by Gillian Gill
The Duckworth-Stephen family at Wimbledon circa 1894
For a woman who had been an acclaimed beauty since puberty, it cannot have been easy to see those pictures enshrined in the family album. When she looked across the table at Stella, so much like the lovely young self who had been captured by Aunt Julia Cameron’s lens and who still haunted a dark corridor downstairs, did Julia Stephen feel maternal pride or female jealousy? Versions of the “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?” struggle between Snow White and her wicked stepmother are, after all, played out every day.
Virginia Woolf insists that Julia had no reason to be jealous of Stella. The Julia Stephen in her forties that Woolf as memoirist calls up from the dead is not the gaunt woman we find frozen and silenced in the family snapshots. She is not even the subtly shaded Julia that Woolf the novelist gives us as Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. Instead, the Julia of “Reminiscences” and “A Sketch of the Past” is a dazzling, quicksilver beauty, forever in motion, witty, surprising, bending the whole world to her charm. The Julia of Woolf the memoirist is in fact less the Julia whom Virginia herself came to know as she emerged from childhood than the Julia of Leslie Stephen’s Mausoleum Book, which is odd, given how much Virginia and her siblings claimed to hate and resent that book.
Young men quickly clustered about Stella Duckworth, many of them introduced by her older brothers, George and Gerald. “Stella’s coming out,” writes Woolf, “and her success and her loves, excited many instincts long dormant in her mother; she [that is, Julia] liked young men, she enjoyed their confidences; she was intensely amused by the play and intrigue of the thing; only, as she complained, Stella would insist upon going home long before the night was over, for fear lest she [Julia] should be tired.”
Stella received several proposals of marriage and declined them all, with her mother’s support. No longer the autocratic mother enforcing her will, Julia had become an almost mischievous confidante. As Woolf describes it, Julia and Stella would have great fun, sitting together in close conference, rating each suitor in turn, and laughingly deciding in the end that none of them would do.
Marriage is, of course, not for everyone, and not every woman likes men. A Victorian woman like Stella Duckworth, with the means to support herself, might have weighed the risks and benefits of marriage and motherhood and decided rationally she had best stay single. But as her later actions proved, Stella did want to have a husband and children, and there was at least one suitor to whom she was far from averse, so her insistence on remaining unmarried for eight years after she came out is hard to explain. Julia’s ready complaisance in her decision is, on the surface, even more inexplicable, since Mrs. Leslie Stephen was famous in her circle for being a hopeless romantic and an indefatigable matchmaker of the Rodgers and Hammerstein “Hello, young lovers . . . I’ve had a love of my own” variety. She was instrumental in arranging the marriages of young friends and relatives like Kitty Lushington and Leo Maxse, Florence Fisher and Frederic Maitland, and her friends surely assumed that, as she savored her debutante daughter’s success, Julia’s thoughts were dwelling on trousseaus and wedding cake.
Her mother’s love of matchmaking is, indeed, something Virginia Woolf features and delicately satirizes in To the Lighthouse. Her character Mrs. Ramsay is quite aware that in the eyes of the unprepossessing bachelor William Banks, she herself is the perfect woman, but she does her charitable best to push the contentedly single artist Lily Briscoe into his arms. With Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle Mrs. Ramsay is more successful, as their engagement comes about in the general euphoria caused by her legendary boeuf en daube, but even this triumph is short-lived. Within pages, the novelist tells us offhandedly that Paul and Minta were ill suited and did not live happy ever after.
As she returns to the events of her mid-adolescence, Virginia Woolf circles around the transformation in the relationship between Julia and Stella that occurred when Stella came of age. Given Julia Stephen’s fierce espousal of woman’s traditional roles as wife and mother, given the power a Victorian mother wielded over her daughters (remember Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell!), and given Julia’s exceptional personal ascendency over Stella, how did it come about that she merrily gave way when Stella rejected one eligible young man after another? How did it come about that Stella, once the most compliant of children, now developed a backbone, and her mother meekly accepted this sudden new assertion of autonomy? Refusing to pass judgment on this turn of events in the lives of the two dead women, both of whom she loved so much, Woolf instead deploys her narrative skills and gives us a detailed account of the first time that Jack Hills proposed to Stella Duckworth, an event to which she was at least in part an eyewitness.
