Virginia Woolf

by Gillian Gill

  Whereas the odds on Thoby’s success in the marriage stakes improved as he got older, Vanessa’s did not. She was closer to thirty than twenty and seems to have had no suitors since her disastrous relationship, at twenty, with Jack Hills, her sister Stella’s widower. Vanessa loved to tease Virginia about the passion she inspired in women like Violet Dickinson, and Vanessa was quite aware that her artist friend Margery Snowden adored her, but a Boston marriage had no charms for her. After the move to Bloomsbury, Vanessa Stephen made herself very busy, going to lots of parties and attending a lot of meetings, but she did not get engaged. For a woman who looked in the mirror every day and saw herself beautiful, this was, to say the least, galling.

  The ambition to become a painter, which Vanessa had long nursed, did not improve her marriage prospects. In England, being an artist was still not quite respectable even for men, and professional ambition of any kind in a woman was not considered attractive in 1906, or indeed in 1956. But there was also something about Vanessa Stephen that men found intimidating, and in the autobiography he wrote in old age, her brother-in-law, Leonard Woolf, was moved to analyze exactly what that was.

  Vanessa was certainly handsome, Leonard tells us. He retained a clear memory of the effect that the “extraordinary beauty” of both the young Miss Stephens had had on men like him, and he says that most people considered Vanessa the more beautiful of the two Stephen sisters. And yet, he continues,

  to many people [Vanessa Bell] appeared frightening and formidable, for she was blended of three goddesses with slightly more of Athene and Artemis in her and her face than Aphrodite. I myself never found her formidable, partly because she had the most beautiful speaking voice that I have ever heard, and partly because of her tranquility and quietude. (The tranquility was to some extent superficial; it did not extend deep down in her mind, for there in the depths there was also an extreme sensitivity, a nervous tension which had some resemblance to the mental instability of Virginia). There was something monumental, monolithic, granitic almost in most of the Stephens . . . There was a magnificent and monumental simplicity in Thoby which earned him his nickname of the Goth. Vanessa had the same quality expressed in feminine terms . . . There was often something adamantine in the content and language of her judgements. It was the strange combination of great beauty and feminine charm with a kind of lapidification of character and her caustic humour which made her such a fascinating person.

  But then, in 1906, a highly eligible suitor presented himself to Vanessa Stephen, and an ardent one at that, a man who in honor of her beauty filled his flat with red roses when he was expecting her for a dinner party. Perhaps the ardor was the problem. The man was Clive Bell, but Vanessa did not return his passion, or so she said in 1906.

  Vanessa had first gotten to know Bell (as she then called him) in Paris in 1904, at the end of the European trip she and her siblings took soon after their father’s death. Clive Bell was then living in Paris, supposedly researching a book on the Congress of Verona but in fact enjoying la vie de bohème with members of the expatriate British artist colony. With great enthusiasm, Clive squired the Goth and his sisters around the studios of painter friends like Gerald Kelly and took them to deliciously louche establishments like the Chat Noir in Montmartre. Vanessa was enchanted, all her notions confirmed of how much more interesting life was outside Kensington.

  Back in London, as we have seen, Thoby began his Thursday “at homes” in early 1905, and Clive Bell started turning up regularly at Gordon Square. Initially this was because he was Thoby Stephen’s closest friend, but increasingly it was because he was fascinated by Vanessa. Clive’s quick tongue and social adeptness rescued many of the Thursday sessions from tedium, and when he also began attending the Friday evenings, when Vanessa was at home to her friends in the art world, she was pleased. Bell had been introduced to the work of painters like Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec by his first lover, Anne Raven-Hill, so he came over as something of an expert on modern French painting. That he was starting an art collection of his own did not detract from his popularity with Vanessa’s artist friends.

  Clive Bell was a hunting man who enjoyed chasing women even more than foxes. The “adamantine,” noli me tangere air of the beautiful Miss Stephen posed a challenge for him, but mere flirtation was out of the question at Gordon Square, with the young woman’s two hulking brothers always at hand. Thoby Stephen, in particular, was well aware of his old friend’s reputation as a womanizer, so Bell made it clear from the outset that his intentions toward Miss Stephen were strictly honorable. As an educated man of good family and independent means, Clive Bell was a most eligible suitor, and moreover, he and Vanessa Stephen had many interests in common. She clearly enjoyed his company, and their good friend Lytton Strachey was ready to swear that Bell was head over heels in love. Thus, when Bell duly proposed, he was confident of success, and when Miss Stephen refused, he was taken aback. After proposing a second time and receiving a second no, Bell went off to his family’s lodge in the Highlands of Scotland to stalk stags, hook trout, and lick the wounds to his ego.

