair Shop?)
The prospect of finding a desk for this little music office I’ve been setting up was an exciting one, but it also came to feel fraught in a way, full of pressure. My fixation with this style/vintage of desk started circa the move to Chicago, when I saw another Facebook marketplace listing in the area for a late-19th-century women’s writing desk. The thought of writing my book on a desk like that, having such a tangible connection to history while I try to do justice to Claribel’s history, was too good to pass up. I got beaten out to that particular desk (which ended up being a good thing, honestly, because the one I got is in much better condition), but I couldn’t let go of the idea. Over the next few months, I assembled a collection of Facebook Marketplace desk listings, some as far away as the southernmost parts of Michigan. I scoured Craigslist and Chairish and Live Auctioneers and eBay for something in that sweet spot of style, time period, and (uh, rather low) budget. I drooled over more expensive desks and repeatedly asked myself whether I might be willing to drop $1500 on exactly the right desk. The answer was always no - I come from an illustrious lineage of tightwads, and I also basically just used up my savings on Masters Degree #2 - but I kept having that moment of questioning regardless, because having the right desk for this gargantuan project suddenly felt so vital. The place of writing had become as important to me as the task of it - integral, really.
This will probably not surprise you in the slightest if you know me even a little, but I’ve been thinking a lot about Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own over the course of this desk quest. “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write—” fiction, Woolf specifies, but the statement is just as applicable to, well, any form of creative labor. I’d been daydreaming about setting up a music office for myself long before I knew where I’d be moving next. Someplace to keep my piano and my little collection of retro keyboards and my stacks of books on music and/or the Victorians and/or England that had long since outgrown the single smallish bookshelf I’d valiantly tried to reserve for them. Someplace specifically for me and for this work, that doesn’t involve squeezing it in around anything else or piling its effects up in corners.
I don’t know what sort of physical space Claribel had for her work, not really. I haven’t the faintest idea how she and Charles arranged their lives at 6 Eccleston Square in London, though I hope the square’s garden was just as beautiful then and that she got to gaze at it for inspiration as she wrote. I do know that the rectory at Kirmington, where she and Charles lived from 1863 to 1868, had a music room, according to a note accompanying one of Phyllis’s photos. Phyllis went to the rectory herself at one point. I have no clue whether she went inside, but she took a photo of the house from the outside, of a big bay window that’s described as being in the music room.
On the outside, looking in. Or trying, at least. Awfully apt metaphor.
That’s a huge part of why the desk feels so important, I think, why the whole notion of my own music office feels so emotionally load-bearing - because there will always be so much about Claribel’s life, in terms of both her lived environment and her inner heart, that’s just plain lost to history. I can’t know it. So I follow in her footsteps as best I can, walking her beloved Lincolnshire wolds, hunting for shells on her favorite spot of coastline at Mablethorpe, and finding concrete objects like sheet music to have and hold and feel. I try to find other connections, other ways of discovering and knowing. And hey, sometimes it works alright. I can’t remember for certain (and it’d take me ages to look it up again), but I think that bay window in Claribel’s music room overlooked her beloved garden. The view out my window isn’t scenic in that way, but what I can see from my new-to-me desk is an old Victorian-era (I think?) house that’s in the final stages of restoration, that the neighborhood historical society fought to save because it belonged to a local musician of some renown. That feels fitting in its own way.
I’ve still got a lot to set up in this office - I need to order a desk chair and another bookshelf and a rug, hang up the remaining ¾ of the art I’d set aside for the walls, figure out where in heaven’s name I’m going to store a few other things, &c &c &c. But now that this absolutely dreamy desk is in place, anchoring the room, everything else feels achievable.
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(Hopefully it won’t be so long till the next update! My life has finally, finally calmed down after the brutal several months of upheaval and logistical hockey that I mentioned last time, so I want to get back to a regular writing schedule. We’ll see what works out. Till next time, mes chers!)
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