ABSTRACT
The Holland Park circle, according to Caroline Drakes, had its origins in the 1850s when George Frederic Watts helped Henry James and Sara Prinsep take out a lease on Little Holland House, the dowager house on the Holland Park estate in west Kensington. The artists who came to Holland Park came to be part of something and they were attracted by something. That something may well have been reputation-by-association, the need for intellectual belonging or the capacity to practice and pursue a particular lifestyle, yet it is likely that much of their daily life was spent in far less rarefied pursuits. The writers who congregated in the 14 Addison Road area in the early years of the twentieth century have never been considered as part of the Holland Park circle, not least because they came too late and worked with letters not canvases, but as with Bloomsbury it was inescapably a place of cultural production at the time.
