by Gillian Gill
Laura Makepeace Stephen as a young girl
Julia Stephen was not guilty of conscious malice and, as we shall see, she had her hands full with a demanding husband, three older children and four younger ones, a large household, and a tight budget. She also took on a massive load of private and public philanthropy. For the next twelve or so years, Julia did her duty, as she saw it, by the child of her husband and her dead friend Minny Thackeray, but she found it impossible to love Laura. Julia had abjured all faith in God, but she still saw the world in terms of good and evil, and Laura, to her mind, was wicked and deserving of punishment. In her frustration and fury and pain, the teenage Laura, once such a pretty little girl, began to look ugly, uncouth, and unfeminine, and that alienated her even more from her family. Ugliness and lack of feminine charm were sins against the aesthetic creed of Pattledom, and that was a creed Julia Stephen still lived by.
At times Leslie Stephen, who worked in the house and could not entirely ignore what was going on between Laura and Julia, intervened, and he was the one who managed to teach Laura to read. One odd, discrepant little anecdote from the Woolf-Bell literature that testifies to Laura’s ability to speak and understand has Laura reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland aloud to her new little brother, Thoby. When Anne Thackeray Ritchie came to the house, Laura would run in, full of joyous excitement, to embrace her aunt and make an effort to communicate. But by the time Laura was in her mid-teens Anne had serious health problems, marital difficulties, and extensive professional commitments, and she came only rarely to Hyde Park Gate.
And then, as we try to trace exactly how Laura Stephen as a teenager moved into screaming, violent insanity, we have to take into account the fact that she was living in the same house as the Duckworth boys. Could Laura’s symptoms be interpreted as a frightened, powerless, handicapped girl’s reaction to sexual abuse? Here again we need to carefully review the evidence.
According to the testimony of Virginia Woolf, Gerald Duckworth in his teens and George Duckworth in his early thirties committed abusive acts upon her and Vanessa. One of the things that have made Woolf an iconic figure for third-wave feminists is that she felt safe enough to confide to friends the sexual abuse she had suffered at the hands of her older half-brothers. In the discussion of Laura, it is important, I think, to distinguish between what Virginia Woolf in 1939–40 said Gerald did to her as “a very small child”—so perhaps in 1888—and what she told the Bloomsbury group Memoir Club in 1921–22 that George did to both her and Vanessa circa 1900. I will be discussing the issue concerning George in Chapter 10.
As the war with Hitler’s Germany became a terrifying daily reality to people in the United Kingdom, Virginia Woolf found herself probing her earliest memories in an unfinished, tentative, and brilliant piece now known as “A Sketch of the Past.” As she looks back, Woolf notices that, as a girl, she had felt a kind of rapture when looking at the pattern on a dress or a view of the sea and was yet so repulsed by her own body that she avoided even glancing at herself in the mirror. Trying to reconcile those contradictory facts in her life—sensual delight, corporeal disgust—Woolf suddenly recalls something that had happened to her when she was very young. This was something she had never before confided in anyone, never talked about. At Talland House one summer, her half-brother Gerald, who was some twelve years older, lifted her onto a slab in the hall, put his hand up her knickers, and began to “explore [her] body.” She had wriggled and stiffened in resistance, yet the hand did not stop but “explored [her] private parts.” Her reaction, Woolf tells us, “must have been strong since I still recall it. This seems to show that a feeling about certain parts of the body; how they must not be touched; how it is wrong to allow them to be touched; must be instinctive.”
This is a radical statement, and as late as 1995, Quentin Bell was still dismissing it. What Gerald Duckworth did as a teenager to Quentin’s aunt when she was a small child, Bell wrote, was the kind of thing children commonly do to children. Bell is discounting the importance of his aunt’s experience. His darling, crazy aunt Virginia was simply too prone to go off the wall over nothing, he is saying as her nephew and biographer. But, as we are now coming to understand in the twenty-first century, it is precisely because acts like Gerald Duckworth’s are common that they are egregious. What Gerald did to her was within the family, at the hands, quite literally, of a family member, and with almost casual ease, so she had no recourse at the time. Thereafter there was no person whom she could tell what had happened and how she had felt, so the memory festered. Gerald, she testified, had made the most intimate parts of her body into something sordid and repulsive.
