In 1919, Virginia and her husband Leonard Woolf bought a cottage south of London called Monk’s House. It was located in Sussex near the River Ouse, where Virginia would drown herself in 1941. The Monk’s House name cropped up partway through Mrs. Woolf and the Servants, a non-fiction book by Alison Light that I wrote about last time. I put the book down, feeling an undefined sense of curiosity about the cottage, a half-memory that wouldn’t surface. It made me take a Woolf biography off my shelves to look up more information about the purchase.

And there it was: the cottage had previously been owned by a man named Jacob Verrall. The Woolfs bought both the cottage and some of its contents at an auction held by Verrall’s estate.

A few years ago, my mother-in-law, Mary Knox, gave me dozens of binders filled with the genealogical research she’d done over many years. The binders now fill a bookshelf in my office. One set involves the Verrall family, direct ancestors of hers who came from the town of Lewes, three miles from the hamlet of Rodmell where Monk’s House is located.

I wondered if there was a connection. Did some of the contents of the Woolf cottage—now the Monk’s House museum—originate with Verrall ancestors? Some of Virginia Woolf’s stuff?

Stuff being a preoccupation, given my ongoing house purge.

I’d already read through the Verrall binders when writing my novel Mad Richard. Hannah Verrall, born in the town of Lewes in 1804, is one of the minor characters in the book. It’s based on the life of Victorian painter Richard Dadd, once considered to be the most promising artist of his generation. Later, he became one its most notorious murderers.

Hannah Verrall was Richard’s aunt, married to his mother’s brother. This was Henry Martin, a chemist. A pharmacist, we’d say in Canada. Henry was part of a large family of chemists that included Richard’s father, Robert Dadd.

In fact, Henry Martin started out as an apprentice to Richard’s father in Chatham, Kent. Later, by 1827, Henry opened his own shop in the London suburb of Somers Town, where Richard’s older brother became their uncle’s apprentice. The Dadds and Martins were close—and Charles Dickens lived just around the corner in both Chatham and Somers Town, but that’s another story.

Hannah Verrall and Henry Martin were my husband’s great-great-great-grandparents. And here’s an odd echo from their lives and Virginia Woolf’s.

Hannah and Henry Martin and their children emigrated to Canada in 1841, fetching up in the Ontario town of Chatham in the Canadian county of Kent. Before they left England, they stayed for several weeks in Sussex with Henry’s older brother, the town chemist in Lewes, not far from Monk’s House. I wondered if this man, Richard Martin, had introduced Henry and Hannah, since Hannah had been born in Lewes, after all.

It’s also possible that Hannah walked past Monk’s House before emigrating, or meandered along a path by the River Ouse. I picture her hugging herself, a corrosively unhappy woman. Family letters show that Hannah didn’t want to leave England. Her husband was the one who hoped for a new start abroad.

Henry’s chemist’s shop had been located on Euston Square, where in the late 1830s, railway magnates constructed the massive apparatus of Euston Station, turning his Somers Town neighbourhood into a construction site. I think his business probably suffered. At the same time, letters from three of Hannah’s brothers—who had already emigrated to North America—suggested they were doing well in the colonies. The Martins left England planning to meet two of Hannah’s brothers in Canada.

In fact, Henry would prosper here. Settling first in Chatham, Ontario, and later in the town of Wallaceburg, he began practicing as a doctor by the simple expedient of calling himself Dr. Martin, never bothering with details like medical school. His training as a pharmacist probably made him as good a doctor as any in the Canadian backwoods of the 1840s and 50s, so why not?

But poor Hannah seems to have hated it here. Imagine the mosquitoes and the loneliness. The tall pines towering over their humid backwoods cabin. Hannah didn’t even make it to her first winter, committing suicide only a few months after the family reached Canada. A coroner’s jury found that she killed herself while temporarily insane.

And here’s the echo: Hannah drowned herself in the Grand River in 1841, exactly one hundred years before Virginia Woolf drowned herself in the Ouse.

There’s no real connection, but as a novelist, I like echoes. I need them. My secret is, I often base characters on an original model, as I suspect most writers do. They’re never people I know well; friends and family don’t need to worry. In fact, the original models have to be people I know hardly at all, or perhaps merely glimpse, so I can fill in the gaps in my knowledge with fiction.

And here’s the trick: I only seem able to actually get them—create characters, recreate them, pin them to the page—when I see or meet a second person who reminds me of the first. An echo.

One time, years ago, I met a man once or twice who had unusually short legs and a puffed-up, self-important manner, but who also seemed kind. He struck me as a possible character in fiction, difficult but sympathetic—although I may have read the real person wrong; most people who knew him didn’t seem to like him.

Yet I only got him on paper after I sat down on the Toronto subway one day across from a man whose legs were so short that his feet didn’t reach the floor. His legs dangled like those of a child, and he had an expression on his face I can remember today of benign aloofness. That concatenation triggered the character I ended up writing, Hugh Bruce, the narrator of my first novel, Poor Player.

Then there’s the question of Jacob Verrall.

To be continued.

Jump to Part Three here.