by Peter Dally
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Acknowledgements
Preface
1. Julia Stephen
2. Leslie Stephen
3. The Stephen Marriage
4. Virginia’s Early Life and Temperament
5. Deaths – The First Major Breakdown, 1904
6. Vanessa’s Marriage – Virginia’s Instability
7. Gender and Sexuality
8. Leonard Woolf and Courtship
9. Marriage – The Second Major Breakdown, 1913
10. Inner and Outer Worlds
11. Creativity
12. Vita Sackville-West
13. Threat of War
14. The Years and Three Guineas
15. War, Depression and Suicide
Appendix: Mania, Madness and Creativity
Family Tree
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Copyright
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Librarian, University of Sussex Library for permission to quote from the Leonard Woolf papers; the Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf to quote from ‘On Being Ill’, Three Guineas, The Voyage Out, Mrs Dalloway, The Waves, To The Lighthouse, ‘Professions for Women’ all published by the Hogarth Press; the Executors of the Estate of Virginia Woolf for extracts from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne Olivier Bell (the Hogarth Press), The Letters of Virginia Woolf, edited by Nigel Nicolson (the Hogarth Press), Moments of Being, edited and introduced by Jeanne Schulkind (the Hogarth Press), A Passionate Apprentice: the Early Journals of Virginia Woolf, edited by Mitchell A. Leaska (the Hogarth Press), A Very Close Conspiracy by Jane Dunn (Jonathan Cape); Quentin Bell’s Biography of Virginia Woolf, vols 1 and 2 (the Hogarth Press), The Autobiography of Leonard Woolf, vols. 1 and 2 (the Hogarth Press), The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, edited by Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska (Hutchinson), Lytton Strachey: the New Biography, by Michael Holroyd (Chatto & Windus); Deceived with Kindness; A Bloomsbury Childhood, by Angelica Garnett (Chatto & Windus); Oxford University Press for allowing extracts of The Prose and Poetry Writings of William Cowper, vol. 1, edited by James King and Charles Ryskamp, Leslie Stephen’s The Mausoleum Book, introduced by Alan Bell (Clarendon Press); Anny Thackeray Ritchie by Winifred Gerin, and Tennyson by Robert Bernard Martin; John Lehmann’s Virginia Woolf and Her World (Thames & Hudson); Orion Publishing for allowing extracts from The Letters of Leonard Woolf, edited by Frederic Spotts (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), Vita and Harold: the Letters to Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, edited by Nigel Nicolson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), Leslie Stephen: the Godless Victorian, by Noel Annan (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), Vita: the Life of Vita Sackville-West by Victoria Glendenning (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), and Vanessa Bell, by Frances Spalding (Weidenfeld & Nicolson); David Higham Associates for quotes from Virginia Woolf, by James King, Leonard Woolf’s The Wise Virgins (Arnold), Elders and Betters, by Quentin Bell (John Murray) and An Unquiet Mind, by Kay R. Jamieson (Alfred A. Knopf): Professor Pat Jalland at Melbourne University for extracts from Octavia Wilberforce (Cassell) and the Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, edited by Regina Marler (Bloomsbury).
Preface
Books on Virginia Woolf continue to flood the market, but an extraordinary gap exists regarding the illness from which she suffered: manic depression. Her diaries – surely the fullest year-by-year record ever of the effect of the disease on a creative life, work and relationships and, less reliably, her letters and her husband’s autobiography, are wonderfully revealing to the trained eye. Yet each new book, even when written by the medically qualified, fails to reveal the effects of Virginia Woolf’s mood swings, and the biological and environmental interactions responsible for them.
The four children of Leslie and Julia Stephen were all talented, and from her earliest years Virginia stood out as the story-teller, the writer, the one who would continue the Stephen literary tradition. For most of the year the family lived in London, but summers were spent in St Ives in Cornwall and were the happiest times of Virginia’s childhood, their memory kept, squirrel-like, in her creative store. She was highly strung and imaginative, and often difficult, jealously demanding her ‘rights’. But in no way unusual; Virginia seemed a thoroughly normal child.
The death of her mother at puberty, followed by that of her half-sister, was devastating, yet she weathered the shock and eventually emerged more or less intact. But during the emotional upheaval, chemicals in the brain that had previously been quiescent stirred into activity and ‘switched on’ the mental disease that was to influence Virginia’s life so profoundly over the next forty years.
