Virginia Woolf

by Gillian Gill

  “body and spirit, reason and emotion”: E. M. Forster and Ronald Edward Balfour, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (London: E. Arnold, 1934), p. 29.

  “One would think that life”: Euphrosyne was a collection of poems by Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner, and Walter Lamb. Woolf’s typescript is reproduced as Appendix C at the end of vol. 1 of Quentin Bell’s biography, pp. 205–6 in the 1972 edition.

  “chanting the better-known”: In his autobiography, Leonard Woolf gives a similarly fond account of the Midnight Society chanting “Atalanta in Calydon.” Swinburne was at one point in his late teens the protégé of Richard Monckton Milnes, another alumnus of Trinity College, Cambridge, and reputedly the most famous late-nineteenth-century British collector of sadomasochistic literature and artifacts, as well as the work of the Marquis de Sade. See my book Nightingales for a full account of Richard Monckton Milnes, later Lord Houghton. My readers may remember that Monckton Milnes was at Trinity with William Makepeace Thackeray and that Thackeray took his two daughters to visit his old friend at Fryston in Yorkshire, where the young poet Swinburne regaled the company with one of his—for the time—shockingly sexual poems. In his letters, Lytton Strachey says that one of his aunts had described to him a similar session at Fryston that she had attended. “This was before the publication of Atalanta. What a remote past! Shall we ever have such memories? Well, well, perhaps ours will be more exciting,” wrote Lytton nostalgically to Leonard Woolf on April 3, 1906. The Letters of Lytton Strachey, edited by Paul Levy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), p. 104.

  Wyndham Lewis led: Wyndham Lewis fell out with Roger Fry and Duncan Grant in 1912 over commissions for the Omega Workshops and was thereafter one of Bloomsbury’s most vociferous critics.

  The novelist D. H. Lawrence: See Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, p. 184.

  they elected “embryos”: In a letter to Leonard Woolf in October 1905, Lytton Strachey writes that Keynes was “pushing the candidacy [for the Society] of a 17-and-a-half-year-old Austrian, Ernst Goldschmidt, head prostitute of Vienna . . . who has fled to Cambridge to avoid the ceaseless buggery to which he finds himself exposed.” Lytton comments to Leonard, “Isn’t it a little comic to choose Cambridge as a refuge?” The Letters of Lytton Strachey, p. 83. Arthur Hobhouse was a “Greek god,” recalled Duncan Grant. Douglas Blair Turnbaugh, Duncan Grant and the Bloomsbury Group (Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1987), p. 37. When Maynard failed to get “Hobby” into bed, Lytton wrote on August 3, 1905, “Why didn’t you—it would have been the only thing—rape him before you left? And then abandon him?” The Letters of Lytton Strachey, p. 74. “Catamite” is a very old English word for a young male lover. The kings Edward II, James I, and William III of England were rumored to have had catamites.

  increasingly homophobic: Graham Robb, in Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century, and Matt Houlbrook, in Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis 1918–1957, both insist that the nineteenth century was a kind of paradise for gay Englishmen. It was a time when the English establishment (the Court of St. James, the judiciary, Parliament, the cabinet, the church, Oxbridge, the armed forces) included a large percentage of men who were gay all their lives or who had enjoyed homosexual relationships as boys and young men. Among working-class men—sailors, policemen, guardsmen, messengers, hall porters—it was both common and acceptable in their families and communities to earn money by sodomizing and fellating affluent men. As historians of gay life, Robb and Houlbrook offer statistics to show that, even after the Oscar Wilde scandal and the passage of the Labouchere Amendment, the highly punitive laws against homosexual acts in private or public were almost never enforced. Apart from the odd raid for PR purposes, the police were not interested in apprehending the men meeting in the bathhouses or lying in the bushes in Hyde Park, in part because the men apprehended might be personal friends of the chief constable. On the other hand, the Metropolitan Police were not averse to picking up working-class “dolly-boys” parading around Piccadilly. Of the handful of “respectable” men prosecuted, several were let off by sympathetic juries of their peers. Robb states flatly that, for gay men in England, “it was in the 20th century that the Dark Ages began” (p. 37).

