Virginia Woolf

by Gillian Gill

  Cast suddenly into emotional disarray by Julia’s death, Leslie Stephen was abruptly questioning his patriarchal assumptions. He was seeing that exercising the power vested in men by matrimony could come at a terrible cost, not only to wives like Julia, who wore out young and welcomed death, but also to husbands like himself, who were left to mourn in solitude. Such thoughts were too terrifying to contemplate for long, so deaf old Leslie Stephen returned to the comfort of his library and his book of household accounts and took out his conflict and his doubt on his daughters.

  As we shall see in Chapter 10, Virginia as a young woman observed her father, loved her father, pitied her father. The two of them shared a passion for literature and literary history. For long silent hours they would sit side by side, reading. Virginia knew her father as she had not known her mother. He remained an ineradicable presence in her mind, heart, and memory, but for that very reason she refused to forgive him. Just before her suicide, in the midst of a war to the death against fascism, Woolf returned to her father and questioned if the Hitlers and Stalins of the world might be the terrible product of the male human being’s insatiable need for women to love him.

  ❧

  In the year 1866, when Leslie Stephen turned away from Pattledom to pursue Minny Thackeray—though, as we have seen, not too fast!—Julia Jackson was in her late teens and at the height of her beauty. She was an intelligent girl, thoughtful, articulate, even a trifle acerbic, but there was nothing of the bluestocking in her. Unlike her contemporaries Florence Nightingale or Elizabeth Barrett, Julia Jackson never set her mother all atwitter by demanding lessons in ancient Greek or statistics. All the same, it was Julia’s personality as much as her beauty that made an impression, especially on men. Her youngest daughter, Virginia, remembered her mother as mesmerizing, and to judge from memoirs of the period, Woolf had it right. Maria Jackson once boasted that any man who happened to encounter her daughter Julia in a railway carriage wanted to marry her.

  Even as a little girl Julia was so lovely that artists like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt begged to paint her portrait, and after some years Mrs. Jackson relented and allowed her daughter to pose—suitably chaperoned, of course. Following the George Watts–Ellen Terry debacle we saw in Chapter 2, even an English artist could not wholly be trusted. Aunt Julia Cameron was also on hand with her camera to take the haunting photographs of her Jackson niece that would be handed down in the Stephen family. Yet even as admiration was part of the air Julia Jackson breathed, she gave the impression of being unaware of the effect she had on people. She did not need to flirt— just pose—and her apparent lack of coquetry made Julia all the more attractive in a high Victorian culture obsessed with the purity of its “young persons.”

  Julia Jackson was eyed longingly by poor young men like Leslie Stephen and received marriage proposals from at least two successful older ones, but until she turned twenty she remained serenely single and devoted to the care of her gracefully ailing mama. Then, on a holiday in Venice with members of her family in the summer of 1866, passion entered her life in the shape of the handsome, blond, old-Etonian barrister Herbert Duckworth. The two fell quickly, deeply, madly in love, became engaged to be married within a couple of months, and, to the beaming approval of both families, were wed in the spring of 1867.

  The announcement that Julia Jackson was to marry Herbert Duckworth caused no little consternation in her circle of acquaintance. Valentine Cameron Prinsep, Julia’s artist cousin, arrived with the news of the engagement at a dinner party given for Leslie Stephen and a few of his friends by the Thackeray sisters. As Henrietta Garnett elegantly puts it in her biography of Anne Thackeray Ritchie, the news “dropped like a stone into their soup plates. Julia had appeared as a vision, beyond the reach of ordinary mortals . . . Collectively they had placed her on a pedestal and now Herbert Duckworth had plucked her down.”

  Who was this man whom young Julia Cameron seized upon as perfection in spats? This turns out to be a tricky biographical question because Leslie Stephen, Julia’s second husband, is the source of almost everything we know about her first. Stephen prided himself on his rationality, his mastery of the facts, and his meticulous research. However, if there was one man in the world who could not write a fair and objective portrait of Herbert Duckworth, it was Leslie Stephen.

