“I came quite naturally, in obedience to the feeling of unity or oneness of womanhood ... it is when the community is shaken to its foundations, that abysmal depths of privation call to each other and that a deeper unity of humanity evinces itself.”

Emily Hobhouse (9 April 1860 – 8 June 1926) was a British welfare campaigner, anti-war activist, and pacifist. She is primarily remembered for bringing to the attention of the British public, and working to change, the deprived conditions inside the British concentration camps in South Africa built to incarcerate Boer and African civilians during the Second Boer War.

Born in Cornwall, England she had a difficult childhood early life as her mother died when she was 20, and she spent the next fourteen years looking after her father who was in poor health. When her father died in 1895, she went to Minnesota in the United States to perform welfare work amongst Cornish mineworkers living there. After a failed engagement and the loss of her money she returned to England in 1898.

When the second Anglo-Boer war broke out she volunteered to help the women and children displaced by the war and being held in concentration camps. Criticised by the British Government and press on her return she felt she never received justice for her work.

Hobhouse was an avid opponent of the First World War and protested vigorously against it and through her offices, thousands children were fed daily for more than a year in central Europe after the war.

She settled in St.Ives, Cornwall until her death. Her ashes were ensconced in a niche in the National Women's Monument at Bloemfontein, where she was regarded as a heroine but her death went unreported in the Cornish press.

“The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”

Virginia Woolf was an English writer and is considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors. She pioneered the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.

Woolf was born into an affluent household in London, the seventh child of Julia and Leslie Stephen in a family of eight that included the modernist painter Vanessa Bell. She studied classics and history Ar King’s College London, coming into contact with early reformers of women's higher education and the women's rights movement.

In the spring of 1882, Leslie rented a large white house in St Ives, Cornwall overlooking Porthminster Bay with views to the Godrevy Lighthouse. The family would spend three months each summer there for the first 13 years of Virginia's life and would later influence Woolf's novels Jacob's Room, To the Lighthouse and The Waves

After her father's death in 1904, the Stephen family moved from Kensington to the more bohemian Bloomsbury, where, in conjunction with the brothers' intellectual friends, they formed the artistic and literary Bloomsbury Group. In 1912, she married Leonard Woolf, and in 1917, the couple founded the Hogarth Press, which published much of her work. They rented a home in Sussex and permanently settled there in 1940.

After the Second World War began, Woolf's diary indicates that she was obsessed with death, which figured more and more as her mood darkened. On 28 March 1941, Woolf drowned herself by walking into the fast-flowing River Ouse near her home, after placing a large stone in her pocket.

these are my background notes about those that I have chosen as subjects.

Melancholy Paintings