Virginia Woolf

by Gillian Gill

  During the London season, one of his sisters must accompany George to the dinners, and parties, and balls, and country house weekends for which the gilt-edged invitations piled up so gratifyingly on his mantelpiece. With a gloriously beautiful, marvelously intelligent sister on his arm, George Duckworth would no longer appear a dim bachelor whose Somerset ancestors had been in cotton, but a saintly young man, a golden halo encircling his black curls.

  But George Duckworth did not see his Stephen sisters as just potential social assets in his quest to find a titled bride. He was, his sister Virginia opined, a man of powerful passion, and on one occasion he came close to acknowledging that he used her and Vanessa to take the edge off his sexual needs. When Virginia was just eighteen, George came to her bedsitting room—the room he had set up for her in the old nursery—and presented her with a small, inexpensive enamel pin. He and Vanessa, George said, had quarreled the night before. He had insisted that she accompany him to a party and she insisted that she would not go. This obdurate noncompliance, George obscurely intimated to Virginia, was a serious matter. Vanessa was forcing both himself and his brother Gerald into leaving the parental home and taking refuge in the arms of whores. Ergo, tonight Virginia must take up the part Vanessa was refusing.

  And, as she relates it, Virginia did, not totally impervious to the romance of donning long gloves and satin slippers. She was whisked off to a dinner party given by Lady Carnarvon, the former vicereine of Canada, a lady whom George was once observed kissing and whose daughter Lady Margaret Herbert he would finally marry in 1906. Finding that Lady Carnarvon, though wearing a modest selection of the diamonds she had inherited from Marie Antoinette, was a pleasant enough woman, Virginia relaxed enough to suggest to the assembled party that men and women should get together to read and discuss the dialogues of Plato. At this, an icy silence fell over the dinner table, and things went no better at the theater, where the Carnarvon party, to its shock and horror, was treated to a finale in which a young man hotly pursued a young woman and finally managed to jump her. Virginia had actually understood very little about the risqué French comedy, but Lady Carnarvon was mortified, so the evening had not been a success. After being dragged off to yet a third party by George, Virginia got home to the silent house in the small hours of the morning, undressed, got gratefully into bed, and put out the light “when the door opened” and “someone entered.”

  “Who?” I cried. “Don’t be frightened,” George whispered, “And don’t turn on the light, oh beloved. Beloved—” and he flung himself on my bed and took me in his arms.

  Yes, the old ladies of Kensington and Belgravia never knew that George Duckworth was not only father and brother, brother and sister to those poor Stephen girls, he was their lover also. (page 177)

  In a continuation of this set of memories, Woolf says that such an incursion happened more than once, that George himself switched off the light, that he would lie next to her in bed “cuddling and kissing and otherwise embracing me in order, as he told Dr Savage later, to comfort me for the illness of my father—who was dying three or four stories down of cancer” (page 182).

  The reference to Dr. Savage is important. It seems that, when Virginia Stephen was institutionalized with a major mental breakdown in 1904, George Duckworth may have played a part in her paranoid hallucinations, and her doctor questioned him about his relationship with his sister. Certainly, biographers of Virginia Woolf have fallen upon these two passages and pointed the finger at George Duckworth as the cause of Woolf’s inability to experience sexual pleasure and even the trigger for her madness. In her controversial 1989 book, Louise DeSalvo argued that Virginia Woolf’s madness was the result of sexual abuse. Quentin Bell and Hermione Lee, while much more cautious in their parsing of the evidence, also come to the conclusion that the sexualized conduct of George and Gerald had a devastating effect on Virginia Woolf’s whole life.

  In the opinion of Quentin Bell, the nephew of both George Duckworth and Virginia Woolf, to his aunt Virginia as a late teenager “Eros came with a commotion of leathern wings, a figure of mawkish, incestuous sensuality. Virginia felt George had spoiled her life before it had fairly begun. Naturally shy in sexual matters, she was from this time terrified back into a posture of frozen and defensive panic.” The biographer Hermione Lee is even more incisive: “There is no way of knowing whether the teenage Virginia Stephen was fucked or forced to have oral sex or buggered. Nor is it possible to say with certainty that these events, any more than Gerald Duckworth’s interference with the child Virginia, drove her mad. But Virginia herself thought that what had been done to her was very damaging.”

