Virginia Woolf

by Gillian Gill

  “supremely happy and fulfilled”: A. Garnett, Deceived with Kindness, pp. 25–26.

  “It contains all the beauty”: Woolf to Clive Bell, [February 1907], The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, p. 282.

  “Give my love to my sister”: Ibid., March 22, 1907, p. 290.

  “Nessa is like a great”: Ibid., p. 30.

  “Nessa and Clive came”: Ibid., p. 316.

  “‘Of course,’” Vanessa imagines: Vanessa Bell to Virginia Woolf, [May 4, 1908], Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, p. 64.

  “Mrs Raven-Hill, Mrs Armour”: Clive Bell’s letter to Virginia Woolf is quoted by Frances Spalding in her biography of Vanessa Bell, p. 71. For Vanessa’s letter to Virginia, see Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, p. 61.

  “I have been writing Nessa’s”: Woolf to Clive Bell, April 15, 1908, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, p. 325.

  “Talk about freedom of talk”: Vanessa Bell to Virginia Woolf, April 19, 1908, Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, p. 61. I find it interesting that six women associated with the Bloomsbury group—Anne Raven-Hill, Molly MacCarthy, Nelly Cecil, Karin Stephen, Ethel Smyth, and Dorothy Brett—became profoundly deaf as young women.

  “renew his gallantries”: Bell, Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, p. 142.

  “no less . . . and not much”: Ibid., p. 138.

  salacious little essays: I have no proof, but I am ready to bet that, in some of his leisure hours in Paris, Clive Bell read some of the semi-pornographic novels put out by “Willy’s” team of ghost writers, including notably his wife, Colette, the actual author of the best-selling series of Claudine novels. For the whole fascinating story of the Colette-Willy marriage, see my novel-biography Becoming Colette.

  rumors had been floating: Bell, Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, p. 119. Stella Duckworth, September 1893: “Mr. Headlam went at 10.30. I cannot think of him without a shudder & yet he is much to be pitied.” It is Quentin Bell, not I, who makes the inference that Headlam desired young girls.

  “Vanessa icy, cynical, artistic”: Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 243.

  to a private clinic: The director of this clinic, a Miss Jean Thomas, was infatuated with Virginia Woolf. Vanessa, in a letter to Virginia, teases her about the raging lesbian passions she has ignited during her stay at the clinic. By 1911, Clive and Vanessa had reached an agreement that Virginia was a lesbian.

  “We have been your humble”: Quoted in Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, p. 49, with the reference “VWL VI, 493.”

  “despite her belief in honesty”: Spalding, Vanessa Bell, p. 171. Spalding continues in the same passage: “[Vanessa Bell’s] letters reveal a great many details about her daily life, but when it comes to what she was feeling or suffering as a result of those dearest to her it is as if she disappears into another room and firmly closes the door.”

  “our more or less high”: Ibid., p. 172.

  “Yes I will tell you”: The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three,1923–1928, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), p. 172.

  “seeing them together”: A. Garnett, Deceived with Kindness, p. 28.

  “a cuckoo who lays eggs”: Bell, Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, p. 133.

  14. Vanessa’s Way, Part 1

  “I almost wrote you”: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, pp. 40 and 68.

  when Carrington became: As woman and as artist, Carrington (she hated her given name, Dora) is one of the most interesting women associated with, though never really a member of, the Bloomsbury group. To discover her and her art, I urge my readers to find the 1995 movie Carrington, with Emma Thompson giving an incandescent performance in the title role. It was through the movie and its footage showing the interiors Carrington painted in the homes she shared with Lytton Strachey that I was able to discover just how fine an artist Carrington was.

  “Do you miss your Dolph”: Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, p. 108.

  Lady Ottoline Morrell: For more about the fascinating Lady Ottoline Morrell, I recommend Miranda Seymour’s wonderful biography Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale. Seymour goes into detail on the way the Bells and Lytton Strachey, together with their mutual friends, exploited Lady Ottoline and undermined her. Virginia Woolf, as her letters and diaries make clear, liked and admired and marveled at Lady Ottoline. A caricature of Lady Ottoline appears in D. H. Lawrence’s novel Women in Love. In the 1969 movie Women in Love, which is important watching for anyone interested in Bloomsbury, the Lady Ottoline character is played by Eleanor Bron.

