Virginia Woolf

by Gillian Gill

  Marriage was the traditional way up the slippery pole of English society for young women, and the two youngest Pattle sisters were eager to climb. Their older sisters, Adeline, Sarah, and Maria, had all been seen as beauties when they came out, but Virginia and Sophia were simply stunning. William Makepeace Thackeray—of whom much more in Part II of this book—once recalled, in an essay for the humorous magazine Punch, that poets had composed odes in celebration of the beauty of Virginia Pattle and that people rioted when she appeared in the streets of London. Not by chance, the Prinsep and Cameron homes provided the two youngest Pattle heiresses with the perfect frame for their beauty and French-accented charm.

  Sophia Pattle (1829–1911) rose into the lower ranks of the peerage by marrying Lord John Dalrymple, the younger son of a noble Scottish family. “Dal” was a charmer, as Lady Strachey would later tell Virginia Woolf, but the Scottish nobility was known for being poor but too proud to earn money, so “Dal” was probably an expensive acquisition. Sophia might have done better with the successful artist William Holman Hunt. The John Dalrymples had only two children, but one of them was a boy who grew up and had children himself, so Lord Dalrymple managed at least to fulfill the most important duty of a nobleman—the provision of a viable male heir. Consequently, as we saw in Chapter 1, the Dalrymples, ably represented by the Indian scholar William Dalrymple, are still going strong in the twenty-first century.

  After her husband’s death, Lady Dalrymple retired to France, which indicates that she might have had financial problems. France in the late nineteenth century was cheap, and the French, who had once cut off the heads of their own aristocrats, loved an English milady. Sophia Dalrymple, Hermione Lee mentions in her biography of Virginia Woolf, was known to the Stephens as “the disreputable Monte Carlo aunt,” but she seems to have kept in contact with her family in England. In 1906, hearing that her Stephen great-nephews were planning to travel through Montenegro on horseback, Lady Dalrymple sent a letter and a newspaper clipping warning them about the danger of brigands.

  Sophia had managed to raise her family into the peerage, but in the British studbook, Scottish peers ranked above Irish peers but below English peers, and her older sister, Virginia Pattle (1827–1910), easily eclipsed her. With her marriage to Charles Somers-Cocks, direct heir to his father, the 2nd Earl Somers, Virginia Pattle soared close to the very top of the English peerage.

  Given the huge estates and great wealth of Earl Somers, it was clearly Virginia’s beauty and sparkle, not her money, that captured the heart of Charles Somers-Cocks. According to one account, Virginia Pattle was acclaimed as the top debutante of her year, which, if true, means that her family now had the social influence to get a daughter presented at court. On the death of her husband’s father, Virginia duly became Countess Somers, and in her twenties and thirties she lived the life of an acknowledged beauty and hostess in the highest ranks of society. Her husband adored and deferred to her, but Virginia’s brilliant success was marred by her inability to give the earl her husband the male heir he counted upon. Thwarted in this most atavistic of female desires, Virginia Somers determined to push her heiress daughters, Adeline (this would be Adeline the third) and Isabella Somers, up onto the top rungs of the English peerage. As Virginia Woolf remarks in her “Sketch of the Past,” “Aunt Virginia, it is plain, put her own daughters, my mother’s first cousins, through tortures compared to which the boot or the Chinese shoe is negligible, in order to marry one to the Duke of Bedford, the other to Lord Henry Somerset. (That is how we came to be, as the nurse said, well connected.)”

  Countess Somers succeeded in achieving her ambitious goals, at least in the beginning, at least in part. Her older daughter, Adeline Marie Somers, married George Russell, the 10th Duke of Bedford, and the younger girl, Isabella Somers, did almost as well, becoming the wife of Lord Henry Somerset, a younger son of the Duke of Beaufort. The Russells and the Somersets, like the Somerses, were the English equivalent of the noblesse d’épée and rather looked down at the upstart Saxe-Coburgs and their tacky new places at Balmoral and Osborne.

