38 WWW.CHARLESTONWOMENPODCAST.COM | WWW.READCW.COM | WWW.INSTAGRAM.COM/CHARLESTONWOMEN In the 1970s, Grant, the last of the Bloomsburys to live in the once-animated house, died, leaving the residence vacant. To save the home as a living work of creativity, London-based art historian and international art dealer Deborah "Debo" Gage, along with her friend Diana Reich, led a campaign in 1980 during which they hatched the idea of reviving the house's spirit by inviting authors and artists to give talks in the apple shed adjacent to the manor. This led to the founding of the Charleston Festival in 1990. Since then, the event, held each May on the property's grounds, has become one of the foremost literary festivals in the United Kingdom. Subsequently, Gage, with the collaboration of the Charleston Trust and The Charleston Library Society, brought the Sussex Festival to Charleston, South Carolina, in 2017. Welcomed with great acclaim, the event evolved as the Charleston Literary Festival. Next year, the local event will celebrate its 10th anniversary with lectures given by a highly curated panel of authors from around the world. Although Reich has retired from her position as literary director of the Charleston Festival, she serves as the senior artistic advisor for the Charleston Literary Festival. As the liaison between the two Charlestons, she is already thinking about and planning several themed parties for the milestone event that will be A Tale of Two Charleston Literary Festivals BY SARAH ROSE An hour south of London near the East Sussex county town of Lewes is Charleston, a large estate where some of the most progressive thinkers and writers of the 20th century lived, collaborated or worked. Collectively known as the Bloomsburys, the society included luminaries such as Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Quentin Bell, Vita Sackville-West, Duncan Grant, David Garnett, E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes, who radically influenced the literature, politics and economics of their times. In 2020, writer Emily Senior described the compound in an article that she contributed to House & Garden U.K. She wrote, "Almost as soon as Vanessa and Duncan moved into Charleston, they began to paint, not just on canvas, but over every available surface — walls, of course, but also tables, chairs, bedheads and bookcases; all glowed with swirls and spirals of color and pattern, full of life and vitality, that was as far from the conservative, conventional interior decoration of the time as it was possible to be." She added, "Charleston's walled garden was created to designs by Roger Fry — a summer playground made for inspiring painting, where classical sculpture sat shoulderto-shoulder with life-size works by Quentin Bell, mosaic pavements and tile edged pools." 2024 Full House for Colm Toibin ©️ Valerie & Ed Photography
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