  We have exact information on why Vanessa refused Clive’s proposal of marriage since two letters containing her explanation have come down to us, one to Clive himself and a second to her closest friend, Margery Snowden. She liked Clive better than any of her friends, Vanessa wrote. She enjoyed his company enormously and would miss him terribly if he dropped out of her life. She wished him well and ventured to hope that he would soon find an occupation commensurate with his talents. But, to her great regret, she did not see herself married to him.

  Let us pause here and pay attention to the fact that Vanessa Stephen—who had recently admitted to her sister that she wanted to be married and was receiving, as far as is recorded, her first marriage proposal in almost eight years—not once, but twice, turns down a highly eligible man she confesses to liking very much indeed. Hey presto, we are back in the Hyde Park Gate echo chamber again, with Vanessa weirdly reenacting her sister Stella’s double refusal of Jack Hills circa 1890. Both Stella and Vanessa expected and were expected to marry, and yet both, when initially faced with an actual, physical, passionately desiring suitor, were shy like young mares before their first stallions. Something deeper than mere Victorian maiden modesty is going on here.

  Clive Bell had created an awkward situation at Gordon Square, and in August the four Stephens were happy to be off on an expedition to Greece and Turkey. Thoby, who had initiated the idea of the expedition and was paying most of the expenses from his Thackeray windfall, had made detailed plans for the trip. He and Adrian would depart London a couple of weeks ahead of their sisters, travel through France by train to Trieste, and then take a boat down the Dalmatian coast to Montenegro. From there they would set off on horseback, get the ferry to Patras, and then strike inland on mules to meet up with Vanessa, Virginia, and their friend Violet Dickinson. Thereafter the whole party would tour Athens and other great classical sites in the Peloponnese and make a side trip to the Euboean peninsula, where their friends the Noels had an estate at Achmetaga. Irene Noel, a vivacious girl and an heiress to boot, was spending the summer in Greece with her family, and Thoby was eager to press his suit with her.

  Virginia looked forward to seeing Greece as eagerly as her older brother did. She was fascinated by classical civilization and had made great strides in her ability to read Greek under the enlightened tutoring of the Girton graduate Janet Case. After a frenzy of packing in the August heat, Vanessa too was eager to get away, but at some point on the sisters’ long journey, she took ill. When she and Virginia were joined by their brothers in Olympia, Vanessa could not get out of bed.

  In itself, Vanessa Bell’s illness was unremarkable. In the early twentieth century there were any number of bugs eager to colonize immunologically unprepared tourists, and there were no good medications. Basically, an English traveler in foreign parts expected at some point in his holiday to come down with something, take to his bed and the chamber pot, and cal
l in the local doctor. This person would hurry over, prescribe some vile concoction, and wait for his patient to get better so he could present his bill. On her honeymoon with Max Mallowan in 1929, Agatha Christie unwisely indulged in an orgy of shellfish in Athens and got very serious food poisoning. When her Greek-speaking husband told her he had to leave her on her sickbed since he was urgently expected at an archaeological dig in Syria, Agatha was not pleased. But she duly recovered, got herself back to England without fuss, and did not hold it against her Max. Just such a response might have been expected from the competent and independent Miss Stephen, who in Italy and France in 1904 had not allowed the bedbugs and primitive outhouses to spoil her pleasure. Yet now, apparently after coming down with a routine stomach ailment, she went to bed and stayed there.