  George Russell’s primary residence was Woburn Abbey, one of the greatest estates of England, and he also owned a large chunk of central London around the eponymous Bedford Square. English history is peppered with Russells—including the great twentieth-century philosopher, mathematician, activist, and Nobel Prize winner Bertrand Russell. Alas, things did not go well for George and Adeline Russell. They had no children, and George died of diabetes at forty, leaving the title, the estate, and, interestingly, the guardianship of his illegitimate Indian daughter (India keeps popping up in this story!) to his brother. Adeline Somers Russell’s glory days as mistress of Woburn Abbey were short. Virginia Woolf recalled how the duchess had come to Kensington to see her mother, and behind the folding doors that Julia Stephen pulled across when talking privately with women friends, went on her knees weeping as she told how her husband had just died at the abbey. Thereafter the life of Adeline, Duchess of Bedford, it was said in her own family, was magnificent and very unhappy. The fate of Adeline’s sister, Isabella, however, was even worse, and her disastrous marriage became a cause célèbre of the Victorian era.

  Isabella Somers (1851–1921) was a deeply Christian young woman whose secret ambition, according to her biographer Ros Black, was to become a nun. Instead, she found herself married to dashing Lord Henry Somerset, second son to the Duke of Beaufort. The Somersets’ main country seat was (and is) Badminton House, and through the Plantagenet John of Gaunt, the family claims (distant) kinship with the present English royal family. Elizabeth II, her husband and (distant) cousin Prince Phillip, and all the Windsors trace their lineage back to the early-fifteenth-century Joan Beaufort, Queen of Scots. Further along in English history, the name Somerset crops up regularly. Lord Raglan, for example, the gentleman who pioneered a fashion in sleeves after losing an arm at the Battle of Waterloo and went on, alas, to command the calamitous British invasion of Crimea in 1854, began life as Lord Fitzroy Somerset.

  Lord Henry Somerset secured Isabella’s hand and large fortune by flattering and flirting with the girl’s beautiful mother, Countess Somers. This was hardly a recipe for conjugal happiness, and Lord Henry proved to be not only duplicitous but violently abusive. From his teenage years he had shown an undisguised preference for persons of his own sex, and he married solely because Isabella Somers’s money would enable him to live in style and provide him with opportunities for social advancement. For some time after the wedding, Henry refused to consummate the match, claiming, with aristocratic panache, that he wished to forsake society and pursue a life of chastity on Christian principles—in the company of a few chosen male friends. He still was in urgent need of money, however, and when his father-in-law, Earl Somers, refused to advance him any more, Henry saw no choice but to go to bed with his wife and try for a child. When Isabella gave birth to a healthy male, to be known as “Somey” in the family, there was great rejoicing with the Somersets at Badminton House and the Somerses at Reigate Priory.

  His dynastic responsibilities met, however, Henry saw no reason not to follow his own tastes and explore the gay underworld that linked Blackfriars to Mayfair. He installed his lover, Walter Dalrymple (a relative of Sophia’s husband, Sir John Dalrymple, and thus one of his wife’s cousins), at his London townhouse, and there they entertained young noblemen of similar tastes, along with a series of male prostitutes. To Isabella herself he was not merely indifferent but cruel, telling her outright that he would never return to her bed or give her the children she wanted. He snubbed her in public, and on one occasion threatened her with a small knife. Henry told Isabella that, if she ever told anyone the truth about their marriage, he would make her life a misery.

  Isabella was desperate for an unofficial separation, but since her husband derived almost all his income from her father, he would not let her go. Isabella appealed to her parents, but Earl and Countess Somers were above all anxious to avoid a scandal that would ca
st shame on the whole family. Then, on February 3, 1878, things came to a head.

  Returning home from lunch with her parents, who were staying at a hotel, Isabella was told by a servant that her husband had taken his disreputable friends into his son’s room to admire the boy as he lay sleeping. Faced with what she perceived as a direct physical and moral threat to her child, Isabella went to her husband’s desk, found letters that proved the nature of his relationships with his male friends and hangers-on, and copied sections of them. The Pattle women, as I have said, had smarts and guts.

