Virginia Woolf Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  The Pattle Legacy

  Virginia Woolf’s Indian Ancestresses—Thérèse de l’Etang and Adeline Pattle

  Pattledom

  High Society

  Virginia Woolf and the Thackerays—A Legacy of Literature, Money, and Madness

  Finders Keepers

  William and Isabella

  Anny and Minny

  Virginia Woolf’s Mad, Bad Sister

  The Angels of Hyde Park Gate

  Julia Prinsep Jackson Duckworth Stephen

  Stella Duckworth Hills

  A Close Conspiracy

  Old Bloomsbury

  From Cambridge to Bloomsbury

  The Landmark Year

  The Great Betrayal

  A Tale of Two Sisters

  Vanessa’s Way, Part 1

  Virginia’s Way, Part 1

  Vanessa’s Way, Part 2

  Virginia’s Way, Part 2

  Epilogue: The Bell Children and Their Aunt

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Bibliography

  Notes

  Photo Credits

  Index

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2019 by Gillian Gill

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Gill, Gillian, author.

  Title: Virginia Woolf : and the women who shaped her world / Gillian Gill.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019012511 (print) | LCCN 2019019205 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328694485 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328683953 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Woolf, Virginia, 1882–1941—Friends and associates. | Woolf, Virginia, 1882–1941—Family.

  Classification: LCC PR6045.O72 (ebook) | LCC PR6045.O72 Z6439 2019 (print) | DDC 823/.912 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019012511

  Cover design by Martha Kennedy

  Cover images: Portrait of Virginia Woolf by Man Ray, © Man Ray 2015 Trust / ARS, NY / ADAGP, Paris/Art Resource, NY; wallpaper by Walter Crane / V&A Images, London / Art Resource, NY

  Author photograph © Gail Samuelson

  v1.1019

  The Diaries of Virginia Woolf edited by Anne Oliver Bell © 1977 by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett; The Letters of Virginia Woolf edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautman © 1975 by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett; and Moments of Being by Virginia Woolf edited by Jeanne Schulkind © 1976 by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett all reprinted by permission of The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf, The Random House Group Limited, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Sir Leslie Stephen’s Mausoleum Book. Text © by the proprietors of the Leslie Stephen copyrights, 1977. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press through PLSclear. All rights reserved. The Letters of Lytton Strachey edited by Paul Levy. Letters copyright © 2005 by The Strachey Trust. Reprinted by permission of The Society of Authors as Agents of The Strachey Trust. All rights reserved. Vanessa Bell by Frances Spalding. Copyright © 1983 by Frances Spalding. Reproduced by permission of the author c/o Roger, Coleridge & White Ltd. All rights reserved. Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911–1918 by Leonard Woolf. Published by The Hogarth Press. Copyright © 1964. Reprinted by permission of The University of Sussex, The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Leonard Woolf, and The Random House Group Limited. All rights reserved.

  For Stuart

  Women alone stir my imagination.

  —Virginia Woolf

  Introduction

  VIRGINIA WOOLF matters to us. She speaks to our lives, inspires our polemic, lodges in our collective memory, and shapes our prose. For an English man who lived, as Woolf did, before most of us in today’s world were born, that would be no small trick. For an early-twentieth-century English woman it is perhaps unique.

  Woolf had an original mind, lived at an important point in history, read everything she could put her hand on, and labored every day, well or ill, mad or sane, to write novels, meet her book review deadlines, scrawl a pile of letters, work up bits of dialogue and thumbnail sketches, and record in her diary the things her mind was busy with. You learn to forge by hammering, goes the old French saying, and as she scribbled and typed, Woolf was forging a style. Elegantly personal. Unpretentiously authoritative. Chattily erudite. Eminently readable. Today, the name Virginia Woolf is a meme, and she is even more read, more quoted, and more influential than she was in her lifetime.