  Thus Lytton Strachey was right in seeing homosexuality written all over nineteenth-century English culture and exposing the hypocrisy of men like Thomas Arnold of the Rugby School and the tragedy of closeted religious homosexuals like General Charles George Gordon. What he failed to see was that the hypocrisy and the secrecy were protective—the lives of most Victorian gay men were anything but barren and despairing.

  recorded in his diary: Graham Robb includes the following extract from Keynes’s diary: “Stable boy of Park Lane/ Auburn haired of Marble Arch/ Lift boy of Vauxhall/ Jew boy/ The Swede of the National Gallery/ The young American of Victoria Sta[tion]/ The young American near the British Museum/ The chemist boy of Paris/ David Erskine M.P./ The blackmailer of Bordeaux.” Robb, Strangers, p. 172.

  the higher sodomy: According to the playwright Tom Stoppard, Oxford was the university where the Platonic theory of sodomy really held sway around the turn of the twentieth century. In his play The Invention of Love, Stoppard has Benjamin Jowett, the provost of Balliol College and the foremost Victorian translator of Plato, discuss with the famous literary critic Walter Pater the unfortunate case of the “Balliol Bugger” and his tutor, William Hardinge. Pater insists that the personal letters that had gotten Hardinge thrown out of Balliol were merely an expression of an older man’s affectionate regard for a younger student, and quite in the tradition of Plato and the Phaedrus. The Phaedrus is the Platonic dialogue in which Socrates argues that the love between an older male lover for his young male beloved is the closest mankind can come to the divine. Jowett demurs, while not exactly disagreeing: “A Platonic enthusiasm as far as Plato was concerned meant an enthusiasm of the kind that would empty the public schools and fill the prisons were it not nipped in the bud. In my translation of the Phaedrus it required all my ingenuity to rephrase his depiction of paederastia into the affectionate regard as exists between an Englishman and his wife. Plato would have made the transposition himself if he had had the good fortune to be a Balliol man.” Stoppard, The Invention of Love, p. 21.

  only one disgruntled lover: Gay men in the early twentieth century went less in fear of prosecution under the law than of blackmail by sex partners unsatisfied with financial arrangements, and the exposure in the press that might result. One don at King’s College did commit suicide, apparently in fear of a scandal, and, to the alarm of Lytton and Maynard, the dead man’s brother, furious with grief, threatened to sue the college. Maynard reassured Lytton that he need not be afraid as long as he did not troll the streets of London looking for rough trade.

  Sebastian Sprott: Painting a happy picture of the Charleston of his youth and describing how in the 1920s his mother cheerfully welcomed all the many lovers of her husband, Clive, and her gay friends Lytton, Duncan, and Maynard, Quentin Bell writes: “Maynard [Keynes] brought catamites who ranged from the absolutely charming to the perfectly appalling.” Foreword to Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, p. xii. For more on Sprott, who for a time was Lytton Strachey’s lover and secretary and introduced Strachey to Roger Senhouse, see Holroyd, Lytton Strachey; Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes; and Moffat, A Great Unrecorded History.

  Don Juan of Bloomsbury: Clive Bell was still vigorously defending the reputations of his gay friends in the 1960s. In the introduction to the revised edition of his biography of Lytton Strachey, which openly admitted Strachey’s homosexuality for the first time in print, Michael Holroyd notes that Clive Bell was one of the men who pressed hardest to stop his book’s publication.

  “obsession with buggery”: “The word bugger was never far from our lips . . . we [she and Vanessa] listened with rapt interest to the love affairs of the buggers. We followed the ups and downs of their chequered histories; Vanessa sympathetically; I . . . frivolously, laughingly.�
� Woolf, “Old Bloomsbury,” in Moments of Being, p. 196.

  “The Goth [Thoby Stephen]”: The letters of Thoby Stephen to Clive Bell that are held in the King’s College Library confirm the accuracy of Bell’s assertion that their relationship was as impersonal as it was affectionate.

  recent television chronicles: I refer to the recent Netflix series The Crown—which was frank about the swinging bisexual life of Princess Margaret’s husband, Lord Snowdon—and Amazon’s A Very British Scandal, about the leader of the Liberal Party in the 1960s and 1970s, Jeremy Thorpe. If Alan Hollinghurst, a novelist and chronicler of gay life in the United Kingdom, is to be believed, the illustrious public school Winchester and Oxford University still formed a protected space for gay men in the 1950s, when the anti-homosexual ferment was at its peak. See Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming Pool Library (1988) and The Sparsholt Affair (2018).

  women of Girton and Newnham: In her superb biography of E. M. Forster, Wendy Moffat records the astonishing fact that, until the 1890s, any woman found on the streets of Cambridge at night could be apprehended by the university police as a prostitute and locked up in “a private prison called ‘the Spinning House.’” This prison was closed when two young women, falsely accused of prostitution, sued the university, and lost; nonetheless, the case forced the university to revise its code of proctorial authority. Moffat, A Great Unrecorded History, p. 48.

