Maggie Humm is an Emeritus Professor University of East London, UK. An international Woolf scholar, she is the author/editor of fifteen books, the last three of which focused on Woolf and the arts. Talland House was one of the Washington Independent Review of Books ‘51 Favorite Books of 2020′ and won the Women’s Fiction International Impact Book Award 2024. Her second novel Rodin’s Mistress, a novel about the tumultuous love affair of the artists Gwen John and Rodin, won the Bookfest Women’s Historical Fiction Award 2023. Her The Bloomsbury Photographs, Yale UP is 2024. She lives in London.   Find her at www.maggiehumm.net.

Royal Academy, London 1919: Lily has put her student days in St. Ives, Cornwall, behind her—a time when her substitute mother, Mrs. Ramsay, seemingly disliked Lily’s portrait of her and Louis Grier, her tutor, never seduced her as she hoped he would. In the years since, she’s been a suffragette and a nurse in WWI, and now she’s a successful artist with a painting displayed at the Royal Academy. Then Louis appears at the exhibition with the news that Mrs. Ramsay has died under suspicious circumstances. Talking to Louis, Lily realizes two things: 1) she must find out more about her beloved Mrs. Ramsay’s death (and her sometimes-violent husband, Mr. Ramsay), and 2) She still loves Louis.

Set between 1900 and 1919 in picturesque Cornwall and war-blasted London, Talland House takes Lily Briscoe from the pages of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and tells her story outside the confines of Woolf’s novel—as a student in 1900, as a young woman becoming a professional artist, her loves and friendships, mourning her dead mother, and solving the mystery of her friend Mrs. Ramsay’s sudden death. Talland House is both a story for our present time, exploring the tensions women experience between their public careers and private loves, and a story of a specific moment in our past—a time when women first began to be truly independent.