  A writer by profession, she published a great deal of what she wrote and kept even more. Her family had long had a sense of history and understood that what was not written down might almost not have existed. The Stephens and Pattles, among Woolf’s paternal and maternal ancestors, understood the value of old pieces of paper covered in handwriting. By keeping letters and diaries, they knew they stood a chance of becoming part of English social history.

  In today’s America you can become famous just by working hard at being famous, and girls and women can compete in the new fame game with boys and men, but this is all very new. Before the twentieth century, the handful of women whose names entered the historical record were empresses, queens, or aristocrats—Catherine the Great, Elizabeth I, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough—or else the wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, and mistresses of famous men. We know about Milton’s daughter and Stalin’s, the mistresses of Horatio Nelson and Charles Dickens, Wordsworth’s sister and Freud’s sister-in-law, Marcel Proust’s mother, and the wives of James Joyce or D. H. Lawrence or Vladimir Nabokov or Winston Churchill or—well, the list goes on. Adeline Virginia Stephen Woolf, in contrast, was solidly middle-class; and her father, Leslie Stephen, and her husband, Leonard Woolf, both much published writers in their day, are now read because they were related to her.

  Being born in the England of Queen Victoria was a key to Woolf’s success as a writer. By 1882, the year of Woolf’s birth, England had produced more professional women writers—novelists, poets, essayists, travel writers, biographers, and journalists—than any other country, and in the nineteenth century there was an explosion of female literary talent in the United Kingdom. Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot are now high on our list of top English writers of all time, and many of us would argue fiercely that Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Brontë, Anne Brontë, Christina Rossetti—I could go on—should be on everyone’s “must-read” list.

  Rare in her generation, Virginia Woolf valued the contribution of women to the English literary tradition as much as we do today. From childhood she immersed herself in the work of women writers of the past, and as a prolific reviewer and essayist she liked to choose books that allowed women’s voices to be heard. She saw herself as a link in a chain of women writers, and this pride in tradition was a spur to her authorial ambitions. At the same time, she knew better than most the enormous obstacles that even the greatest women writers of the past had faced, and saw with clear eyes the sadness, often amounting to tragedy, of their lives.

  England from the late eighteenth century on was one of the very few countries (the young United States was another) that chose to teach a good percentage of its dau
ghters to read and write. Among English speakers, a market quickly grew up for poetry, fiction, and journalism that would appeal to the female reader. Seeing that market, educated women of small means turned their hands to writing, less in the hope of eternal fame than of respectable independence and support for their families, and they were in a race against time to do it. In our American world today, women can expect to live into their eighties, but Victorian women tended to die young.

  Isabella Beeton, who compiled the famous cookbook published under her name, was not atypical, dying in childbirth at the age of twenty-nine, a victim of puerperal fever complicated by the syphilis she had contracted from her husband. The three (surviving!) Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, had genius on their side, but they were no luckier than poor Isabella Beeton. In between peeling endless potatoes at home and struggling with rich people’s recalcitrant children away, they wrote novels and sent them under male pseudonyms to a London publisher, betting, astutely, that they could make a better life for their family as novelists than as governesses. The galloping consumption that was epidemic in England carried off Anne and Emily before they turned thirty, but Charlotte at least lived long enough to write her masterpieces, earn a modest affluence for her father and husband, and get a tiny taste of what it might be like to be a literary lion like William Makepeace Thackeray or Charles Dickens. All the same, even as Great Britain was birthing an unprecedented number of Great Women Writers, nineteenth-century English society as a whole still agreed with the librettist W. S. Gilbert that, if a beneficent autocrat were to rid society of “that singular anomaly, the lady novelist,” she never would be missed.

  As the daughter of the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, its entries almost exclusively about men, Virginia Woolf knew quite pertinently that the flame of even the greatest women writers was quickly extinguished once they lay in the grave. Despite the best efforts of women reviewers like Woolf herself and her adoptive aunt Anne Thackeray Ritchie before her, it was men who wrote the history of English literature, and men quickly decided that George Eliot was tedious, the Brontës hysterical, Rossetti overly pious, and Mrs. Gaskell as far below Dickens or Trollope as Elizabeth Barrett Browning was below her husband, Robert.