  Isabella got the child up, carried him over to her parents, and courageously returned home. Discovering the loss of his son and seeing that his papers had been disturbed, Lord Henry stormed over to the hotel, crazy with rage, and accused his in-laws of child abduction. Alarmed by Henry’s anger, caring at last more for their daughter’s safety than their own social status, the Somerses dispatched a servant to get Isabella out of her husband’s house before his return. She arrived at the hotel in her dressing gown, with her hair down her back, one slipper on and one off.

  In 1878, the Married Women’s Property Act was still four years in the future, and children were by law the property of the father. A mother had no legal guardianship rights. Lord Henry was not unhappy to get rid of his wife, but he was furious to have his child, the passport to his future, taken from him. With the full support of his parents, whose affection for Isabella died as soon as the ducal succession was in question, Lord Henry went to court, confident of victory, to regain physical possession of his son and heir.

  At this time, homosexuality was officially anathema in Victorian England, its propensities and practices fiercely denounced by clergymen, educators, and doctors, and, at least on the books, subject to severe punishment under the law. All the same, Lord Henry was right to be confident that he would prevail in the court of law and in public opinion. His well-connected friends launched a vicious attack on Isabella in the press, casting her as a frigid harridan who had driven her husband away, and the court refused to accept as evidence the letters she had copied as proof of her husband’s homosexual liaisons.

  At the end of the trial, when making his ruling, the judge acquitted Lord Henry of the “horrible and foul crime” of which he stood accused by his wife. He simply could not believe, the judge said, that “Lord Henry Somerset could be so bad as to seek to pollute the rising mind of a child.” All the same, little Somey was, “if things remain as they are [that is, if Lord Henry’s elder brother had no male children], the heir of the premier Duke of England” and the grandson, moreover, of Earl Somers, a former Lord Chancellor of England. On the basis of the child’s lineage and glorious prospects, not on the evidence of spousal abuse and immorality, the judge granted Lady Henry Somerset custody of her son until he was sixteen.

  It was a moral victory for Isabella Somers, but it came at a very heavy cost—to her, not to her husband. There was in England an unwritten law that the dirty linen of the aristocracy must not be washed in public, and the homosexual activities of many highborn gentlemen were either ignored or regarded with benevolent cynicism. Queen Victoria knew full well that many of her grandsons were gay, and if royal wives didn’t make a big fuss when coming upon hubby in flagrante delicto with the stable boy, why should Isabella Somers make a fuss? Morality in matters sexual was considered ineffably bourgeois. Of course, Lady Henry’s mother had been born a Pattle!

  So, according to the inflexible law of the beau monde, it was Isabella who had to be punished. Eager not to offend the Somersets, the officers of the law moved with elephantine deliberation, giving Lord Henry plenty of time to escape across the Channel, lest opinion turn against him. Thereafter he led a carefree new life in Italy, “the land of Michelangelesque young men,” as Quentin Bell elegantly puts it, and affordable even for a younger son on a small allowance.

  Isabella, meanwhile, found herself banished for life from London society. Shades of Downton Abbey—when visiting her sister, Adeline, the Duchess of Bedford, Isabella was obliged to escape down a servants’ staircase whenever the duchess’s mother-in-law arrived. Encouraged by middle-class relatives like her first cousin Julia Jackson Stephen, Lady Isabella Somerset, as she preferred to be known after the scandal, turned to good works, notably the support of poor women with alcoholic husbands, and she had a notable career as a philanthropist.

  Relations between the Somersets and the Somerses were never cordial, but Somey remained loyal to his mother. When he married, he did not invite his father to the wedding, with the result that all the Somersets boycotted the event. Worse, Lord Henry Somerset’s older brother, on succeeding to the title of 10th Duke of Beaufort at age forty-eight, married his longtime mistress, who produced a son and heir. Sadly—or not, depending on your point of view—the task of producing two male heirs in succession proved too much of a strain for the Beaufort men, and in due course Somey’s grandson David Somerset, Isabella’s great-grandson, became the 11th Duke of Beaufort. The Pattle bloodline, one might say, came out on top.