  “I sometimes feel”: Lytton Strachey to Leonard Woolf, September 9, 1904, The Letters of Lytton Strachey, p. 32.

  “Only those just getting”: Spalding, Vanessa Bell, p. 65, quoting from Bell’s unpublished memoir.

  This was the doctrine preached: In his biography of Lytton Strachey, Michael Holroyd calls the relationship of Lytton and Carrington one of the great love stories of the twentieth century. For my part, any love that leads a young, talented, and beautiful woman to, first, prostitute herself to men like Partridge and Penrose whom Lytton lusted for, and finally commit suicide after his death, is not an idyll.

  I have long admired the narrative verve and elegant prose style of Lytton Strachey in Eminent Victorians, but my sympathy for the man declined after I read Frances Marshall Partridge’s account of an interview that she once had in London with Lytton, in 1924. Ralph Partridge, whose marriage to Carrington had foundered, had fallen deeply in love with Frances (Fanny) Marshall, and he wanted to live with her in London on weekdays and on weekends stay together at Ham Spray, the house that Ralph and Carrington ran for Lytton Strachey. Lytton became very upset that his comfort and pleasure when in the country was about to be disrupted by young Fanny Marshall, so he summoned her to the Ladies Lounge of the Oriental Club. I quote Marshall; apparently Lytton’s words were engraved on her memory: “You see, I rely very much on Ralph’s practical support, sound sense and strength of character. Fond as I am of Carrington, I fear she loses her head sometimes. So that I think I ought to warn you that if you and Ralph set up house together, I can’t promise to stay at Ham House with Carrington, and I think you know what this would mean to her. What would become of her?” Frances Partridge, Love in Bloomsbury (London: Taurus Park Paperbacks, 2014), electronic edition, Loc. 1585. So, to preserve his own comfort, Lytton Strachey is willing to threaten Frances, the woman he knows his loyal friend Ralph loves, and to consider abandoning Carrington, the woman who adores him, knowing this may well cause Carrington’s suicide. In my book, this is not sexual freedom but rather male privilege and moral turpitude. This record of the conversation with Lytton Strachey in 1924 is all the more striking because Frances Marshall Partridge’s memoir is, by and large, a bright, breezy, and bowdlerized account of life in Bloomsbury. She says nothing about the cruel way her employer David Garnett treated his wife, Rachel Marshall Garnett, who was her older sister. She jokes about Clive Bell’s determined attempts to seduce her, before she and Ralph were finally able to marry.

  “entered the smoking room”: Spalding, Vanessa Bell, p. 64. Another part of Lytton’s influence on the culture of Bloomsbury was his voice, a variant of the peculiar speech patterns of the Strachey family, which modulated erratically, piano and forte, across octaves and was copied by, reportedly, generations of young men in London seeking to be trendy. Michael Holroyd, in his various books on Strachey, writes literally pages about Lytton’s voice.

  “The word bugger was never”: Woolf, “Old Bloomsbury,” in Moments of Being, p. 196. The conversations at Cambridge led by G. E. Moore famously revolved around the nature of good.

  “Vanessa by her behavior”: Spalding, Vanessa Bell, p. 64.

  “From the opening gut”: Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey and the Bloomsbury Group: His Work, Their Influence (New York: Penguin Books, 1967), pp. 377–78. Woolf was among the first to praise Eminent Victorians, but she was privately dismissive of Strachey’s later work and scathing about his pretentions as a poet. Thi
s may be why Holroyd, in his celebration of Lytton Strachey’s literary genius, is so scathing in turn in his estimation of Woolf, as both a woman and a writer. Holroyd opines that Woolf is a writer of no importance and calls her “anaemic,” “a nature clogged with self-obsession,” radiating an “ascetic, sexless charm” (note on p. 242 and pp. 222–23). In the second chapter of his memoir Basil Street Blues, first published in 1999, however, Holroyd cites Woolf favorably for the views on biography she expressed in her 1937 essay “Reflections on Sheffield Place,” which prefigure his own.