  Leslie had inherited Julia’s private papers, and there he found a trove of Jackson-Prinsep-Cameron letters, which allowed him to recapture the period in Julia’s shining youth when he had first met her. There was also a small number of letters exchanged by her and Herbert Duckworth during their courtship and marriage. Reading those carefully preserved letters put Leslie on the rack, but he persisted. They confirmed what Leslie had known ever since he had been drawn back into Julia’s orbit after his first wife’s death. Julia had fallen in love with Herbert Duckworth almost at first sight and adored him after he made her his wife. She remembered their few years together as the happiest period in her life, the culmination of a cloudless youth. Though she was far too high-minded to rhapsodize about her first marriage in the presence of her second husband and her Stephen children, and never talked about Herbert even to her closest friends, Julia had never forgotten him. In her heart, she always mourned and missed him.

  His dead wife’s first marriage was an open wound in Leslie Stephen’s psyche because for him Herbert Duckworth did not exist merely in a few letters. The two men had known each other. They had both been at Eton, though Stephen was one year older and a day boy, and both, like their fathers, had gone on to Trinity College, Cambridge. Leslie recounts in the Mausoleum Book how, as a second-year student he had arranged to meet his cousin, G. B. Atkinson, in Trinity Street. Atkinson failed to appear and, when questioned later, cheerfully admitted that he had stood up his cousin Leslie in favor of paying a call on Herbert Duckworth, who had, in Cambridge parlance, just “come up.” Duckworth, Atkinson raved, was “the perfect type of the public school man.”

  Leslie Stephen professes to be joking when he tells this story, but many a truth is spoken in jest, and on such youthful slights a lifetime of resentment can be built. Atkinson was probably not the only Cambridge man ready to pass over a shabby, unkempt intellectual like Stephen Minor (Stephen Major, that is, Leslie’s brisk, assertive older brother, Fitzjames, being quite another affair) in favor of debonair Duckworth Minor.

  With the unconscious condescension and self-revelation that today makes reading the Mausoleum Book so fascinating, Stephen concedes that Julia’s first husband had some good points. Let me annotate in italics the way he continues after his “joke” about the Atkinson incident. Herbert Duckworth was

  in all seriousness [really?], not only a thorough gentleman in the best sense of the word, but had the outward indications of the character which may be valued a little too warmly by men like Atkinson [!] . . . He was good at fives . . . and at other games, without being excessively devoted to athletic pursuits [such as climbing in the Alps and writing groundbreaking books about alpinism, like Leslie Stephen]: he was capable of passing examinations creditably, though he did not aim for distinction at the Senate House [unlike Stephen, the Wrangler and former Cambridge mathematics don], and altogether was the kind of man who might be expected to settle down as a thorough country gentleman with all the very real merits that belong to that character. A man of honour, of fair accomplishments and interest in books, he was fitted to take his place in any society, without being the least of a dandy or a fop.

  Ah, yes, damning with faint praise, and then the killer double negative—“without being the least of a dandy or a fop.” Translation: Herbert Duckworth was a perfect representative of that subset of English upper-middle-class males that morons like Atkinson aped but that real men of real brain and sinew like Leslie Stephen despised.

  However hard he tries to be fair and to paint the Duckworth marriage in Julia’s bright colors, Leslie Stephen could not, in his heart of hearts, forgive his wife for having once upon a time fallen for a m
an with a handsome face and a superb tailor. Only another man, Leslie Stephen might have said, can really know a man, can get below the surface and judge the substance. Duckworth had been the kind of boy who had made his life torture at Eton.

  Stephen also knew that the Duckworth family fortune was made in cotton, and this, I think, is a crucial point in the Leslie-Herbert rivalry. Cotton, in early-to-mid-nineteenth-century England, meant trade with the slave-owning American South. It was the cotton magnates, fearful for their industry, who almost managed to drag England into the American Civil War on the side of the South. The Stephen-Venn family, on the other hand, were founding members of the abolitionist group known as the Clapham Saints, in the van of the campaign to abolish the slave trade and make slavery illegal throughout the British Empire. Leslie’s father, James Stephen, spent his life as an official at the Colonial Office trying to enforce the law and stamp out slavery in all British colonies. In the big fives match of life, the Duckworths and the Stephens had been playing on opposite sides.

