“But when we sit together, close, . . . we melt into each other with phrases.  We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.”

 Virginia Woolf, The Waves (p.11)

Our literary grandmother has been sitting on a bench with her book on her lap and her hat beside her in Richmond-upon-Thames since 2022, waiting for her sisters, daughters, and granddaughters all over the world to sit beside her, to “share an emotional space” on the bench. Writer, editor and publisher Cheryl Robson started a 5-year-long fundraising campaign for the commissioning of a Virginia Woolf statue in 2016. The collective spirit of the contributors who “have no country” transforms the statue into a monument for Woolf’s country — “the whole world”—and, by extension, makes it “ours.”  Resonating with the omniscient narrator of her “Kew Gardens”, on her bench, Woolf seems to be wandering her gaze on the passersby, on the bank of the River Thames. As she does with her characters, she connects them with “a thread of a spider web” and opens new tunnels into their consciousness. Her visitors cultivate a deep emotional connection at the memorial site. By leaving books, offering shawls for warmth, and engaging in physical closeness—such as sitting with children or taking photos, selfies—her fellow travellers of “the whole world” transform the statue from a formal monument into a personal, living presence.

When Virginia Woolf’s first bronze life-size statue was unveiled in Richmond-upon-Thames in 2022, viewers met with her inviting smile, calling them to sit beside her at eye level, to the space she left for them on the bench.  Through her timeless presence on the bench, she is ready to meet her sisters, daughters, granddaughters, nieces from all over the world, of every age. This eye-level connection mirrors her ability to slip into the reader’s and the character’s consciousness, and the intimacy ignites the sharing, a silent flow of empathy. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed describes emotions as sticky, contagious, and flowing. She suggests, “Feelings become a form of social presence rather than self-presence” (p 8). This shared emotion of empathy on the bench turns into an object that sticks with people all over the world. This connection of empathy is a timeless one, flowing among people, sticking them together, even bringing people all over the world together in an act of fundraising campaign. Her timeless intellectual legacy is stuck to the bench where the emotions are physically felt by the public and flows among the people through literal contact on a casual bench. Her posture and inviting face turn her into a presence rather than a statue. She is occupying the same public space with the people in the park, joining them in their jogging, picnicking, and conversations.

Diverted from the traditional approach to a monument —hierarchical, patriarchal, monumental orator image, the statue removes the hierarchy and distance; instead, it offers an emotional connection between Virgina Woolf and her grandchildren. Empathy created by the dynamic posture of Woolf creates a link among them. Rather than being a distant icon, Woolf becomes a fellow wanderer on the riverside who rests on a bench to take a pause.  Her posture is open to listening, offers a dialogical, genuine relation “to combine; to create” (Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, p. 89). Her interactive, living presence makes her legacy accessible to her companions on the bench from every generation.  It suggests that the “room of one’s own” is no longer a solitary, locked one, but a shared, public space where the next generation is welcome to find their voice. Her casual posture, one arm stretched casually on the back of the bench, creates a picture of her wrapping the occupants sitting by her side. Thus, her sympathetic expression, her smile, builds a “cosy, cave area, a protected space for an intellectual experience” for the companions taking their place next to her, and their presence completes the statue and provides “a room” which transforms from “a room of one’s own to our own” (M. Özyurt Kılıç, personal communication, January 7, 2026).

Instead of situating her on a pedestal, sculptor Laury Dizengremel designs the sculpture in a sitting position to be touched to achieve physical contact. The wearing down of the bronze where people hold her hand or sit by her side keeps a physical record of human connection and turns the cold metal into a living part of the Richmond community. Referring to the inspiration from the poet Patrick Kavanagh’s seated posture (though his posture is far from inviting for a conversation but may be for a share of some solitary togetherness in silence) beside the Grand Canal in Dublin, Dizengremel says,  “People put their hands on [Kavanagh’s] knee and round his shoulder,” until they shine “I love it when you can see the wear” (Guest, np). The wearing down of the bronze is a physical expression of the affective contagion. As she hoped, “Virginia statue is interactive one: people can sit by her on the bench and one comment [they] have had is that it will beg for lots of selfies,” in other words, it calls for an experience of co-presence (Dizengremel, np). 

It is literally being shaped by the people who visit it, and it is never completed until a companionship, or another form of interaction, is created there. Woolf’s statue turns into James E. Young’s concept of a “counter monument,” and it is incomplete until a member of the public sits on the bench.   As Young proposes, instead of “hard edges of urban life”, placing a monument “cityscape” (p. 274) among the public, brings monuments into being in “the activity that in the ongoing exchange between people and their historical markers, and finally, in the concrete actions we take in light of a memorialized past” (Young, p. 296). The incompleteness of the statue enables an infinite, timeless interaction with Woolf’s inheritors, just like the growing, expanding spiral shape of her snails’ shells.

As an agent to achieve the ongoing exchange, the empty space on Woolf’s bench is perhaps the most significant part of the work, enabling us to “think back” through our intellectual mother (Woolf, A Room, p. 114). Her welcoming expression and interested eyes directed to the spared space construct an affiliative interaction with her granddaughters—the modern writers, students, and thinkers who follow in her wake and take a seat next to her, as companions, equals and fellow travellers. The act of sitting and engaging in a dialogue with the responsive face of Woolf transforms the bench into a transgenerational bridge. Thus, it acts as a physical site for this intellectual genealogy. This is a way of looking at the past that is not about distant history but about a lineage. By accepting her invitation to sit next to her, the younger generation now accepts her legacy to “think [forward] through [their] mothers”.

References

Ahmed, S. (2014). The cultural politics of emotion (2nd ed.). Edinburgh University Press.

Dizengremel, L. (2021, March 17). Creating Virginia Woolf’s first-ever life-size statue: Let the world

pause on tributes to men for a spell so we can catch up!. Womanthology. https://www.womanthology.co.uk/creating-virginia-woolfs-first-ever-life-size-statue-let-the-world-pause-on-tributes-to-men-for-a-spell-so-we-can-catch-up-laury-dizengremel-award-winning-sculptor/    

Guest, K. (2022, November 16). A Statue of One’s Own: the new Virginia Woolf sculpture that’s challenging stereotypes. The Guardian.

         https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/nov/16/virginia-woolf-sculpture-laury-dizengremel   

Özyurt Kılıç, M. Personal communication (January 7, 2026).

Woolf, V (1935). A Room of One’s Own. Hogarth Press. London.

Woolf, V. (1960). The Waves. Hogarth Press. London.

Woolf, V. (2003). Mrs. Dalloway. Wordsworth Classics. (Original work published 1925)

Young, J. E. (1992). The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today. Critical Inquiry, 18(2), 267–296. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343784