Of the several young men who proposed marriage to Stella Duckworth in her late teens and early twenties, John Waller Hills was the frontrunner. Eton- and Oxford-educated, Hills was a close friend of the Duckworth brothers and had become a regular guest at the Stephen dinner table by the time Stella came of age. “It was very natural,” Woolf writes in “A Sketch of the Past,” “that when [Hills] was living alone in Ebury Street, very hard-up, very hard-worked, stammering, and lonely, that he came to my mother for sympathy.” Leslie Stephen despised Hills as a man of facts, not ideas, but even he never thought for a moment that it was Stella’s money that Jack wanted. Anyone with eyes could see that he was not only passionately in love with Stella but unreservedly devoted to her. For Jack, Stella was never a stupid Old Cow. She was always a shining star.
And so, Jack Hills arrived one day, ready to go down on his knees and propose to Stella Duckworth in form, with the approval of all in the family and in the expectation of being accepted. As readers who love Jane Austen will know, a marriage proposal in an upper-class nineteenth-century household was always a choreographed event, and Stella cannot have been taken unprepared by what Jack wished to say to her. Within minutes of beginning their private interview, however, she rejected his proposal out of hand. She then ran up to her room, where she was heard sobbing bitterly. Jack promptly went in to see Julia, who had been waiting to know how things had gone. Jack fell weeping into Julia’s outstretched arms, expecting, and finding, the balm of maternal sympathy that he had never experienced with his own mother.
Julia liked Jack Hills very much. She looked on him almost as a son, and she felt very sorry for him when she saw Stella making him so unhappy. According to what Jack told other family members, when he turned to Julia after Stella rejected his proposal, Julia showed herself at her most charming and sympathetic. On the other hand, what passed between mother and daughter when Jack had gone and Julia went upstairs to Stella’s room, we do not know. No record exists of their conversation. The subsequent chain of events makes it clear, however, that Julia issued no diatribe and no ultimatum. She did not thunder: “How can you be so cruel to that delightful, deserving young man? You are a shameless hussy, leading him on and then dismissing him.” Or: “I shall be very seriously displeased with you, Stella, if you do not reconsider your silly, unkind decision to reject Jack. I would like you to keep to your room for the next days and give more serious, considered thought to your future.”
Something odd is happening here between daughter and mother, and Virginia Woolf gives us the clue to it. There was something “beautiful” about the bond between her mother and her oldest sister, Woolf tells us, but also something “excessive” and “morbid.” The blame for that, Woolf asserts, lay with Stella, who was reading her mother’s mind in a way that made Julia uncomfortable: “What her mother felt passed almost instantly through Stella’s mind; there was no need for the brain to ponder and criticize what the soul knew. [Julia] would no doubt have liked some brisker resistance, some intellectual opposition, calling out a different kind of care. [Julia] may have felt that the tie [of Stella to herself] was too close to be wholesome and might hinder Stella from entertaining those feelings upon which she [Julia] set so high a value.”
Reading that passage, one can sense Virgi
nia Woolf imagining her own ideal for a mother-daughter relationship, one as close as that between Julia and Maria and between Julia and Stella, but free of the excessive and the morbid. Perhaps, she hints, had her mother only been able to live a few more years, she herself and Vanessa could have given Julia “brisker resistance,” “intellectual opposition,” “a different kind of care.”
Whether, in fact, when Vanessa and Virginia turned eighteen in their turn and took their place in adult society, Julia Stephen would have tolerated, much less appreciated “resistance” and “opposition” from them, one may take leave to doubt. If you follow Woolf’s line of analysis, however, it becomes clear that, however Julia Stephen might rhapsodize about the joys of married life and preach marriage and motherhood as a woman’s solemn duty to society, Stella Duckworth knew that in fact these were not things her mother wanted for her. By remaining single, Stella might appear to disappoint Julia while intuiting, without Julia ever needing to say a word, what it was that Julia really wanted. To keep Stella for herself, and, if she were to die, for Leslie.
