by Gillian Gill
Two people in the earlier deathbed scene Woolf recalls are resolutely themselves. Julia herself, and Stella. When Virginia is ushered in to say her last goodbye, Julia says, bracingly, unsentimentally, “Hold yourself straight, my little Goat.” As for Stella, she had foreseen that her mother might soon die and prepared as best she could. Julia had been Stella’s lodestone, the center of her life, the person she loved best, but in the extremity of grief and loss, as in the routine of daily life, Stella’s thought was for others. Virginia, scrupulously focusing on her own feelings and reactions, tells us in her final account of her mother’s death what Stella did for her.
Once again, according to Victorian custom, thirteen-year-old Virginia is led into the parental bedroom and confronted for a second time with her mother’s corpse, now neatly laid out. The urge to giggle at other people’s dramatic grieving has gone. The trauma that will send her into her first nervous breakdown is near, and Stella, the person who this time accompanies Virginia to the viewing and holds her hand, registers Virginia’s acute distress.
“Her face looked immeasurably distant, hollow, and stern,” writes Woolf of her mother. “When I kissed her, it was like kissing cold iron. Whenever I touch cold iron the feeling comes back to me—the feeling of my mother’s face, iron-cold and granulated.” Instinctively, Stella acts to make the dead woman real again, alive in memory if not in fact, to be loved and cared for, not feared. “Then Stella kissed her [Julia’s] cheek and undid a button on her night gown. ‘She always liked to have it like that,’ she said.”
Back in the nursery, Virginia tells Stella that “when I see mother, I see a man sitting with her.” Stella is shocked and frightened, and this vision of the man was probably a first symptom of Woolf’s approaching retreat into delusion. Stella again shows acute psychological perceptiveness. She does not say something sensible and insensitive like “Don’t be so silly, child. This is no time for your fancies.” Instead Stella contemplates the picture her little sister has conjured up and says, “It is nice she [Julia] should not be alone.”
Perhaps Stella, the daughter who never knew her father, welcomed the notion that a man who was not Leslie Stephen sat by her mother’s side in the hour of death. Perhaps Stella in her non-intellectuality and Virginia in her imagination both took comfort in an idea that Julia herself had once entertained in the first days of her widowhood—that Herbert was on hand, waiting for her to die, so that they could be reunited.
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The burden of the big household at 22 Hyde Park Gate had proved beyond the strength of Julia Stephen, and she had barely taken her last breath when her daughter Stella took up that burden. Stella managed the household with efficiency and diligence, but far more important than her housekeeping skills were her empathy and emotional wisdom. At first, their mother’s death sent the Stephen children into shock, and for many months they were terribly sad and shaken. But then, finding that Stella offered them a semblance of normal life and a space to recover, they accepted these gifts as their due, eager to move on with life. They were young—Adrian, the youngest, was only ten; Vanessa, the oldest, only fifteen—full of ambition and joie de vivre; and, as Thoby was the first to admit openly, it was silly to keep on weeping. No tears, however bitter, could bring their mother back.
Their father, Leslie Stephen, however, could not move on. The very idea of moving on was anathema to him. He was, he declared, utterly and forever inconsolable, and it was his children’s first duty to mourn as he did and give him their unconditional love and unquestioning support. Withdrawing to his study, Leslie read old letters and began to write his commemoration of Julia’s life, purportedly so that the children would never forget or fail to reverence their mother. In the evenings, Leslie descended for a silent dinner and then sat in the darkened parlor, weeping and raging at his fate.
Leslie’s titanic misery cast a pall over the whole household, but it fell with especial weight on Stella’s shoulders. That his wife’s oldest daughter might bear a sorrow as heavy as his own, that his duty as a father might be first and foremost to comfort her, was something Leslie Stephen could never stretch his mind to.