As we now know, for Virginia Woolf, a single incidence of sexual abuse triggered an intense reaction with lifelong consequences, and she was able, decades later, as a celebrated writer and mature thinker, to advance a code of morality on the basis of her experience. On the most primal level, Woolf wants us to understand, a boy who uses a small girl’s body for sexual exploration without her consent and despite her resistance is abusive. That families and society permit such abuse to occur and allow it to go unnoticed, as if it is just the way of things, is part and parcel of the abuse.
Today these insights are central to our understanding of child sexual abuse. When Woolf was developing her ideas in 1940, they were revolutionary. And, given the psychological damage done to Virginia Woolf as a girl by the Duckworths, it seems legitimate to wonder how Woolf’s sister Laura, twelve years older, a girl with severe developmental handicaps growing into adulthood as an outlaw within the family, might have fared at the hands of the same young men.
We know that George and Gerald knew Laura Stephen well, much better than their four younger half-siblings knew her. Gerald was exactly the same age as Laura, George two years older, and as small children they had all three, under the watchful eyes of their mothers, Julia and Minny, played together on the sand at the seaside. George and Gerald probably decided early on, as spoiled little boys will, that Laura was “not all there.” When their mother married Leslie Stephen, the young Duckworth boys were not pleased to share her with a crusty, depressed old man and stand by as he and his imbecile girl moved into their own home.
George Duckworth, as Virginia Woolf would later describe him in a talk to the Memoir Club, was intellectually backward and not made for self-reflection. She might have been equally caustic on the subject of Gerald, had his private publishing company not published her first two novels. When their mother produced four siblings in six years—Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, and Adrian—the response of the Duckworth brothers, away at school for much of the year, was pragmatic. They never doubted that they would always come first with their mother, and they could take comfort in the fact that they were socially superior to Thoby and Adrian (who did not have a rich papa or get into Eton), and that Vanessa and Virginia, like Stella, had inherited the Pattle beauty and were likely to be a credit to them. But there was one person in the family on whom the brothers could take out some of their repressed resentments and frustrations about their mother’s second marriage—Laura Makepeace Stephen.
George and Gerald saw Laura draining time and energy from Julia that they felt were rightfully theirs, and they complained bitterly that Laura was backward and out of control and mortified them in front of their friends. Picturesque examples of Laura’s behavior were passed on by the Duckworths to the Stephen children, who were receptive, since they got even less of their mother’s love and attention than their half-brothers did.
Did the Duckworths’ antipathy toward Laura Stephen take the form of sexual abuse? Could the violent behavior attributed to Laura Stephen in her teenage years have been a healthy but unavailing cry for help? It seems all too possible. Let us remember that the Duckworths were healthy young males whose education from the age of eight segregated them from women and accustomed them to receiving and administering physical abuse. Eton, the Duckworth boys’ secondary school, was a hormonal powder keg, a hierarchy set up to allow t
he older boys to exploit younger boys as domestic servants (fags) or, if they were beautiful, as sex toys behind the closed door of the study. This victimization occurred with the tacit connivance of the headmaster and the teachers, who had their own favorites among the older boys and who intervened in their pupils’ relationships mainly to administer public floggings on the bare buttocks. Imagine what such an education in sadomasochism might predispose a teenage boy to do if left alone with an unloved, handicapped teenage girl.