  But marvelous, saintly Julia had adored Herbert Duckworth. The letters proved it.

  ❧

  Unlike Minny Thackeray Stephen, the newlywed Julia Jackson Duckworth had no trouble getting pregnant and bringing a child to term.

  Barely a year after her wedding, she gave birth to her first child, George Herbert Duckworth, a big healthy baby and the image of his handsome blond papa. In 1869 Julia neatly balanced the family with a baby girl, Stella, in her own beautiful likeness, and within a couple of months of Stella’s birth Julia had to give up breastfeeding her daughter as she was pregnant again. It was looking as if the Herbert Duckworths might have one of the enormous families—eight children, ten, eleven, who knew?—in which the well-fed Victorian bourgeoisie specialized.

  Julia Duckworth circa 1867, pregnant with her first child, George

  But if large families were common at this time, so were women’s deaths in childbirth among the rich as well as the poor. Middle-class parturients in England were now advised by their doctors to entrust themselves to male obstetricians instead of midwives, even as most members of the medical profession refused to see any connection between childbirth mortality and a doctor’s unwashed hands. Florence Nightingale was forced to close her new obstetrics unit at St. Thomas’s Hospital because of an iatrogenic epidemic of puerperal fever. Women approaching their third or fourth delivery date were encouraged to write letters of farewell to be read, in the event of their death in childbirth, by their surviving children.

  It is possible that when Julia Jackson became pregnant for the third time in three years, some alarm bells went off in Pattledom, but if her mother mewed and her aunties clucked, Julia Duckworth remained serene. She was seen, and remembered herself, as rapturously happy during the three or so years between twenty-one and twenty-four. She spent those years pregnant or lactating, but clearly she welcomed Herbert back into her big bed as soon as she could. To Julia Duckworth—as the story goes—the discomforts of pregnancy, the tedious reclusion that Victorian middle-class society imposed upon women in their final months, and the pains of delivery without anesthesia were to be taken in stride. She was beautiful, she was married to a man she adored, she was effortlessly fertile, she bore healthy children, and all was right in her world. Just as she had once been the picture-perfect Victorian virgin, Julia was now the pattern Victorian wife.

  Herbert Duckworth was not quite the handsome drone in the Bertie Wooster mold that Leslie Stephen deemed him. Instead of living as a country gentleman on his allowance from the pater, Herbert went in for the law. He became a barrister, a profession for which he had excellent qualifications—a solid intelligence, the Eton-and-Cambridge old boy network, good looks, the manners of a gentleman, and an interest in money. He may not have worked long hours, but to judge by the important inheritances he left to his children, Duckworth did well in the law, a lot better than Leslie Stephen did in writing and editing, even with the support of the Thackeray network. By 1870, however, Herbert, thirty-seven, was finding his legal practice a strain. To satisfy his doctors and please his wife, who, trained by her mother, fretted over his health, he decided to stop riding the legal circuit for a while and devote himself to his family. Julia was delighted. The only blot upon her married life arose when Herbert went away on business or failed to meet her at the time stipulated in his latest telegram. Now Julia had Herbert by her side and under her eye and could count on his being nearby when the new baby came.

  And so it came about that, as Julia was approaching the time of her confinement, the Duckworths were visiting the family of Julia’s sister Adeline Jackson Vaughan at Upton Castle, the Vaughans’ romantic but comfortless ruin in Pembrokeshire, West Wales. On a beautiful September day, Julia and Herbert went walking in an orchard. That day was etched into Julia’s memory, but since she seems never to have described it to her daughter Virginia, we are free to set the scene.

  We see the handsome, elegant young husband and the radiant, heavily pregnant wife on his arm, the chubby little blond two-year-old waddling along with his nurse, the sweet baby girl asleep under a tree in her perambulator. The husband reaches up to pick a fig from the tree above him, doubles over in agony, and goes quickly back to the house. In a few hours, a doctor is hastily called, but nothing can be done. An abscess has burst, and within a few hours Herbert Duckworth is dead. Six weeks later, Julia Duckworth gave birth to a second son, a delicate baby she named Gerald de l’Etang Duckworth, after Antoine de l’Etang, her distant aristocratic ancestor.

