by Gillian Gill
7
Virginia Woolf’s Mad, Bad Sister
WHEN FREDERIC Maitland, one of her father’s most loyal disciples, gratifyingly determined to undertake an official biography of Leslie Stephen, he wrote asking Leslie’s daughter Virginia to read, on his behalf, the many letters her parents had exchanged during their courtship. Maitland had married into the Stephen family—he was the husband of Florence Fisher, one of Julia’s nieces—but all the same he felt a delicacy about reading personal correspondence. Such were the conventions of British biography circa 1905, and Frederic Maitland was a rising Cambridge historian with lots of other fish to fry.
Woolf was gratified to be contacted by Maitland. In 1905 she was recovering from a serious mental breakdown, still under suicide watch by friends and family members, and ordered by her doctor, Sir Charles Savage, to eat a lot more and read as little as possible. Bored, frustrated, ready to throw all her medications down the toilet along with the medical men who had prescribed them, Woolf eagerly agreed to do all she could to advance Maitland’s work.
This raised alarm bells with several family members, notably Jack Hills, who had once been married to Virginia’s dead half-sister, Stella Duckworth. Indignant to hear that Hills considered her the last person qualified to read her parents’ letters, Woolf dived right into them. In the early years of their relationship, Woolf discovered, both her parents had been obsessed with the problems posed by Leslie’s “idiot” daughter, Laura Makepeace Stephen. Hills had been appointed Laura Stephen’s legal guardian after his wife’s death. Laura was some twelve years older than Virginia, and by the time Virginia emerged from the nursery, Laura was already spending time away from the family or was sequestered with an attendant somewhere in the family home. We do not know how much the two sisters interacted.
Jack Hills need not have worried about crazy Virginia letting any cats out of the Stephen family bag. No one better than Woolf, who had just emerged from a private clinic for the affluent insane herself, appreciated the sensitivity of the Laura revelations. She told Maitland that the early letters between her parents added no facts of importance to the understanding of Leslie Stephen’s career, and she extracted a few, carefully chosen passages that the disciple-biographer could cite to humanize his august subject. A Trinity don of delicate health—he would die as a young man in the year the Stephen biography was published—Maitland was happy to take her advice. As far as I can judge from Woolf’s letters, Frederic Maitland would have been happy to allow Leslie Stephen’s talented daughter to not only ghostwrite but type up the whole volume to be published under his name—a fact not lost on the ambitious Miss Stephen.
What the Stephen courtship letters—now in the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library—show is that, in the long and tortured months when Leslie Stephen was striving to persuade Julia Duckworth to marry him, he found in his daughter, Laura, a way to involve Julia actively in his life. The child posed a challenge closely tailored to Julia’s interests and skills, and in letters and doubtless in conversation too, Leslie and Julia agonized over what to do about Laura. The agreement they finally reached was a key factor in turning their friendship into marriage.
Unfortunately, as Virginia Stephen knew all too well and Maitland probably knew or at least guessed, Julia and Leslie Stephen had not solved the Laura problem. Far from it. If indeed there was a skeleton in Leslie Stephen’s closet, Laura was it, and as the Leslie Stephen school of biography saw it, the closet must be left firmly closed.
The image of closet and closure is all too apt. Laura Stephen had been largely separated from the rest of the family all through her teens and was put in a mental asylum in her early twenties. The skeleton image is not apt. The oldest Stephen daughter was very much alive when Maitland was writing the laudatory biography of his mentor.
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When Laura was born, not even three pounds in weight, Minny Stephen at once bonded with her tiny daughter and, unlike many women of her class, was intimately involved in her care. Of course, the Stephens had a reliable nurse and a staff of maids to provide twenty-four-hour assistance, but Laura Stephen owed her survival to her mother.