From the time of Leslie and Julia’s marriage, when the two households were merged in Julia’s house, George and Gerald lived for many weeks of the year in the same house as Laura. She had her own room somewhere upstairs and her own version of Grace Poole—the servant entrusted with supervising Rochester’s mad wife in Jane Eyre—but what care and protection that person afforded is not known. Laura was clearly more alone and more vulnerable than her younger sister would be ten years later, when George began to abuse his position as head of the family. The Duckworth youths as teenagers crossed Laura on the stairs and saw her at meals; if she used one of the three water closets that served the whole household, they could catch her coming in and out. The opportunities for abuse were there, and, as Vanessa half-jokingly told friends in later life, their half-brothers were good at seizing opportunities.
James “Jem” Stephen
But what about Julia Stephen? Was she not a stern disciplinarian who would never tolerate any improper behavior in her home? Well, yes and no, and modern studies have eloquently shown that, all too often, the wives and mothers of sexual abusers do not come to the defense of the abused, preferring for complex reasons to look the other way. Julia Stephen was often away from home or at least out of the house on her many errands of mercy, and we know for a fact that her preference for the boys and young men in her household led her to protect her large, priapic, and violently deranged nephew Jem Stephen when he began stalking her daughter Stella. When Leslie Stephen ventured to express fears for Stella’s safety, Julia told him, “I cannot bar my door to Jem,” so Stella was obliged to slip out of the room or down the backstairs to avoid him, and her sisters were instructed to tell Jem that Stella was out.
One can feel sympathy for poor doomed Jem, the pride of his family throughout his school and university career, and still feel that Stella was a victim too, and that Julia might have been a little more protective of her daughter. Louise DeSalvo, who bothered to read the poetry that Jem wrote at Oxford, has convincingly shown that the family’s golden boy was obsessed with images of violent sexual abuse toward women long before he went mad. That the poetry and the images won prizes and the admiration of his peers only shows that many Victorian men found sadism normal, even amusing.
And if Julia Stephen was so cavalier in defense of her own daughter, what would she have done had she spotted her darling boys interacting—inappropriately, shall we say—with Laura? Raised a finger in reproof, sent her sons to their rooms, complained to Laura’s companion of letting her roam the house alone, but not much more, I think. Boys will be boys, after all, and Julia Stephen felt that Laura was enough to try the patience of a saint. The Duckworths were young lords of the universe, convinced of their own irreproachability, and their doting mother would have believed whatever they told her.
All of this is supposition, of course. There is no hard evidence that Gerald and George Duckworth abused Laura Stephen. How could there be? Of all the people who recorded memories about life at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Laura’s is a testimony we do not have. As a child she did not learn to write, and even when Aunt Anny came to see her, the two were not permitted to be alone together. All the same I think it is important to raise this question: if the mentally fragile Virginia Stephen was permanently wounded by what George and Gerald did to her, what effect might the brothers have had on Virginia’s developmentally challenged, possibly autistic half-sister Laura Makepeace Stephen?
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Isabella Shawe Thackeray, my readers will remember, was for some fifty years looked after by reliable people in a series of private homes, her care supervised by her husband and then by her older daughter, who loved her and visited her regularly. Under this system of loving care, Isabella, who seems to have been schizophrenic, became happier and more responsive with the years, able to communicate a little through the music she had always loved.
Laura Stephen, in contrast, whose development was retarded by so many tragic circumstances but was not psychotic, was placed in an institution for the insane as a young woman and remained in institutional care until her death. How old Laura was when she was institutionalized is hard to determine, but that very lack of a hard date or a remembered transition tells us that she had long since been set outside the Stephen family circle.
Leslie Stephen was reluctant to send Laura to an asylum. When he could move off his treadmill of anxieties, he was a loving, reasoning, ethical man, and his nephew Jem’s suicide in the asylum must have weighed upon him. According to one account, it was George Duckworth, speaking man to man as the eldest son, who insisted to his stepfather that Laura must be institutionalized as she was putting Julia’s life at risk. Asked to choose between his eldest daughter and his wife, Leslie chose Julia. It is not chance that Laura left the family around the time that the invalid Maria Pattle Jackson, Julia’s mother, moved into a bedroom next to her daughter’s at 22 Hyde Park Gate.