  “Devastated” is a cliché word for young grieving widows, but it graphically describes Julia Duckworth in the first months after her husband’s death. It was as if the country about her had been laid waste. Perhaps the most poignant pictures Julia Cameron ever took were of the sorrowing Mrs. Herbert Duckworth, thin yet classically beautiful in her high-necked black dress, fair hair pulled back in the severe knot she would wear for the rest of her life.

  At first, Julia Duckworth’s grieving for Herbert was in the high histrionic mode patented by Queen Victoria after the death of Prince Albert in 1861. Stella Duckworth remembered her mother recumbent upon Herbert’s tomb, begging audibly for death. Even eight years after Herbert’s death and only months before her own remarriage, Julia Duckworth caused a small sensation at the sweaty August wedding of Anne Thackeray and Richmond Ritchie, by appearing among the other brightly clad guests in black velvet, heavily veiled in black, and flanked by her small daughter, whose somber mask mirrored her own. There is a self-dramatization here that was part of Julia Duckworth’s complex personality, but her grief was nonetheless sincere, and like Victoria, she laid the burden of her loss upon her daughter, Stella, not her sons.

  Julia explained her state of mind during the time after Gerald’s birth in an astonishingly acute and self-aware letter she wrote to Leslie Stephen in the year before they were married. Here we can see that, if Virginia Woolf as a literary critic was indebted to her father, as a psychological novelist she owed much to her mother. Julia wrote to Leslie:

  I was only 24 when it all seemed a shipwreck, and I knew that I had to live on and on, and the only thing to be done was to be as cheerful as I could and do as much as I could and think as little. And so I got deadened. I had all along felt that if it had been possible for me to be myself, it would have been better individually, and that I could have got more real life out of the wreck if I had broken down more. But there was Baby [Gerald] to be thought of and everyone around me urging me to keep up, and I could never be alone which sometimes was such torture. So that by degrees I felt that though I was more cheerful and content than most people, I was more changed.

  Perhaps one of the reasons Julia Duckworth found comfort with Leslie Stephen was that he too came to weddings dressed in black and never urged her to “keep up.”

  Money is often a problem for widows, but it was one problem Julia Duckworth did not face. Herbert Duckworth had been a man of means, he left his family well off, and his father was go
od to his widow, taking her and the children into his home. Learning a lesson, perhaps, from the wild extravagances that had sent her aunt Julia Cameron into exile in Ceylon, the widowed Mrs. Duckworth led a life that was affluent but not extravagant, sociable but not social. She was a devoted and idolized mother, a loving and attentive daughter and sister, and, while careful to be a good steward to the patrimony of her three young children, she was generous with money as well as time in her support of local charities.

  After the death of her father-in-law, she moved away from the Duckworth house in central London and bought a house for herself and her children in a newly developed and, at the time, fairly inexpensive street in Kensington called Hyde Park Gate. It was probably no accident that Hyde Park Gate was only a short walk from the site of Little Holland House, where Julia Duckworth had once been so happy; its owners tore down the house and redeveloped the property after the Prinsep lease ran out. Thoby Prinsep’s house had been low and rambling, surrounded by meadows and full of light; by contrast, Julia’s chosen home for the rest of her life was a tall, dark row house, with only a tiny dank garden at the back. The woman liked to torture herself.

  And while she seemed all serenity and reason, admirably managing her household, her children, her family, and her philanthropy, and impressing her friends, the mind of Julia Duckworth was in turmoil. It was as if hitherto her life had been a sunlit garden and suddenly, without warning, without reason, the sun went out, and she was left alone in darkness. No one had thought Julia Jackson needed any formal education as a girl. Education was for Unitarians like Elizabeth Gaskell or the daughters of poor clergymen like the Brontë sisters. No one, certainly, had thought Julia Jackson had it in her to be the next George Eliot or even the next Anne Thackeray. But after Herbert Duckworth died, Julia dove deep into her mind and began to read and think seriously. One of the people whose work she read, and found convincing, was her atheist philosopher friend and neighbor Leslie Stephen.