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  When Virginia Woolf produced these revelations about (by this time) Sir George Duckworth to the Memoir Club in 1920 or 1921, others backed up her account. Older women, like her Greek teacher Janet Case, recalled feeling uncomfortable at the way George would kiss and embrace his sisters in public. Above all, with her usual dry humor, Vanessa Bell laughingly admitted that whatever George had done to Virginia, he had done to her too. She too had been provided by George with a bedsitting room of her own one story up from his, into which he could enter late at night with silent impunity. In fact, the available evidence makes it clear that Vanessa, not Virginia, was the principal target of George’s predations. It is also clear that her reactions at the time were more complicated than the visceral repulsion felt by her younger sister.

  Vanessa Bell at the beginning seemed admirably fitted for the role of society belle that her brother George planned for her. When she first appeared in 1898, with her black lace over a white underdress sparkling with brilliants, a perfect amethyst gleaming at her throat and a blue enamel butterfly pinned in her chignon—both the gifts of George—she took people’s breath away. It was Virginia who sat in the ballroom reading In Memoriam while Vanessa danced every dance. It was Virginia who froze out young men at dinner parties with her erudite conversation, while Vanessa, who almost prided herself on not being an intellectual, was adept at keeping the conversational ball rolling in mixed company. Vanessa was reduced to tears when an evening dress she had made from a green upholstery fabric was greeted with cold contempt by George—“Tear that thing up”!—but it was Virginia whose bloomers fell down. Vanessa had possibilities, and George fussed over Vanessa’s wardrobe, paid for her to have dresses from a fashionable couturière, gave her expensive jewelry and, to the envy of her brothers who were mad about hunting, a thoroughbred horse.

  But then, as we have seen, things came to some kind of head between Vanessa and George. They had a violent quarrel over an invitation to Mrs. Maud Russell’s select soiree, and George felt obliged to call in help from Virginia. Could it be that Vanessa simply could no longer bear the prospect of George coming to her room after the party? Certainly, it is at this point, according to Vanessa Bell’s biographer Frances Spalding, that Vanessa became romantically involved with Jack Hills, her sister Stella’s widower.

  After Stella’s death, Jack Hills had continued to be welcomed as a member of the Stephen-Duckworth family. He went on holiday with them, and Vanessa and Virginia were each allowed to take long walks with Jack as he clutched their hands and poured out not just his grief but his sexual frustration. That Jack Hills should fall in love with Vanessa is not hard to understand. He emerges from the memories recorded of him by Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell as a heterosexual man educated in the homosexualized culture of the boy’s boarding school and the men’s college, struggling throughout his twenties to find some honorable way to satisfy his sexual needs.

  Attracted by beautiful, sympathetic Julia Stephen, Hills, as we have seen, fell passionately in love with her oldest daughter, and for almost ten years he loved and desired Stella Duckworth. But when, finally, they were married and permitted to be alone together on their honeymoon, things did not go smoothly between them. In a matter of weeks, Hills was back in Kensington, with Stella hedged in again by her stepfather and four brothers and with her needy younger sister
often installed in her dressing room. For the first months of his marriage, his wife was intermittently ill, then, overnight, she was dead, and once again Jack Hills was consumed by frustrated sexual desire. But then, on holiday with the Stephens, there, holding his hand, listening raptly, full of sympathy, was Vanessa. And she looked so astonishingly like his dead wife—not the care-worn twenty-eight-year-old Stella whom he had married, but the incandescently pale eighteen-year-old Stella who had first lit the flame of his passion.