As far as I can tell from the various accounts, Laura lived with her family until her late teens. She was then sent to live in the country for most of the year but continued to spend the summers at Talland House in St. Ives with the Duckworths and the other Stephens for a year or two after that. It was at Talland House that Gerald Duckworth felt able to set the child Virginia on the hall table and finger her genitals.
In her early twenties, Laura was committed to Earlswood, “an idiot asylum” in Redhill, a London suburb, and then to an equivalent one in Southgate, where she could also be readily visited from Kensington. In the early years Julia Stephen went to see Laura at the institution, often with her daughter Stella. After Julia’s death in 1895, one of the many family burdens assumed by Stella was to visit Laura, but in 1897 Stella died too.
Ever since his marriage Leslie had found it difficult to be in the same room as Laura, but flickers of the love he had felt for his first child as a little girl still burned, and all his life he was haunted with guilt and a sense of responsibility. For as long as he could, Leslie visited Laura in the institution, and when he became seriously ill with cancer, he sought to ensure that Laura would be protected. In 1897, after Stella’s death, Leslie wrote to his teenage son Thoby, “I want you to remember her [that is, Laura] and see that she is properly cared for.” When Thoby died in 1906, less than three years after his father, first Jack Hills, Stella’s widower, then Katharine Stephen, one of Leslie’s nieces, became Laura’s guardian, but Laura outlived her too. When Laura died, she was apparently in some kind of medically supervised living situation near York, a city in the Midlands far from the homes in London and Sussex of her surviving brother and sisters.
Laura’s best support during her sad life came from her mother’s side of the family. While Laura lived with the Stephens, Anne Thackeray Ritchie stayed as much a part of her niece’s life as she could. After Laura was institutionalized, even though it must have been inexpressibly painful, Anne visited Laura just as she had once visited her own mother, taking her out for jaunts or having her visit. After Lady Ritchie died, her daughter Hester Ritchie Norman continued to keep in touch with Laura, and to invite her to stay occasionally. Belinda Norman Butler, Hester’s daughter, remembered Laura Stephen clearly, and her testimony is startling: “She was perfectly all right, really. Of course, she had some companion to look after her. She was craggy-looking, with the Stephen nose, like Leslie’s. She was tall and thin and dressed in black lace. She was utterly sweet to us. She was nice to us. When we broke something once, I remember she helped us to pick up the pieces of some china we had smashed. She laughed and w
as kind and didn’t scold us.”
But even more important to Laura’s comfort and safety was the money she had in essence inherited from her Thackeray mother. After Minny’s death, Leslie made an agreement with his sister-in-law, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, that a generous sum of money accruing to Leslie as Minny’s husband and widower would be put into a trust fund for Laura. Intended initially, perhaps, as a dowry, the fund was later used to place Laura in a private institution. Any money left over from covering Laura’s expenses was to be reinvested in the 4 percent funds and inherited at Laura’s death by her next of kin—her father and his other children. Laura’s expenses never amounted to more than a few hundred pounds a year, but there seems never to have been any question of using all of Laura’s “dowry” to set her up in a private home with caretakers, as her grandmother Isabella Thackeray had been.
There is no account of any of the other four Stephen children ever visiting Laura. After Leslie’s and Thoby’s deaths, and presumably after Katharine Stephen could no longer act as guardian, Vanessa and Virginia were occasionally asked to make some decision about Laura’s care, but they kept a determined distance. Laura Stephen remained one family matter on which her sisters saw eye to eye with George and Gerald. When George Duckworth died in 1934, Virginia Woolf wrote to Vanessa Bell, “Leonard says Laura is the one we could have spared.”
When Laura, age seventy-four, died of stomach cancer in 1945, a few years after Virginia Woolf’s suicide, the lawyer for Laura’s estate had difficulties locating her next of kin, Adrian Stephen and Vanessa Bell. He needed to tell them that they had inherited 7,800 pounds (some 400,000 in today’s pounds), minus death duties, from Laura Makepeace Stephen.