Jack Hills was a lovely young man, but since he already treated Julia as a mother, she had no need to be his mother-in-law. To see her beautiful eldest daughter walk blushing down the aisle would have been gratifying, but what Julia really wanted and needed, as her strength waned and familial pressures mounted, was not to be the mother of the bride on a single day but to have Stella by her side every day, forever, perfectly trained, passionately willing, forever subordinate, eternal moon to Julia’s sun.
Julia had produced three daughters, so she could afford to have one remain a spinster dedicated to the care of herself and the aging, exigent Leslie. Vanessa and Virginia were both very pretty little girls who promised to be beauties in Julia’s image. When the time came, Julia would feel able to exercise her maternal authority and make sure that her younger daughters married and supplied Julia with jolly sons-in-law and enchanting grandchildren. Stella, whose “almost canine” adoration often irritated Julia, would be perfectly happy as the chief bridesmaid, the maiden aunty, standing with a smile behind Grandma’s big chair.
In the third volume of his autobiography, Leonard Woolf in his eighties would write of his vicarage neighbors at Rodmell, the Hawkesfords, “Next to the war memorial in Whitehall, there should be another to the millions of daughters who gave their lives to looking after selfish parents and the millions of Marys who gave their lives to looking after the Mrs Hawkesfords.”
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As a small girl, Stella Duckworth had trotted behind her mother when Julia went out on her charitable visits. In her teens she graduated to the committee meetings of various reform societies, and toward the end of her mother’s life, she dealt with many of the written demands for assistance—a winter coat, a job for the widow’s eldest son, a recommendation for a servant—that flooded into Hyde Park Gate every day. It was through Julia that Stella came to know the social reformer Octavia Hill, and when Stella was over twenty-one and permitted to do social work independently from her mother, she began volunteering to assist in Hill’s campaign to resettle London’s slum dwellers in decent accommodation. Private philanthropy, which was central to the lives of so many Victorian women, offered the perfect cover for Julia’s increasing frailty and Stella’s self-sacrifice. If Stella had chosen not to be a wife and mother like Julia, the two could claim that she had perhaps taken the finer way, treading the noble path of charitable good works where Julia had gone before.
For the next six or so years, having apparently given up all thought of marrying, Stella Duckworth spent her discretionary hours working on Octavia Hill’s housing projects. By 1900, having taken over the management of extensive properties belonging to the Commissioners of the Church of England, Hill was at the head of an organization that ran seventeen thousand housing units. The success of Hill’s system depended on establishing close relationships with renting families and being extremely firm about rent collection. Every week, a group of women—at first volunteers, later paid employees, but all women—would spread out and visit each of the Hill-financed homes to collect the rent and assess the domestic situation.
I suspect that Miss Hill played a more important and satisfying part in Stella Duckworth’s life than we shall ever know, though exactly how she contributed to Hill’s organization is unclear. She may have been one of the women volunteers who went around each week to collect the rent money. We do know that Stella even in her twenties could get leave to go into slum areas of London only if she took one of her young sisters or brothers along with her as a kind of chaperone. None of the children, unsurprisingly, enjoyed these exhausting and sometimes painful sorties out of prim and proper Kensington. Only Virginia, of the four young Stephens, seems to have understood what her older sister was trying to accomplish and tried to emulate her.
In her life, Woolf, with some distaste and much irony, engaged in several kinds of educational projects for poor women, and in her fiction Woolf almost obsessively sets a frame around the middle-class privilege her characters enjoy. She juxtaposes her protagonists against a flower seller straight out of My Fair Lady, ragged urchins throwing stones into the river off the Embankment, men on the dole flogging postcards, a charwoman on hands and knees, scrubbing. Her female characters are often political and social activists. In The Years, Rose Pargiter goes to jail for her work on the campaign for Irish independence, and the Pargiter cousins Magdalena and Elvira D’Elroy, partly out of straitened means and partly as an ideological statement, live in a noisy, ugly flat in a working-class neighborhood of London, far from the quiet elegance of their childhood home. Mary Datchet in Night and Day is part of the new cadre of women professionals who, unlike Stella Duckworth, got paid for their work for charitable organizations and could—barely!—afford to rent a room of their own and live independent lives.
