Orlando. But Knightley already had a strong sense of her from growing up in Teddington, in south-west London - ''I believe she was in a sanitarium in East Twickenham'' - and also from being taken on regular visits to Charleston farmhouse in Sussex, home to Virginia's sister, the artist Vanessa Bell, and her partner Duncan Grant, its surfaces freely daubed with paint. ''Over the years I have done many, many paintings on the walls of my house, thinking of Charleston and f-ing it up completely, then getting a nice man to come and paint over it all again because it never looked the way it was meant to.''Coco Chanel loved the company of writers; Jeanette Winterson electrifies the room with her words about Woolf.
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