  ❧

  Virginia Woolf was never close to her Somers great-aunt or her first cousins once removed, but their lives intersected with hers in several interesting ways. As the documentation brought forward in the Somerset child custody trial shows, the “gay life” was at least as common in the Mayfair culture of Isabella Somers circa 1878 as in Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury circa 1918. The big difference was that the women of Bloomsbury knew, accepted, and indeed joked about the fact that so many of their male friends were homosexuals.

  More directly, Virginia Woolf’s aristocratic relatives shaped her youth because they powerfully shaped the relationship between her parents. As we shall see in Part III, from her teenage years as a notable beauty to her death as a gaunt, gray-haired, though still middle-aged matron, Julia Prinsep Jackson Duckworth Stephen managed to project an air of glamour. In the middle- and upper-middle-professional milieu she inhabited in her last years, part of that glamour was due to the fact that Julia could, if she chose, claim French nobility among her ancestors and English aristocrats as her close relatives. Julia Stephen was far too refined to brag about “my poor cousin the Dowager Duchess of Bedford” or “that dreadful person Lord Henry Somerset who ruined the life of my cousin Isabella,” but friends were happy to do it for her.

  No one was more susceptible to Julia’s glamour than her second husband. A stubbornly independent man who worked for a living, Leslie Stephen was proud of his own ascetic, intellectual, ethical heritage as a Venn-Stephen. The Pattle clan loyalty emerged whenever there was a family marriage or a death, so, when Julia and Leslie married, Julia’s aunt Virginia, Countess Somers, loaned them her smaller estate for their honeymoon. When Maria Pattle Jackson died in 1892, Julia Stephen was prostrate with grief over the death of her mother, and she and Leslie went to live for six or eight weeks in a little house at Chenies in Buckinghamshire loaned to them by Julia’s cousin, the Dowager Duchess of Bedford.

  The Bedford-Beaufort connection was one of the things that made Julia Jackson the epitome of beauty, grace, and distinction in Leslie’s eyes, and it would be one of the forces that shaped their relationship when they married. No one better than Leslie understood that, by marrying him, Julia had moved down several notches in the complex hierarchy of the English bourgeoisie and become a woman who needed, for the first time in her life, to worry about money. As we shall see, while superbly playing the part of the self-sacrificing Victorian “Angel in the House,” Julia Stephen was empowered by her husband’s highly eroticized adoration and sense of indebtedness.

  For Leslie and Julia’s children, their mother’s aristocratic relatives formed a vague but agreeable backdrop to humdrum Kensington life, and Virginia’s husband, Leonard Woolf, picked up on it as soon as they became engaged. In his autobiography, Woolf accurately identified his wife’s class background: “The children of Sir Leslie Stephen had, at the turn of the century when their father died, broken away from the society into which they were bo
rn. That society consisted of the upper levels of the professional middle class and country families interpenetrated to a certain extent by the aristocracy.” Leonard saw, resented, and envied that class’s “assurance of manner,” which could easily change into “insolent urbanity,” and he felt himself excluded from it despite his education at a public school (meaning, in British terms, a private school) and at Cambridge University. “I was an outsider to this class because, although I and my father before me belonged to the professional middle class, we had only recently struggled up to it from the stratum of Jewish shopkeepers. We had no roots in it.”

  George Duckworth, Julia’s oldest son and Virginia Woolf’s older half-brother, was particularly aware that his mother had come down in society by marrying Leslie Stephen. As an adult, George’s goal was to use the fortune he had inherited from his father, Herbert Duckworth, to move the family back up into the higher reaches of English society. Following the deaths of his mother and of his sister Stella, George decided that his own rise in society might still be achieved by following the old Pattle strategy: finding upper-class husbands for his beautiful stepsisters. Perhaps, George thought, Vanessa and Virginia Stephen, like Virginia Pattle Somers, Adeline Somers Russell, and Isabella Somers Somerset before them, might snag an earl or a duke. This plan was a dismal failure, as each of George’s Stephen sisters in turn hated to play the part of a society miss. Perhaps the family gossip about the disastrous marriages of their mother’s cousins Adeline and Isabella did their part in convincing Vanessa and Virginia that marrying up the social ladder was a recipe for disaster.