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In 1895, twenty-six-year-old Stella Duckworth’s brothers, seeing her droop and wither, decided they must do something about getting her married. George and Gerald Duckworth were not pleased with the way their mother had allowed Stella to be so silly about men. To have a sister fade into spinsterhood might, inexplicably, be acceptable to Mother and Father, but the brothers felt it cast a shadow upon their own social eligibility. The possibility that their very own sister might age into a version of fierce, unfashionable, man-hating Octavia Hill was, to say the least, alarming to George and Gerald. Thus, in the spring, her brothers devised a plan whereby Stella would accompany them on a tour of the Continent, and they made sure that Julia would give her full approval and cooperation. Theirs would be a cheerful party of friends, the brothers said, and after all, Mother had met Father in Venice and fallen in love. Perhaps the magic of Italy could work again.
Stella did not want to leave Hyde Park Gate. She, unlike her stepfather and siblings, looked at Julia Stephen with clear eyes. She had known her mother as a young, beautiful woman, and she saw the thin face and gaunt body. Bearing so much of the domestic and philanthropic burden her mother had taken on, Stella appreciated that Julia was having to work harder and harder to maintain her image as the Angel in the House and was being destroyed in the effort.
In the New Year of 1895 Julia Stephen came down with a bad case of influenza, and as the time neared for her oldest children to leave on their Italian tour, she had only just gotten out of bed. Seeing her mother so obviously pale and weak, Stella begged to be allowed to stay in Kensington, but George and Gerald used all their male charm and brotherly authority to overrule her. Julia herself, always eager to please her older sons, told Stella she was a goose to worry and insisted that her daughter take this lovely holiday. Thus, at the beginning of April the three Duckworths sailed for Europe, and Vanessa, sixteen, suddenly and uncomfortably found herself promoted to the position of Chief Daughter.
Stella’s fears for her mother were well grounded. Soon after her Duckworth children left, Julia Stephen fell ill again and was forced back to bed. The doctors began to suspect rheumatic fever, a commo
n and survivable disease at the time but dangerous for someone like Julia, whose physical reserves were depleted and whose morale was low. Reading between the lines of the cheery letters she was receiving from home, Stella guessed that things were going very badly wrong in Kensington. There was something frantic about Vanessa’s communications, and when had Leslie Stephen ever had any idea of what to do in a medical emergency, so for once Stella put her foot down. She and her brothers must pack up and return home as quickly as possible. As a result of Stella’s premonition of disaster, the Duckworths got home in time to take over the direction of the sickroom—George did very well with Harley Street men—but ten days after their return, in the early morning of May 5, Julia Stephen died.
For thirteen-year-old Virginia, her mother’s death appeared at the time to be “the greatest disaster that could happen,” and it was not until May 1939, only two years before her own death, that Woolf was able to give a full account of what she herself saw, felt, and thought when her mother lay dying and dead in the big bed on the second floor.
Lachrymose deathbed scenes were a staple of Victorian fiction—Dickens, with Little Nell, Sydney Carton, and Jo the crossing sweeper, made them a specialty. Virginia Woolf hated these scenes, and in her own fiction she went to extremes to avoid them. In the last part of To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay, whom we have grown to love and whom we have seen triumphant at her dinner party, dies in an aside, her creator refusing to engage our morbid pity. Thus, one of the things that the mature Virginia Woolf analyzes in her account of her mother’s death was that she had felt herself, out of the blue, involved in a melodrama. Everyone except her had an assigned part and took satisfaction in playing it for the public. The doctor, stoic in defeat, hands behind his back, walks off into the lightening day. Father stretches out his hands and howls like a tortured animal. The older brothers swathe their younger siblings in towels and give them warm milk and brandy before solemnly ushering them into the room to kiss the warm cheek of their mother, who has died only minutes earlier. Bewildered, rebelling against any prewritten script for the emotions, Virginia in those first hours observes it all dry-eyed, restraining a laugh behind her hand at the newly hired nurse’s practiced weeping.