Minny and baby Laura with their dog, Troy
Laura, or Memee as she was called, was an unusually small infant and had a great deal of pain from teething, often waking the household with her screams at night. As a result, she developed a strong dislike of meat, so her mother allowed her the nutritious, easily chewed foods she liked, such as goat’s milk and fresh fruit. Slow to walk, Laura was also slow to talk, and even slower to make sense. She loved to sing and dance around and hum and babble away in a weird mixture of English and German (Louise Beinecke, her nurse, was German), which her mother declared enchanting. In a letter to her sister, Anne, Minny gave a sample of Laura speak—or rather, Laura song: “I was so surprised at Memee suddenly beginning to strum on the piano and shouting a long ballad all de children are mumbled down stairs Polly put the kettle on Cooky take it off again where’s me little children gone.”
Victorian fathers were not expected to show much interest in their infant children, especially if they were girls, but in this Leslie Stephen was the exception. When he came home at night, he would, according to Anne Thackeray Ritchie, head straight for the nursery to find his wife and daughter, and happily join in the prevailing baby worship. To his great friend in America, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Leslie Stephen wrote:
It is true that my baby is the best of all possible babies. That child’s head contains an amount of brains wh. would astonish any humble phrenologist. She can’t talk much but her expression indicates an amount of humour & of feeling wh. few persons possess. She is not appreciated by the general public because she does not weigh as much as some babies & the public goes by weight in regards to babies but she is a baby to be proud of to anyone who has an eye to the best qualities in human babies.
The Thackeray documentation shows that for her first four years, Laura Stephen led the privileged life of children of her class, big-sistered by Annie and Margie Thackeray, her mother’s informally adopted daughters, taking seaside holidays with the children of relatives and friends like the Duckworths, carried off to the Continent for long stays in comfortable hotels with her doting parents. Her slowness to speak did not go unnoticed, but she was a natural mimic and very funny. She was no doubt very spoiled, but she was a beautiful, good-natured, affectionate little person, and beauty and sweetness of nature were the key requirements for little Victorian girls.
But then, literally from one day to the next, disaster struck. Laura’s mother died of eclampsia in the last months of pregnancy as we have seen, and during the mourning period no one seemed to remember Laura was there, much less care about what she was feeling. The five-year-old now found herself in the care of her father, a man whom she adored but who was sunk in his own grief and frequently went off, leaving his child with relatives and friends. Annie and Margie Thackeray, who had loved and protected Laura, went back to India to live with their father, Edward Thackeray, and his new wife. All the same, Laura still had her aunt Anny and her dog.
Soon after Minny’s death, Anne Thackeray moved back in with her brother-in-law and niece, first at Leslie’s house at 8 Southwell Gardens and then, after Leslie sold that house for a splendid forty-one hundred pounds, at the house in Hyde Park Gate near Julia Duckworth. Brother- and sister-in-law clung together in their sorrow at first, but after a time they began to clash fiercely, over money matters and the management of Laura. Leslie Stephen was increasingly aware of his daughter’s cognitive problems and angry with what he regarded as her refusal to learn and conform to an educational schedule.
Anne Thackeray wanted to continue her dead sister Minny’s system for handling the child. She would have willingly taken on the care of Laura, as she had done for Annie and Margie, but Leslie considered Laura spoiled and selfish. That the little girl’s mopes and fits of passion and refusals to cooperate could be an expression of trauma following the loss of her mother
apparently never occurred to him. He found Laura to be a burden, and saw the laxity of Anne and nurse Beinecke as the cause of the child’s inexcusable refusal to be a loving support to her father in his misery. So, after terrible quarrels, Leslie told Anne that he would tolerate no further interference from her in his daughter’s upbringing. Wounded, frustrated, fearful for Laura but on the brink of a new life as Richmond Ritchie’s wife, Anne Thackeray moved out of the Hyde Park Gate house she owned jointly with Leslie, and within months was married.
Thus, within a couple of years Laura Stephen had lost her mother, her adoptive sisters Annie and Margie, the love of her father, and the affectionate and supportive presence of her aunt. And even as Anne Thackeray was taking a swift, unexpected swerve into marriage, Leslie was doing the same, as he grew ever closer to his neighbor and friend Julia Duckworth.