  The Duckworth brothers may have been obtuse, but they knew that their old friend Jack was eaten up with sexual frustration, and they had tried to keep him and Stella apart during his eight-month engagement. Either they let down their guard after Stella’s death or they were not present at the rented house at Painswick in 1900 when Jack and Vanessa went off on their long walks. So it was an immense shock to uncover, on the family’s return to Kensington, the burgeoning love affair of Jack and Vanessa.

  One evening, George came to Virginia’s room and, in his usual roundabout way, begged her to explain to her sister that, in England, it was impossible for Vanessa to marry Jack. Such a marriage was incestuous and therefore forbidden under English law. Virginia agreed to talk to Vanessa. She had never much appreciated Jack, and the idea that Vanessa might marry and leave her with father and brothers alarmed her. But when she tried to put George’s case against the marriage to her sister, Vanessa was taken aback and very angry. Virginia, she felt, out of need, out of fragility, had betrayed her. “So, you too take their side,” Vanessa coldly said, and though Virginia rallied to Vanessa’s cause, a tiny crack now ran through the golden bowl of the sisters’ relationship.

  Stella’s brothers may have been officious and ill-informed (Jack and Vanessa could easily have gone to France to be married, where it would have been both legal and far from rare), and they did not need Virginia’s help in bringing Jack Hills to heel. But the Duckworths were not wrong in scenting something incestuous about the love that flared so quickly between Vanessa and Jack Hills. If a young woman was desperate to get away from home, marriage was indeed the obvious way to do it, and eligible young men like George Booth had once clustered around Vanessa. With the mourning period for Stella now over, the same young men could have come back, to the applause of society. A creepy repetition compulsion was at play in the family group at Hyde Park Gate, a preference for endogamy over exogamy that would have fascinated Freud. Mad Jem Stephen, too injured to conceal his passions, had pursued his cousin Stella round the house with rape in his heart. Leslie Stephen, after his wife’s death, had clasped Stella to his bosom in part at least because she looked so astonishingly like his wife, Julia, as a young woman. Now Jack was wanting to marry Vanessa, a young version of his dead wife.

  George Duckworth played a key role in ending Vanessa’s relationship with Jack Hills, and perhaps to make amends, in 1900 he invited Vanessa to take a trip to Paris with him, at his expense. In 1902, George and Vanessa set off together again, for a more extensive trip to Rome. Both vacations were no doubt taken with groups of friends, but this is supposition, and the simple fact that Vanessa went away for weeks with George and his friends is surely a little odd. If Vanessa loathed and feared George, as we know from her own testimony that Virginia did, why did she agree to travel with him and give him more opportunities to express his feelings for the sister he addressed as “Beloved”? Did George behave with propriety, or did he take advantage of the times when they were alone together? If so, what was Vanessa’s response?

  Well, we can’t even hazard an answer to those questions because we do not have the letters Vanessa is known to have written to Virginia when she was away. All we have is a letter from Virginia to George, telling him she had heard from Vanessa that she was having a splendid time in Paris with him: “My dear old Bar . . . Nessa’s letters are frantic with excitement. My only fear is lest she find it all too fascinating ever to leave it. Don’t let her get engaged to a charming French marquis—I am sure they have not the constitution of good husbands. And don’t let her see too many improper studios—The artist’s temperament is such a difficult thing to manage and she has volcanoes underneath her sedate manner.”

  Here Virginia, our future novelist, shows remarkable insight into her sister’s character, and she is almost alarmingly prescient of Vanessa’s future life. But the most interesting thing about this letter is that George Duckworth kept it all his life and thus allowed us to read it. If Vanessa was determined to get away from the Kensington past, George wanted to remember it.