  Thus, despite the relatively high representation of women in English literature, despite her family’s established place among English literati, and despite the apotheosis of Jane Austen as the woman novelist even men could admit to liking, Virginia Woolf faced an uphill battle when she determined to be a writer. In 1905, when Woolf began her campaign to establish herself in the world of English publishing, her situation was, in fact, not very different from that of a young middle-class Saudi woman today who wants to be a lawyer, or a young middle-class Guatemalan woman today who wants to have her own fashion company, or a young middle-class Sudanese woman today who wants to be a surgeon. And I specify middle-class women since to be born into a family of even modest means of course gives a boost to anyone, female as well as male. In our twenty-first century, many of the poorest human beings on our planet are women, many of them illiterate.

  ❧

  Woolf’s family was safely upper-middle-class. As a girl, she enjoyed three copious if starchy meals a day, wore shoes and warm clothes, and lived in a multistory house near a big park. She took long, lovely summer holidays by the sea. She did not have to cook a meal, empty her commode, or starch her collars. Her father did not lose his fortune and send her out to work as a seamstress, a governess, a mill girl, or a prostitute. Unlike so many girls above and below her social status, she was not fated to become the wife, mistress, or chattel of an old man she did not know. A highly articulate child in a literary family, she was taught to read and write as a small child and was early given the run of her father’s large library. What she lacked was a university education, and in this she was an odd throwback to women writers fifty years earlier, like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, and Florence Nightingale, all of them autodidacts for whom higher education was not a possibility.

  From early childhood, it was clear to everyone that Virginia Stephen was highly intelligent and learned easily. If she had been a boy her father would have dreamed of Eton and Trinity for her, and even as a girl she might have followed in the path of several of her Stephen and Fisher girl cousins and attended a good girls’ school, with a view to being admitted to Newnham or Girton, the two women’s colleges at Cambridge University, the Stephens’ alma mater.

  Left to himself, her father might even have been amenable to sending Virginia to school and university. Leslie Stephen was a proud disciple of the utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill, and on a theoretical level he accepted Mill’s advanced views on gender equality and higher education for women. At one point during his courtship of Julia Jackson Duckworth—Virginia Woolf’s mother—Leslie Stephen, while insisting that it mattered more to him that a woman be of “noble character than learn anything,” advanced Mill’s argument that some women might have to support themselves in life and thus needed the tools education offers. I do not want, Leslie wrote rashly to Julia, to see my daughter, Laura, or perhaps your daughter, Stella, become “a mere young lady.” Julia reacted to her suitor’s letter in cold fury, reminding Leslie that she herself had received no systematic education. Did that mean she was not worthy of his love and esteem? Lovesick Leslie at once capitulated, and thereafter, for the daughters he and Julia produced, there would be no question of going to school, preparing themselves for earning a living if need be, or moving into their father’s professional world of journalism and essay writing.

  All her life, Julia Stephen, Virginia’s mother, was fiercely anti-feminist and inexorably opposed to formal education for girls. A woman’s value, in Julia’s view, lay in her beauty, her charm, her easy command of social situations. That value was certified by the caliber of the husband she attracted. If Julia could help it, no daughter of hers would be mocked as a bluestocking and thus handicapped in the marital stakes. Julia saw beautiful Vanessa and Virginia, her Stephen daughters, as successful wives and mothers like her, and her oldest daughter, Stella Duckworth, as a spinster who would tend to the needs of her parents as they grew infirm.