  If Thoby and Adrian Stephen had arrived in Olympia, Greece, on September 13, 1906, to find their sister Virginia being fussed over by a pack of doctors, they would have been worried but not surprised. The Goat, in their view, had always been jumpy and unpredictable—capricious, in fact. Vanessa, on the other hand, had always been the sturdy, sensible, let’s-just-get-on-with-it sister, the one a brother could rely on to send him jolly food parcels at school or make sure he didn’t leave his Latin crib sheet in his bedroom. In Father’s hideous final years, while everyone else was tiptoeing around, Vanessa actually dared to stand up to the old man. Vanessa was strong, Vanessa was brave. When had Vanessa ever been ill? But now, quite suddenly the tables were turned, and it was Vanessa, not Virginia, whom Thoby and Adrian found lying upstairs in the shabby little Greek hotel, all weak and weepy.

  And if Vanessa was, inexplicably, in bed, Virginia was full of fun and fizz, mopping the brow, swatting the flies, emptying the bedpan, the whole Florence Nightingale–Julia Stephen routine. She reveled in being the strong, protective sister at last and produced a side-splitting account, full of gastric and intestinal minutiae, of how Vanessa had been taken ill on the sea voyage from Brindisi to Patras. Recovering from their initial shock and assured by the local sawbones that Miss Stephen would be fit again in no time, Thoby and Adrian were happy to sit tight for a couple of days, soak their saddle sores in the tub, send out the dirty laundry, catch up with the letters from home, and get in a good tramp around the first of the ancient sites on their list.

  Given the new tragedy lying in wait for the Stephen children, let me pause once again to note that Thoby and Adrian Stephen had not been close as children. They were separated by three years in age and by Virginia, an intervening sister whose sparkle stole the family show. Thoby had been sent away to prep school when his little brother was barely out of rompers, and Adrian, nicknamed “the Wombat” as a chubby, solemn child, had been Mother’s special pet, her “Joy,” and resented as such by the older children. But now, age twenty-three, six feet five inches tall, broad-shouldered, and handsome in the bony, big-nosed way of the Stephen male, Adrian could look his older brother in the eye, share an equestrian adventure in Montenegro, and jaw companionably of an evening about the excellences of Plato and Aristophanes and the unexpected horror of retsina. The expedition to Greece was a time for brotherly bonding, though it would never have occurred to these two conventional, taciturn young men to say so.

  Thoby was cross about the way his sisters seemed to take it in turns to fall apart. Somehow women did not quite fit in Greece, Thoby felt, and all his precious plans for the great Greek adventure were threatened by Vanessa’s illness. Adrian, whom one can picture freshly bathed, wearing a clean shirt and “Oxford bags” trousers held up by his old Trinity tie, saw things Thoby’s way but refused to be downcast by Vanessa’s illness. Adrian had not been sent away to school until he was eighteen, and he felt wiser in the ways of women. “Don’t worry,” let us imagine opera-loving Adrian telling Thoby. “Let’s face it, la donna è mobile, and everyone gets a gyppy tummy on those Greek ferry boats. In no time Vanessa will be sitting on her camp stool under her silly green-lined umbrella, posing the local peasantry against picturesque ruins.”

  But instead of getting better, Vanessa got worse. On the train home from visiting the sites at Epidaurus, Mycenae, and Tiryns, she collapsed and had to be left behind with Violet while the other three Stephens went off to be feted by the Noels at Achmetaga. The fivesome then went to Athens, where Vanessa saw a doctor who recommended hot goat’s milk. Virginia, still chirpy and intestinally unchallenged, recorded that she was so intent on reading Mérimée’s Lettres à une inconnue (recommended to her by Lytton) that she kept letting the goat’s milk boil over. With the women busy in the sickroom, the Stephen brothers took side trips, snoozed in the sun over their pocket Homers, and argued at length about a stretch of road from Portsmouth to Hindhead—“Definitely macadamized.” “Definitely NOT!”

  When the time came to depart by ferry to Istanbul, Vanessa was on a medical regimen of several bottles of champagne a day, no doubt an improvement over boiled goat’s milk, but she still had to be carried to the boat on a litter. Soon after their arrival in Turkey, Thoby left for England, and the other three, along with Violet, did not prolong their stay. Islam had failed to enchant, and Vanessa was still barely ambulatory, so they took berths on the Orient Express and set out for home. By the time they were on the ferry from France to England, Violet Dickinson was complaining of feeling very ill, and when the party arrived at Victoria Station, George Duckworth was on hand, with a trained nurse. Thoby, George reported, had come down with something—the doctors said malaria—and having heard how ill Vanessa had been, George was taking no chances with the health of his beloved sister.