  The issue of the sisters’ letters to each other is an important one to consider as we examine this period in their lives. The letter from Virginia to George is one of many written by the Stephen sisters from the final Kensington period that have come down to us. Letters from his sisters were among the papers left by Thoby Stephen when he died in 1906, and both Virginia and Vanessa wrote regularly to their female Vaughan cousins and their cousin-in-law Madge Symonds Vaughan. The real trove of correspondence from this period was, however, addressed to two close friends, Violet Dickinson and Margery Snowden. Violet Dickinson was an old friend of the Stephen family, and a support to both sisters, but for Virginia she conceived a passion. Violet was perhaps the second person in Virginia Woolf’s life to use the word “genius” of her, and Violet hoarded Virginia’s letters. These would eventually number an astonishing 450, “recording a love that had grown old,” as Woolf’s editor Nigel Nicolson puts it. And if Violet was smitten by Virginia, Margery, an art school friend, was smitten by Vanessa and kept all her letters.

  Demonstrably, preserving important letters was a practice built into the culture of the Stephen family and their friends and, given that Vanessa and Virginia Stephen circa 1900 had yet to prove themselves remarkable, their biographers have reason to be thankful for it. Yet the very wealth of information that has come down to us serves to hide a massive hole in the documentary evidence. Not a single letter from Vanessa to Virginia or Virginia to Vanessa has survived from their Kensington years. Yes, we know from Virginia’s 1900 letter to George in Paris that, while Vanessa was away with their brother, she and Virginia corresponded regularly. What we do not have is any of those letters from Vanessa, or Virginia’s replies.

  The lack of any extant letters from before 1897 between the sisters is unsurprising. Since they lived under the same roof and took all their vacations together, they had no occasion to write to each other. However, once Vanessa began to leave home to visit friends or travel with George, the sisters are known to have corresponded almost every day. As Vanessa Bell told her daughter, Angelica, many years later, keeping in touch by mail was a small but key part of the maternal care that Vanessa gave and Virginia craved.

  If you write and receive a great many letters, as these women both did, most of them will get thrown in the waste bin or lost in the move. But if only chance or neglect was at work here, one would expect at least some stray little postcard to have turned up. Letters from Vanessa were important to Virginia. They were a lifeline that kept her going as she worked in Vanessa’s absence to keep their ailing father happy and the household ticking along. The letters would be something she kept and reread. I would lay odds that, as late as March 1904, when she was rushed into a private clinic, somewhere in her upstairs room at Hyde Park Gate, Virginia Stephen had a bundle of letters tied up in ribbon and marked “Vanessa.”

  The dates of the letters that have come down to us offer a hint as to how and when the Kensington letters might have gone missing. The first two extant letters in the sisters’ correspondence were written by Vanessa to Virginia on October 25 and December 7, 1904. The first letter we have from Virginia to Vanessa, a brief note (“We missed you today. Here is a check . . .”), is tentatively dated by editors to October 1907. The first substantive letter from Virginia to Vanessa was written on August 4, 1908.

  From this point until Virginia’s death in 1941, the sisters kept at least some of their letters to each other, thus opening a door into thei
r lives and their relationship for posterity. We know when they stopped by the fishmongers and asked the maid to bring in the dessert, what they liked for tea and avoided for dinner, where they bought their books and their paints, the way they handled menstruation. We know that they were both capable of whipping up a sponge cake, making quarts of strawberry jam, planting and weeding large gardens, and keeping chickens and ducks. We know that they could name every butterfly in their flowerbeds and mend their own bicycle tire punctures. Once you enter the great mound of firsthand evidence left to us by the Stephen sisters, you begin to feel that you know more about them than about women in your own family.

  Bu this plethora of later information makes all the more significant the fact that the first two items in the sisters’ correspondence date to late 1904. This was the year their father died. It was the year Vanessa, Thoby, and Adrian moved from Kensington to 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. It was the year that Virginia fell into her most dangerous nervous breakdown to date, and thereby lost control over her possessions for some seven months. The first letters Woolf would keep hold of for the rest of her life were, precisely, two letters from Vanessa from that difficult period in her life in 1904–5, when Vanessa acted as Virginia’s de facto legal guardian. They were letters that provoked in Virginia a growing resentment at being separate from her surviving family and treated as a helpless object of care. They were letters to which Vanessa never had access.