  “a big mild mastiff”: Holroyd, Lytton Strachey, p. 195. Holroyd is paraphrasing a letter from Henry James, offers a few direct quotes including this one, but does not say to whom the letter was written, or when.

  wearing a bathing suit: Upper-middle-class men before World War I still preferred to bathe nude, even in mixed company and public places. My readers may remember the scene in the Merchant Ivory Productions movie A Room with a View, when a group of decorously clad women come upon their male companions, including Mr. Beebe the vicar, cavorting naked in a small pond.

  result of the social chasm: Similar plots are not uncommon in the adventure stories of the period by men like Erskine Calder and John Buchan and, of course, in the comic adventures of P. G. Wodehouse’s Drone Club members. An upper-middle-class man mysteriously, without words, conveys to friends an interest in a certain woman, and thus, according to the rules of chivalry, puts that woman off limits. He may or may not, at the end of the book, marry the woman with whom he has exchanged barely two words. Is it any wonder that so many English women fell for bounders who actually talked to them?

  “Have you read the Lysistrata”: King’s College Library, JTS/191. I am quoting the translation that Stephen quotes for Bell and doing the best I can to read Stephen’s difficult handwriting.

  the Darwin sisters: Among the Darwin sisters was Gwen Darwin Raverat, who became a renowned artist and author of the beloved Cambridge memoir Period Piece. The Darwin home at the end of Silver Street, enlarged and renovated, is now the home of Darwin College. I have happy memories of the place since, when I was an undergraduate in the early 1960s, it was the main building and administrative center of the new third women’s college, then called New Hall, now Murray Edwards College. I had many of my supervisions at Silver Street, and all of us New Hall undergraduates and tutors could then cram into the dining room, with its dark-green walls, for hall at night. My Cambridge experience was, in fact, much closer to that of the Girtonians described by Virginia Woolf, in her feminist essays, than to that of women undergraduates of King’s and Trinity today.

  “The three young men”: Virginia Woolf, Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches, edited by David Bradshaw, with a foreword by Doris Lessing (London: Hesperus Press, 2003), p. 8. This real-life scene echoes the scene in E. M. Forster’s novel The Longest Journey in which Agnes Pembroke bursts uninvited into the college rooms of her cousin Rickie, to the consternation of Rickie’s friends and the active hostility of his intimate chum Stewart Ansell. It will take Rickie many painful years to understand what Stewart grasps immediately—women are incompatible with undergraduate life at colleges like Trinity.

  “When I first knew [Sydney-Turner]”: Strachey to Bernard Swithinbank, July 1, 1905, The Letters of Lytton Strachey, p. 71. Bernard Swithinbank was a very handsome young man who had known Maynard Keynes at Eton. For a brief time, Lytton was madly in love, but Swithinbank rejected him and, to Lytton’s great distress, took up instead for a time with Duncan Grant in Paris. Saxon Sydney-Turner, like Leonard Woolf, was obliged to get a job in the civil service when he left Cambridge because he had no unearned income and his widowed mother and younger siblings needed his help. In 1910 Virginia Woolf visited Saxon, as she then called him, at his family home in Hove, and in her letter she sympathetically describes the dingy and depressing boarding house kept by Saxon’s mother. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, [December 27, 1910], vol. 1, p. 443.

  “Those Thursday evening parties”: Woolf, “Old Bloomsbury,” in Moments of Being, p. 186. This paper presented to the Memoir Club is dated by editors to 1921 or early 1922.

  “Later on MacCarthy and I”: The Letters of Lytton Strachey, p. 69.

  “a great power of romanticizing”: Woolf, “Old Bloomsbury,” in Moments of Being, pp. 187–88.