In losing Julia almost as suddenly and early as he had lost his first wife, Minny Thackeray Stephen, Leslie felt he was reliving his worst nightmare. At the same time, wives, for a man like Leslie Stephen, were in the end replaceable, and even as he railed at the incomprehensible atrocity of his double tragedy, Leslie had the consolation that his dead wife had bequeathed to him a stand-in for herself, inadequate of course, but good enough to serve. After the death of his first wife, Leslie Stephen had turned for comfort and support to Minny’s sister, Anne Thackeray. When Anne—cruelly, incomprehensibly to Leslie’s mind—deserted him to marry her young cousin, Leslie found Minny and Anny’s dear friend Julia Duckworth at hand to bind up his widower’s wounds. Now Julia too was gone, and in his torment of mourning and self-pity, Leslie again turned to a woman for the sympathy and support he saw as his patriarchal right. That woman was Stella, and her hardest hours in those early hard days were spent sitting in the red plush living room, crushed to her stepfather’s bosom as he wept over the loss of her mother.
What are we to make of this tableau? One of the fascinating things about Victorian fiction, letters, and memoirs is the way atavistic impulses bubble up as an unconscious subtext. Stella Duckworth had lived in Leslie Stephen’s home as his daughter since she was a small girl, but she was not his daughter, and the fact that she looked so very much like her mother as a young woman makes her stepfather’s growing dependency on her both weird and unwholesome.
Let me be clear. We are not speaking of literal incest here. There is no evidence that Leslie Stephen ever made what was once called an improper advance to either his sister-in-law, Anne Thackeray, or his stepdaughter, Stella Duckworth. He never asked either of them to take his dead wife’s side of the bed. What he did was ask, indeed expect, them to dedicate their lives to his care and welfare, as his dead wives had done. And he actively, as by right, sought to close off the possibility of their becoming wives to other men.
George Duckworth, who still lived at Hyde Park Gate and had taken on the role of head of the house, should have seen what was happening and protected his sister from their stepfather’s emotional exploitation. He did not, out of stupidity and emotional obtuseness but also out of an unacknowledged cupidity that paralleled his stepfather’s. With Leslie holed up in his study and monopolizing Stella in the evenings, George was in loco parentis to his Stephen sisters, with consequences we will be discussing in the next chapter.
Released from her adoring bondage to her mother and without the blinders of male privilege like her brothers’, Stella could see that things at 22 Hyde Park Gate were very wrong. For her dead mother’s sake as well as for their own, Stella was willing to do everything she could for her brothers and sisters, but she could not and would not be a surrogate Julia for her stepfather. She saw that her sisters were in urgent need of a mother’s protection as they came into womanhood, and that, as an unmarried woman, she herself lacked authority in the family.
Finding Jack Hills by her side again, solid, down-to-earth, dependable, a man of facts, not ideas, a man who loved her and was willing to wait in the hope she might love him, a little flame of hope was lit in Stella Duckworth’s heart. Perhaps self-sacrifice was not always the best course of action. If, perhaps, rather than give up and give way, she chose to decide and act, chose self-fulfillment over self-sacrifice, everything for everybody would, in fact, be better. Perhaps she, like other women, like her mother, could have a husband and babies as well as parents and siblings. Perhaps this is what Jack Hills told Stella when he took her out into the garden of the Stephens’ rented vacation house at Hindhead for a talk that lasted hours. What we know is that Jack proposed marriage for the third time and that this time Stella accepted. To the astonishment of the Stephen family, waiting nervously in the house as dusk turned to night, the two walked in, pink with delight, and announced their en
gagement.
Of the love between Stella and Jack, Virginia Woolf writes in a kind of rapture that tells us a lot about her own decision to marry Leonard: “The marriage would have been, I think, a very happy marriage. It would have borne many children. And she might have been alive . . . And it was through that engagement that I had my first vision—so intense, so exciting, so rapturous was it that the word vision applies—my first vision then of love, love between man and woman. It was to me like a ruby, clear, intense . . . This color, this incandescence, was in Stella’s whole body. Her pallor became lit up, her eyes bluer. She had something of moonlight about her that winter.”