To the black-clad Julia Duckworth, the black-clad Leslie Stephen reported in the years 1876 and 1877 that he was in torment. He had finally been forced to recognize serious cognitive and emotional problems in his daughter, now seven. Not only was Laura verbally incomprehensible and slow to learn, but she was also increasingly unruly, disobedient, even perverse. Julia was sympathetic and full of advice. On the subject of educating small children, she felt herself an expert. Her own daughter, Stella Duckworth, one year older than Laura, was a model of obedience and decorum, a tiny, exquisite, mute version of her beautiful mama. Julia’s sons, George and Gerald Duckworth, were doing well at prep school, both on track to enter Eton as boarders on the strength of the trust funds left them by their affluent papa.
The problem with Laura, as Leslie and Julia chose to see it, was that she had inherited the madness that ran in her mother Minny Thackeray’s maternal family. Leslie had perhaps heard his sister-in-law, Anne Thackeray, tell the story of how her mother, Isabella Shawe Thackeray, had tried to drown her as a tiny girl and how her father, William Makepeace Thackeray, had always feared that his fragile younger daughter, Minny, might have inherited her mother’s madness.
Leslie could report from certain knowledge that his mother-in-law, Isabella Thackeray—still very much alive—had been incurably insane from her mid-twenties and that her sister, Jane Shawe, had headed down the same path later in life. Isabella’s daughter Anny Thackeray was, Leslie and Julia agreed during their courtship, while immensely lovable and quite a literary talent, not the most rational of women. Did Anny not persist in seeing silver linings where Julia and Leslie saw only thunderclouds? Was Anny capable of sticking to a budget or making a simple statement based on statistics? Was she not married to a boy half her age? Leslie Stephen, encouraged by Julia, came to see Laura’s unnerving mood swings from apathy to violence as reminiscent of the child’s maternal grandmother as a young woman.
The idea that Laura Stephen had inherited insanity from her mother’s family held sway in the Stephen family for the next two generations or more, even as evidence steadily built up that, if indeed Laura Stephen was congenitally disposed to insanity, she could just as easily have inherited it from her father as from her mother. Let us review the evidence.
Leslie Stephen’s biographer Noel Annan clearly lays out that both Leslie and his father, James Stephen, were subject to frequent deep depressions and occasional mental breakdowns. They were afflicted with “neurasthenia,” to use the Victorian medical parlance, or something like bipolar disease in ours, and if there is a “gene” for “neurasthenia,” it was expressed in severe and mild forms over at least three generations of Stephens. Following a blow on the head from a sail, J. K. Stephen (known in the family as Jem), one of Sir Fitzjames Stephen’s sons and Laura’s first cousin, became violently insane in his mid-twenties and starved himself to death at thirty-three in a mental institution. As a result of Jem’s tragic end, his father, Fitzjames, became unhinged with grief, was removed from the bench, and died two years after his son.
Leslie’s older son, Thoby Stephen, Laura’s half-brother, was notably uncommunicative, had an odd accident involving another boy and a knife at prep school, and was later sent home from his boarding school after trying to throw himself out a window. The school said he had been sleepwalking but, again according to Noel Annan, Thoby repeated this apparent attempt at suicide when he was brought home. Further down the years, Leslie’s third daughter, Virginia, Laura’s half-sister, made her first attempt at suicide at fifteen, had to be forcibly restrained from throwing herself out the window at the institution where she was confined, and lived her life thereafter in fear of the next psychotic episode.
As we shall see later in this book, the legendarily tough, redoubtable Vanessa Stephen Bell was mysteriously incapacitated on her journeys to Greece in 1906 and Turkey in 1911, and she suffered two major mental breakdowns in later life. Adrian, the youngest of Leslie Stephen’s children, was considered too fragile to be sent away to school and was educated from home in a private day school until he began to prepare for entrance to Cambridge. After years of aimlessly seeking a profession, Adrian Stephen settled, to the dismay and scorn of his older sisters, on a career as a Freudian analyst. Psychoanalysis, as Vanessa cattily pointed out to Virginia, did not require any exams or paper qualifications, and the two sisters giggled over the fact that their little brother (a hulking six foot five) was now encouraged by his own analyst to see them as the cause of all his problems. Adrian Stephen is the forgotten sibling in the Virginia Woolf story, but I wonder if analysis led him to figure out that Virginia was not the only “crazy” person in his family.