  It was all too easy for Leslie Stephen, a neurotic, self-absorbed workaholic, to accept his adorable and deliciously conventional young wife’s views on women’s education and dismiss John Stuart Mill’s “feminism” as the product of Mill’s submission to his wife, Harriet Taylor. It suited Leslie’s busy editorial and research schedule, as well as his sense of connubial fitness, to give his second wife complete jurisdiction over the upbringing of their girls, and, philosophy aside, where was he to find the money to send the girls to school? The Cheltenham Ladies’ College certainly offered a first-class education at very reasonable rates, but fees were still fees and had to be paid out of pocket. Leslie Stephen was not a wealthy man and his first duty as paterfamilias, he and Julia agreed, must be to ensure that the two sons of their marriage, Thoby and Adrian, got the private school education that would allow them to maintain their place in society.

  The Stephen family’s educational priorities were those of most of their class. As Virginia Woolf would later point out in her famous essay Three Guineas, Mary Kingsley, the renowned Victorian explorer and naturalist, was given no formal education. “I don’t know if I ever revealed to you,” Kingsley once wrote with restrained bitterness to a friend, “the fact that being allowed to learn German was all the paid-for education I ever had. Two thousand pounds were spent on my brother’s, I still hope not in vain.” In an allusion to Pendennis, a novel by her sort-of-grandfather William Makepeace Thackeray, Woolf went on in the same essay to satirize the familial duty to educate its sons as “Arthur’s Education Fund.”

  It is a voracious receptacle. Where there were many sons to educate it required a great effort on the part of the family to keep it full. For your [that is, men’s] education was not merely in book learning; games educated your body; friends taught you more than
books or games . . . In the holidays you travelled, acquired a taste for art; a knowledge of foreign politics; and then, before you could earn your own living, your father made you an allowance . . . while you learnt the profession that now entitles you to put K.C. [King’s Counsel] after your name. All this came out of Arthur’s Education Fund. And to this your sisters . . . made their contributions.

  To Leslie Stephen’s dismay, educating two sons proved more difficult and expensive than he had expected. Thoby and Adrian Stephen grew to be huge, handsome, virile young men, fond of hunting, but neither proved especially bright or exceptionally diligent. Scholarships to mighty Eton, which both Leslie and his older brother, James, had won, were quite beyond Thoby and Adrian, and to attend Eton as fee-paying boarders like George and Gerald Duckworth, Julia’s sons from her first marriage, was financially out of the question for the Stephens. Leslie was obliged to pay full fees for his sons at less prestigious schools, and even then, severe economy had to be practiced at home. Thus, while their four brothers went off to school to prepare for admission to Cambridge, Virginia, Vanessa, and their half-sister Stella were, apart from music and dance classes to prepare them for young ladyhood, educated at home in whatever hours their busy parents could spare.

  Stella Duckworth, the middle child of her mother’s first marriage, sandwiched between the two brothers their mother adored, and labeled incurably stupid early in her life, accepted this system unquestioningly. Vanessa Stephen, the next-oldest daughter, aspired to be a painter and, having been born with her mother’s iron will, stood up for herself and got the classes and teachers she needed to pursue her artistic dreams. It was brilliant, verbal, intellectually curious Virginia who suffered most from her mother’s educational philosophy, although she did not come to realize this until after her mother’s death.

  A case can be made that Virginia Woolf’s education at home prepared her better for life as a writer than any school or college could have. William Thackeray—whose nose was broken twice in school fights at Charterhouse—said that all his education at an elite English boarding school taught him was to loathe classical literature and take the birch without sign of weakness. In her youth, Virginia Stephen had time and opportunity to read voraciously, she could listen to her father’s learned conversations with his acolytes, and Henry James and John Ruskin were just two of the literary giants who came for dinner at her house. But Virginia Woolf herself emphatically did not see her lack of formal education as an asset. From the time her brother Thoby returned elated from Cambridge University she felt that she had been cheated of her educational birthright through the preference given to brothers. Even as a girl, she passionately wished that the mellow pleasures of life in an ancient Cambridge college, which she would later evoke in her novels Jacob’s Room (1922) and The Waves (1931), had been hers. She saw it as unjust that, by virtue of sex, not ability or effort, all four of her brothers became members of the age-old fellowship of intellect and scholarship that Cambridge University represented.