Once he had recovered from the shock of Jack’s proposal and Stella’s acceptance, Leslie Stephen nurtured a steadily growing rage at what he saw as Stella’s betrayal. The scorn he had long expressed for Jack was now thickly marbled with jealousy, and he refused to give his blessing to the match. Delighting in Stella and Jack’s happiness and fearing that Leslie’s volcanic temper would wear down Stella’s resistance, family and friends rallied in defense of the young couple, and little by little the deaf old man came to see that his position was indefensible. Since Stella herself remained strong and resolute before his attacks, Leslie negotiated. If the ungrateful young pair would get married, they must at least move in with him, Leslie insisted, and here practical Stella saw a way to compromise. The house at 24 Hyde Park Gate was up for sale and Stella bought it. The Stephen and Hills households would be separate but close.
For eight long months, Leslie did his best to cloud his stepdaughter’s joy, and the Duckworth brothers further complicated things by decreeing, apparently on the grounds of propriety, that Stella and Jack must be given as little time alone together as possible. Unsurprisingly, all this opposition from his fiancée’s family did not sit well with Jack, who had already been waiting for Stella for almost ten years, so Stella had her hands full placating the four most important men in her life. Nonetheless, as the wedding approached, Stella seemed to the world a new woman, a model of efficiency, sure of her choices and eager to be married, every inch Julia’s daughter.
Brides are traditionally busy people, but Stella Duckworth was busier than most. She had no mother to plan her wedding, Jack’s mother proved disengaged, even hostile, and Jack himself was too busy preparing for his next set of law exams to be of practical help. There was the new home at 24 Hyde Park Gate not just to buy but to remodel and redecorate with new furniture, new curtains, new almost everything. And then there were the arrangements for the actual wedding, which Stella found time to take on only six weeks before the event.
In 1897, when few businesses and even fewer private individuals in London had telephones, household errands and social calls ate up the afternoons of middle-class women, and preparations for a shopping trip were more like the ascent of Everest than an email to Amazon. Every visit had to be planned and confirmed by mail, and all too often, after a long trip across London by bus and tube, a woman would arrive to find the shop closed. Just getting the dresses for the bride and for bridesmaids Vanessa and Virginia took many tiring treks over to the dressmakers and much tedious standing on stools to be pinned and fitted. Meanwhile, the regular schedule of housekeeping at 22 Hyde Park Gate had to be rigorously followed, and Stella or Vanessa had to always be at home to pour Father his tea and offer him the choice of seedcake or spiced buns.
A letter that Stella Duckworth wrote to her brother Thoby on March 11, only weeks before the wedding, gives an idea of the long list of jobs that the bride-to-be needed to check off every day. Thoby was an undergraduate at Cambridge and living on a slim allowance, and Stella knew that neither he nor his father had seen any reason for Thoby to acquire morning dress. Knowing how perfectly outfitted her Duckworth brothers would be and not wishing the Stephen men to come off like poor relations, Stella hurriedly penned the following:
My Darling Thoby, I want you to do something for me so attend very carefully will you go to a good tailor. I dare say the one you went to for those trousers wd [sic] do and get yourself a black tail coat and a nice pair of grey trousers. I expect it will have to be made for you so I am telling you in good time. The suit will cost between £3 and £4. I expect you had better ask what it will cost then I will send you the money to pay the bill with. You must also have a new topper [top hat] but we have time to choose that in London. Adrian has been staying in with a feverish cold. He is almost well now but he has his exeat [permission to be away from school] & so stays till Tuesday.
Your loving S.D.
All the while, finally in charge of her fortune as well as her life, Stella continued to make her visits to workhouses. She was actively planning with Octavia Hill the construction, at Stella’s own expense, of some cottages for poor Londoners in Lisson Grove, Marylebone. And Stella did not neglect one charity case who especially depended on her—Laura Stephen.
