The portal, installed by Labour-led Camden council, is part of a National Lottery-funded RePresenting Bloomsbury project aimed at making "meaningful connections between our diverse communities and Camden's public realm." Fellow author Bertrand Russell was among those who received QR codes explaining their views, with more investigation into other statues set to take place in the coming years.
"You couldn't make this up," Woolf's great-niece Emma wrote in a post on X. "The wokerati of Camden Council have decided that this statue of my great-aunt Virginia Woolf in Bloomsbury needs a QR code to explain her 'offensive' attitudes."
"This was a woman born in 1882," Woolf continued. "Are they expecting her to trot out the Wokery of 2024? Virginia was a feminist, socially progressive, a literary pioneer, politically active ... she was way ahead of her time in so many ways."
According to the Telegraph, when visitors scanned the QR code on Woolf's statue, they were presented with a biography which read, "Her diaries and letters also present challenging, offensive comments and descriptions of race, class, and ability which we would find unacceptable today."
Despite being married to Jewish author Leonard Woolf, she was accused of harbouring negative views of Jews. She was also said to have worn blackface alongside her fellow Bloomsbury Group members as they dressed as Abyssinian royalty for a laugh, which was deemed to be evidence that she was "someone who was a product of imperialist attitudes of the time."
Woolf's work does include a number of terms Brits today would consider offensive, however at the time they were not beyond the pale. Nonetheless, she has been painted as a racist imperialist.
As the Telegraph reports, the project highlights not only the "discriminatory ideas or behaviours" pushed by the authors, but also their "positive contributions to society." In Woolf's case, however, it appears as though more emphasis was placed on the former.