  “has some awful females”: Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, pp. 82–83.

  their mutual friends: Raymond Mortimer was a celebrated writer of the 1920s and 1930s, now perhaps best known as one of the lovers of Harold Nicholson, Vita Sackville-West’s husband. “Dadie” Rylands was a don at Cambridge University, a notable theater critic, and, as Wendy Moffat documents in her biography of E. M. Forster, a man notable even in gay circles for his sexploits.

  “Dearest dearest creature”: The Letters of Lytton Strachey, p. 641.

  Dillwyn Knox: In Dillwyn Knox, John Maynard Keynes found a mind of a brilliance comparable to his own. Those interested in code breaking will recognize Knox’s name as one of the great code breakers of his generation, instrumental in cracking German military codes in both world wars. Lovers of the post-1945 English novel will know that “Dilly” Knox was one of the uncles of the great novelist and biographer Penelope Fitzgerald. Dilly and his brothers and brother-in-law, all affluent men and pillars of the English educational and religious establishment, lifted not a finger to help Fitzgerald when, through no fault of her own, she and her small children were on the edge of destitution.

  “Vanessa explained how interesting”: Spalding, Vanessa Bell, p. 79.

  “Dear Maynard, it is plainly”: Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, p. 163. For some years Vanessa and Virginia co-rented Asheham, a property that both the Woolfs and the Bells liked a lot. However, when their lease ended, they were forced to find other properties in Sussex.

  paid Duncan and Vanessa: On a flying visit to Cambridge to read some papers, I was entranced to spot two of Keynes’s Bell-Grant pieces installed in the archive room of King’s College. In the corner of the room was a wooden chest that turned out to be the “Ark” in which the Apostles stored their papers for the Cambridge Conversazione Society. In the King’s archivist’s inner sanctum I saw on the wall Simon Bussy’s devastating profile portrait of Lady Ottoline Morrell, which, I was assured, was the original. Fun!

  “a vast success”: Bell, Bloomsbury Recalled, p. 96.

  “I had a sort of inkling”: With the acid sophistication she had learned her husband preferred, Vanessa wrote to Clive, “I hope you’ll see your whore [Anne Raven-Hill] soon and get some amusing gossip out of her.” Spalding, Vanessa Bell, p. 90.

  an illustrious Quaker family: The three big English chocolate companies of the early twentieth century were Cadbury, Rowntree, and Fry, all founded by Quakers.

  “Did you hear of our adventures”: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, p. 465.

  the enthusiastic collaboration: Desmond MacCarthy was enrolled to manage the first exhibition and Leonard Woolf the second. Fry, assisted by Vanessa and in 1912 by Duncan, hung the paintings himself. Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, neither of whom pretended to be art experts, went around the exhibitions and recorded remarkably fresh and insightful comments.

  “Roger is the greatest fun”: Quoted in John Lehmann, Thrown to the Woolfs (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978), p. 32.

  “[Duncan] and I have decided”: Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, p. 100. Sadly for Vanessa Bell, her joking wish to “emulate Gill” will bring anyone up short who is conversant with early-twentieth-century British art. Eric Gill (no relation to me!) was one of the most successful and renowned English artists of the early twentieth century. He was also a sexual pervert and child abuser. According to the secret diary Gill kept, he began his incestuous career with his own sister and went on to have sex for many years with his two eldest daughters as well. Even his dog was not spared. Gill hid his sexual activities well, converting to Roman Catholicism in his forties, founding a lay religious order, wearing a monk’s robe and a chastity belt. His work became increasingly religious and his commissions were often ecclesiastical. Such was Gill’s fame in England that when Fiona MacCarthy in 1989 revealed the contents of Gill’s diary, she was criticized for injuring Gill’s surviving daughter. It is possible that Gill’s male contemporaries, in the overwhelmingly male society of English artists, got a whiff of what Eric Gill was up to in his isolated homes, but in 1911, Vanessa Bell certainly did not and could not. She would have seen only Gill’s early, mildly erotic woodcuts.

  “And then—what”: Vanessa Bell to Roger Fry, November 23, 1911, Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, p. 112.

  “Dearest,” wrote Vanessa: Vanessa Bell to Clive Bell, Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, p. 164.

  “Discretion is not the better”: Holroyd, Lytton Strachey, p. xvi.

  friend and collaborator: Quentin Bell and Frances Spalding, both experts in British art criticism, make it clear that the most successful book published by Clive Bell—Art (1914)—was an extension and popularization of Fry’s theories.