  George need not have worried, at least not about Vanessa. Within days of arriving back in London she was writing letters, asking friends to come and cheer her up. Within two weeks she was not only well on the road to full recovery but, as we shall see, in radiant high spirits—which raises a question. What exactly was it that made Vanessa Stephen so horribly ill she had to be carried onto the ferry for Constantinople? This is a question that puzzled her doctors at the time and has puzzled biographers since. Hermione Lee reports that one Greek doctor diagnosed appendicitis, but it is not clear what Lee’s evidence is for that diagnosis. The dangers of allowing an infected appendix to go untreated were clearly understood in 1906, appendectomies were both common and lucrative, and yet none of Vanessa’s doctors offered to open her up. In fact, the new flock of doctors summoned to Gordon Square by George Duckworth to examine his sister came down on the side of “hysterics”—or, in modern Harley Street parlance, a nervous breakdown. For the Stephen-Duckworth family, that diagnosis was partly reassuring—but only partly. On the one hand, nine years earlier, Vanessa’s half-sister, Stella Duckworth Hills, had died of what was very probably peritonitis. On the other hand, a nervous breakdown was not something the family took lightly, given Virginia’s recent history.

  To compare the life-threatening illness of Virginia in 1904 and Vanessa’s version of Montezuma’s revenge in 1906 seems spurious on the face of it. In fact, however, the comparison between the sisters is very much to the point. Let us remember what Leonard Woolf tells us about his sister-in-law: “The tranquility [of Vanessa Bell] was to some extent superficial; it did not extend deep down in her mind, for there in the depths there was also an extreme sensitivity, a nervous tension which had some resemblance to the mental instability of Virginia.” Leonard’s insight is confirmed by a letter Vanessa wrote to her painter friend Margery Snowden in which she refers to her “blue devils,” periods of depression in her life that could, she wrote, last “for weeks or even months.”

  As I have noted earlier in this book, severe neuroticism and chronic depression were endemic in the Stephen family, but the question now becomes this: What did Vanessa Stephen have to be so neurotic and depressed about in 1906? The tragedies of her youth—her mother’s rapid descent into death when she was fifteen, her sister Stella’s tragic death when she was seventeen—were well in the past. When their father, Leslie Stephen, died, Vanessa was ready to confess that she
had actually dreamed of killing the old man. What, after so many tears and tribulations, could reduce a stoic, strong-willed, pleasure-loving woman like Vanessa Stephen, with nothing wrong with her that the doctors could detect, to two months of inconvenient and expensive invalidism in Greece? Here, I think, the apparently casual diagnosis of “hysterics” by a Greek doctor deserves our attention.

  “Hysterical” is a word long used to dismiss women with real problems, but hysteria (“womb sickness”) is also an important mental disorder first recorded in the medical literature of the ancient Egyptians and Greeks. Until the early twentieth century it was viewed as a disease of virgin women and widows that was triggered by problems of sexuality and could be “cured” by sexual congress with a male. In the nineteenth century, Jean-Martin Charcot ran an intense clinical study of hysteria at La Salpêtrière, the public hospital in Paris, which had a rich supply of female paupers to experiment with and photograph in their picturesque madness. Meanwhile, an epidemic of hysteria had broken out among women of the affluent middle classes in Britain, Europe, and the United States, and since it proved gratifyingly difficult to cure, became an important source of income for medical men.

  Thus, in 1893 the Viennese psychiatrist Josef Breuer and his younger colleague Sigmund Freud published Studies in Hysteria, notable mainly for Breuer’s study of his patient “Anna O” (Bertha Pappenheim). In 1905 Freud wrote up a single case study of his patient “Dora” (Ida Bauer) that would become even more famous. The two young Austrian doctors theorized that the physical symptoms manifested by their hysterical patients—all female—revealed what was troubling the women psychologically. According to Freud and Breuer, the female patient’s body symbolically enacts what she cannot speak, with the hysterical injury following the neurological path of some “real” injury. For example, a girl who is forbidden independent speech in her family and who once had suffered from laryngitis might develop hysterical aphonia, an inability to speak. Denied freedom of movement in her social group, a girl who had once broken an ankle might become unable to walk.