The only person at 22 Hyde Park Gate in Julia Stephen’s lifetime who both loved and respected Stella was Laura Stephen. Laura was just one year younger than Stella, and the two had known each other from the days when Laura’s mother, Minny Thackeray, was alive. Given Laura’s difficulties with speech and inability to write, the nature and extent of the relationship between these two women can only be conjectured. But we know that Stella was never mean to or impatient with anyone and that, when Laura was finally committed to an institution in her early twenties, Stella visited her. After Julia’s death in 1895, Stella seems to have taken on the primary responsibility for Laura along with the rest of her burdens.
This, at least, is what I deduce from two terse remarks in Virginia Woolf’s journal for 1897: “[January 12] Stella went to Laura and was away for lunch and tea.” Then, two days later, “Stella was away all morning and afternoon at Laura.” These two comments are interesting both because they are the only two places I have found in the early journal where Virginia refers to “Laura,” and because of the date—some three months before Stella’s wedding, and as we have seen, an exceptionally busy and fraught time for the bride-to-be. Why exactly Laura needed such focused attention we can only guess, but it seems all too likely that Laura was extremely upset to hear of Stella’s marriage, and needed Stella’s personal reassurance that she would not be deserted. In general, news of Laura was kept from Virginia, but it was so unusual for Stella to take two long afternoons off from her family and her fiancé that Virginia picked up on it and marked it in her diary.
With the exception of Leslie, Virginia was the one in the family who seemed most deeply disturbed by Stella’s upcoming marriage. With all the emotional turbulence swirling about her, Virginia, who had barely recovered from the trauma of her mother’s death, was again haunted by hallucinatory visions, irrational fears, and thoughts of taking her own life. Dr. Savage and other specialists were summoned, and once again the patient was ordered to walk and eat more, do no lessons, and read and write as little as possible. Leslie took long walks in Kensington Gardens and talked books with Virginia, but Stella was the person with whom Virginia was calmest and most comfortable, so Stella took Virginia about with her and kept her close when they were at home.
Cast all too often in the role of unwanted chaperone to Stella and Jack, Virginia had a chance to look over her sister’s fiancé at close quarters and did not much like what she saw. As Leslie had often observed, Jack was no intellectual. He was also not blond, handsome, and immaculately turned out like the Duckworths, nor tall, broad, and sinewy like the Stephen men. Schoolboy Adrian already towered over Jack. At fifteen, as she herself would later remember, Virginia Stephen was “extraordinarily unprotected, unformed, unshielded, apprehensive, receptive, anticipatory,” a moth newly emerging from its chrysalis, wings still wet and fluttering.
The passion between Jack and Stella, which she remembered with such passion as a woman, had disturbed Virginia as a young adolescent. She had been given the “basic facts of life” and, oddly, it had been Jack Hills who gave them. Not content with offering the younger Stephen girls a
concise summary of human reproduction, however, Jack Hills had gone further. He told Vanessa and Virginia that men not only thought about sex and talked about sex among themselves all the time, but they actually “had women.” To Virginia this was incomprehensible. At sixteen, a keen student of ancient Greek, she knew about “sodomy” from Plato, but when it came to the social mores in her own world she was a complete innocent. The idea that men and women in the present were living by different moral codes, and that the purity men preached so constantly was for women only, baffled and upset her.
But even Virginia became cheerful as the wedding came near, and the delights of being a bridesmaid were made manifest in a most becoming custom-made dress and “a pendant gold watch from Dent’s of Pall Mall”—a gift from the groom but no doubt shopped for by the bride. When Stella Duckworth walked down the aisle, the whole congregation was bathed in the radiance of her happiness, and when in April 1897 the married couple set off for their honeymoon in Italy, Virginia and her siblings all looked to the future with fresh hope. With Jack and Stella just doors away at Hyde Park Gate, perhaps home would cease to be a mausoleum to Saint Julia.
But then, a mere two weeks later, the young couple sent word that they were returning at once to Kensington. Stella was feverish, often in great pain, and unfit for travel. She urgently needed to consult her English doctors. Obviously the Italian honeymoon to which Jack Hills had looked forward so passionately had been a disaster, not an idyll.