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Several attempts have been made to diagnose what was “wrong” with Laura Stephen. When Laura was about eighteen, Leslie Stephen brought in a friend, the eminent Victorian psychologist Sir Charles Savage, and he reinforced Leslie and Julia’s idea about inherited lunacy by giving it as his expert opinion that the girl was not only an “idiot” but incurably insane. The same doctor had been consulted in the case of Jem Stephen and, eerily, for decades he would be Virginia Woolf’s doctor too. A hundred years or so after Savage, the biographers Hermione Lee and Henrietta Garnett suggested that some form of autism may have been at the root of Laura’s problems. Theirs is an informed guess at best, since autism had yet to be diagnosed or studied in the late nineteenth century. So, once again, let us review the evidence.
Certain things can be established when the Thackeray sources are set next to the Stephen ones. Laura Stephen was born many weeks premature, weighing less than three pounds. That she survived at all is a tribute to the power of cotton wool and a mother’s love. All the same, it seems certain that, without the breathing support available now in our specialized preemie units, Laura’s immature lungs inhibited the normal development of her brain.
The Thackeray papers also provide excellent evidence that, even by our exacting twenty-first-century standards, Laura as an infant and small girl received exemplary care. Minny Thackeray Stephen was the ideal mother for her child—intelligent, devoted, responsive, and able to afford the best. Minny had a strong social network, headed up by her live-in sister, Anny.
For almost five years Laura Stephen knew nothing but love and affection and care. Even in the second summer after Minny’s death, Laura spent a happy holiday in the Lake District with her father and his sister, Milly Stephen. Her aunt even managed to persuade Laura to eat some meat, and the little girl was behaving well enough to be rowed across the lake by her father for a visit to the reclusive and highly particular art critic John Ruskin. Now a sturdy seven-year-old, Laura took hill walks with her mountaineer father and his dog, Troy, whom she adored.
But by the age of eight, back in Kensington, separated from her aunt Anne, the girl had become a problem that Leslie Stephen could not cope with alone, or so he confessed to Julia Duckworth. And in a conscious spirit of self-abnegation and social commitment that astonished her family and friends (how could the charming Mrs. Duckworth, wrote Henry James, consent to become “the receptacle of Leslie Stephen’s impossible taciturnity and dreariness?”), Julia agreed to take
on not only her neurotic friend, but his ungovernable child.
And once he remarried, like so many fathers in real life as well as fairy tales (remember Cinderella?), Leslie did what he had said he would do in his will and gave Julia the same jurisdiction over his daughter, Laura, that the child’s mother would have had. To bring up and educate daughters was, in Victorian society, properly the province of women, and Leslie Stephen now had a proposed dictionary of twenty-six volumes to edit.
Julia preferred sons to daughters and made no secret of it. She adored both her Duckworth sons, who so closely resembled her darling Herbert, and Gerald ceased to be her pet only when Adrian was born. Julia saw Laura as not just intellectually backward but emotionally entitled, and that was something she could not tolerate in a small girl. Laura had been spoiled and needed to be brought under firm control. Louise Beinecke, the German nurse who had been with Laura since birth, had to be dismissed and replaced with a person who understood discipline. The child’s peculiar tastes for things like goat milk must not be indulged. Meat was good for Laura, and she must be forced to eat it. She must learn to read and write. Her strange little dances and odd little songs must stop. A good steel surgical corset would do wonders for her deportment.
It is plain, from the details about Laura given in the biographies of Anne Thackeray Ritchie, that the drooling, violent, ungovernable, moronic Laura Stephen inscribed into the literature surrounding Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell emerged after her father remarried and after Laura came under the control of her new stepmother.
Julia might well have tolerated, pitied, or even felt affection for her stepdaughter, had Laura been a nice, obedient, quiet, fragile, affectionate idiot. But she was not. Laura had the Stephen strength and the Stephen will, and she had once known love, so she resisted the new regimen forced upon her. She spat out gobs of the meat she was forced to eat, stammered, stuttered, howled, and occasionally threw things like scissors. Her stepmother responded with enforced isolation.