  15. Virginia’s Way, Part 1

  he fell in love with Virginia: Virginia Woolf told Ethel Smyth that she had been joking if she ever said Leonard had waited seven years for her as Jacob waited for Rachel. “He saw me it is true and thought me an odd fish and went off next day to Ceylon, with a vague romance about us both [her and Vanessa]. And I heard stories of him . . . and Lytton said he was like Swift and would murder his wife, and someone else said Woolf had married a black woman. That was my romance—Woolf in the jungle.” Woolf to Ethel Smyth, June 22, 1930, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, p. 180.

  “I feel all my heart drawn”: See Nigel Nicolson’s introduction to the first volume of The Letters of Virginia Woolf, p. xviii.

  “I want everything”: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, p. 496.

  “after your awful description”: Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, p. 127.

  Thrown to the Woolfs: The author, the very distinguished English editor and publisher John Lehmann, was for a time a member of the group of gay men in Berlin in the 1930s chronicled by Christopher Isherwood in Berlin Stories. One of these stories, centered on the character Sally Bowles, became the basis for the musical Cabaret.

  “are evidently both a little”: Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, p. 132.

  more serious mental breakdown: Various attempts have been made to diagnose the exact nature of Virginia Woolf’s mental illness. Kay Redfield Jamison, one of the foremost American medical experts on “mood disorders,” confidently refers to Virginia Woolf as bipolar in her detailed analysis of the relationship between Robert Lowell’s poetry and his bipolar disease. Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire—A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character (New York: Knopf, 2017).

  “I am obsessed at night”: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, p. 80. In Beginning Again, the third volume of his autobiography, Leonard Woolf offers a detailed and moving account of his wife when mental illness overcame her.

  “In the lava of my madness”: Ibid., p. 180.

  “After being ill”: Ibid., p. 231.

  “Can’t you imagine us”: Vanessa Bell to Virginia Woolf, August 11, 1908, Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, p. 67.

  “I’m always angry with”: Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 537.

  “How any woman with”: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, p. 176.

  “Think—not one moment’s”: Ibid., p. 180.

  “if this young man had”: Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, various editions. I quote from the Martino Publishing edition, 2012, p. 203.

  “unmitigated, pure, often”: L. Woolf, Beginning Again, p. 26.

  “My Darling Goose M”: The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Two, 1912–1922, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne
Trautmann (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), p. 191.

  “five-finger exercises”: Woolf, Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches, p. vii.

  after an eighteen-month gap: To recapitulate the notes of Woolf’s brilliant and dedicated editor Anne Olivier Bell, The Diary of Virginia Woolf as we have it today begins in January 1915, continues until February 15, 1915, and then takes up again on August 3, 1917. As Woolf’s anchor to reality, the diary would then continue, with odd gaps, until 1941, when it gave way to the hurricane of Hitler’s war.

  “loose drifting material”: Entry for April 20, 1919, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, p. 266.

  Clive’s mistress Mary: In the photos of Mary Hutchinson in the Bell Collection at Trinity College, Cambridge, one can see what a beautiful and elegant woman she was. Her wide smile and beautiful teeth mark her off from the Stephen sisters Vanessa and Virginia, who keep their mouths closed in their portraits and photos.

  dreamy fantasy: Leonard Woolf gives some examples of his wife’s inspired whimsy through the character Camilla Lawrence in his 1914 novel The Wise Virgins, reissued in 2007 with an introduction by Woolf’s biographer Victoria Glendinning, by Yale University Press.

  her outworn bloomers: Both Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell preferred not to spend money on underclothes, so, when elastic failed, they apparently relied on safety pins to keep their bloomers and petticoats in place. One reason why Virginia liked to have her sister shop for dresses on her behalf was that she hated to reveal to shop assistants the inadequacy of her underwear.

  “When one sees Clive”: The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume Two, 1920–1924, edited by Anne Olivier Bell, assisted by Andrew McNeillie (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 105. In the same diary entry Woolf writes: “We talked chiefly about the hypnotism exerted by Bloomsbury over the younger generation.” So, there we have it, straight from the horse’s mouth. By January 1918, Bloomsbury was in full swing.