  “grubby poodles”: Henry James was even harsher in his appraisal of Clive Bell. He warned Lady Ottoline Morrell to beware of Bell, calling him “that sullied little piece of humanity.” Miranda Seymour, Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale (London: Hodder & Stoughton, Sceptre Books edition, 1994), p. 374. From everything I can ascertain, Henry James was right.

  “It was some abstract question”: Woolf, “Old Bloomsbury,” in Moments of Being, p. 190.

  “I knew theoretically”: Ibid., p. 194.

  women were the alien: See especially Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), Luce Irigaray’s groundbreaking work on the canon of Western philosophy, from Plato to Freud. I got nothing but trouble for undertaking the English translation of that book, but it has informed my thought and I cannot, quite, regret it.

  12. The Landmark Year

  his next practical joke: The remarkable Dreadnought Hoax of 1910, a scandal that made the national papers, was hatched by Adrian Stephen, with the participation of his sister Virginia and his friend Duncan Grant, another man who adored practical jokes. With long robes and cork-blackened faces, speaking in some kind of linguistic hodgepodge, they posed as Arab royalty and were given the full royal treatment by the crew and captain of HMS Dreadnought. See Lee, Virginia Woolf, pp. 278–83.

  or indeed in 1956: Perhaps my readers remember the happy homemaker persona that Doris Day, a woman who had been working in the entertainment industry since her teens and became the most successful female vocalist of all time, adopted in so many of her highly successful movies.

  “extraordinary beauty”: L. Woolf, Beginning Again, pp. 26–27.

  Gerald Kelly: Gerald Kelly, Eton and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, was to become a very important figure in British art circles over the next decades, knighted by the king, whose portrait he was chosen to paint, and serving as the president of the Royal Academy during World War II.

  On her honeymoon with Max: For the full story of Agatha and Max, see my book Agatha Christie: The Woman and Her Mysteries.

  disease of virgin women: Hysteria is closely related to shell shock, as army psychologists in World War I came to realize, and both men and women can suffer from it. Many years ago, I was researching Freud and Charcot and was thrilled when my dentist recounted to me a hysterical moment in his own life. He and his first wife were having serious marital problems and he was wretched from constant colds and sinus infections. One day, after another argument with his wife, he suddenly said to himself, “My God, she is always getting up my nose,” whereafter he got a divorce and his nasal problems cleared up.

  Prince Albert forty years: Queen Victoria had typhoid as a teenager, and one reason she was so shocked by the death of her husband was that she was confident that Albert would fight off the disease as she had done. For
a full discussion of the death of Prince Albert from typhoid, see Chapter 27 of my book We Two.

  “sew up the ulcer”: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, p. 246.

  “I do feel that Thoby’s life”: Vanessa Stephen to Madge Vaughan, December 11, 1906, Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, pp. 45–46.

  “Dearest Madge, Nessa”: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, p. 250.

  “That does not mean that”: Ibid., pp. 250 and 265. Madge was at this time a very close friend to Virginia, who in a letter of February 1907 feels able to give a truer expression to her state of mind following Thoby’s death: “You and your children [in a photograph] are just by my inkstand. They give me great pleasure—so does their mother. Thoby used to say that you were the most beautiful person he had ever seen. It is very hard not to have him here—I cant get reconciled—but we have to go on. Adrian is well—but I cant be a brother to him!” (p. 283).

  “Nessa became engaged”: Ibid., p. 268.

  a visit to Clive’s family: According to Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf visited the Bells of Cleeve House on only this one occasion. The nightmare of that visit was summed up for her by the fact that the inkpot in which she dipped her pen was formed from a horse’s hoof.

  “I shall want all my sweetness”: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, p. 273.

  13. The Great Betrayal

  “I see he [George] is much”: Ibid., p. 299. Evidently Violet had been trying to mend bridges between the Bells and the Duckworths.

  29 Fitzroy Square: Interior scenes of the 2017 movie Phantom Threads, starring Daniel Day Lewis and Vicky Krieps, were reportedly filmed in a house on Fitzroy Square. The house in the movie, elegantly restored and maintained, is very different from the rundown rental at number 29 in 1907, but the long sequence of narrowing staircases and lowering ceilings give a sense of what life must have been like when the Stephens and their friends lived in the square.