Manic depression exists in every known society. It was well described by early Greek physicians, but only during the last century has it been defined and separated from other mental illnesses.
The condition showed itself in a yearly cycle of mood changes: depression in late winter and early spring, and then again in September; elation in the summer, sometimes in November. By the time she was 19 Virginia had come to recognise the pattern and told her cousin, ‘My Spring Melancholia is developing into Summer Madness.’1
Virginia’s fluctuations of mood between depression and high spirits are known as cyclothymia. At first the mood changes were comparatively mild but, when she was 22, after her father’s death, she became mad and for almost a year was disabled by manic depression. She recovered but in 1913, following her marriage to Leonard Woolf, she had a second, more violent and prolonged attack of madness.
The distinction between cyclothymia and manic depression is one of degree. Any marked shift of mood results in changed feelings and perception. When Virginia was depressed she saw herself as a failure; a failed writer, a failed woman, dwarfed by her sister, Vanessa. She believed she was old and ugly and impotent. She felt people laughed at and ridiculed her. She became afraid of strangers and filled with anxiety. When ‘high’ or hypomanic, Virginia felt ‘a great mastery over the world’,2 and she ‘scarcely wanted children’; she had ‘an insatiable desire to write’, to show herself off, to socialise, gripped by the ‘Spirit of Delight’.3
The deeper the mood swing, the more exaggerated the distortions, and eventually fantasy came to replace reality. In severe depression, when this occurs the cyclothyme becomes insane, or mad, and is diagnosed as having manic depression. The depression which Virginia developed without fail between January and March was potentially the most dangerous. Depression at other times was unpleasant, often incapacitating for many weeks, but never led on to hallucinations. All Virginia’s breakdowns into insanity had their origin in the New Year period.
Patterns of illness vary individually, but Virginia Woolf had the classic form of the disease: alternating swings of mood occurring with the seasons. Treatment today has improved since her day, but for long-term stability there still remains the need for a trusted understanding partner who can assume temporary command of the patient’s life at critical times; a need all too often misunderstood by Virginia Woolf’s biographers.
Chapter One
Julia Stephen
Virginia’s mother, Julia Stephen, came from a large family renowned for beauty rather than intellect, and although Julia was often gloomy, even melancholic, she was never seriously depres
sed, and none of her relatives was remotely insane. It is true that Julia’s maternal grandfather was a drunk and extravagantly wicked,1 and that her aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, the renowned Victorian photographer, was a notorious eccentric, but not a manic depressive. Virginia’s genetic inheritance for cyclothymia came wholly through her father. Nonetheless, Julia contributed a great deal to Virginia’s temperamental instability and indirectly therefore to her mood swings.
Julia was adored by her husband and children, friends, and the many lame dogs, sick and deprived, whom she nursed and supported. She appeared to one and all the essence of goodness and beauty, a true angel both in and outside the house, always prepared to give of her time to those in need.
She was the ‘darling of darlings’ to her mother, who would have only Julia as attendant during her frequent illnesses. Leslie Stephen, her husband, wanted her continually at his beck and call, to mother and encourage him and lift his self-esteem. When the children fell ill Julia insisted on nursing them herself. Her presence filled the home with light and warmth. Virginia could never have enough of her mother, but she had to be ill or noticeably upset to receive Julia’s full attention. No sooner was Virginia better than her mother was off on some other mission of mercy. Had she been challenged she would have responded with, ‘To serve is the highest expression of your nature’.2
There was a disconcerting contradiction in Julia. She gave her time and attention wholly to those in need, yet she gave little of herself and withdrew once her task was done. She was intensely private and it seemed she could not come close to anyone when outside her caring role. Her husband sensed this absence of deep involvement and worried that she did not love him as she had loved her first husband. Julia would never openly admit to loving Leslie after their marriage. He called her a heartless woman and it was only half in jest. Virginia too, fretted: ‘I can never remember being alone with her for more than a few minutes.’3
Julia never let herself go emotionally. She kept herself and her world under tight control. No one was allowed to take liberties: friends who stepped over the boundary were dropped, an awkward child was despatched to bed and ignored. Her difficult, autistic stepdaughter Laura was sent away to an institution. It was noticeable how much harder Julia was with daughters than with sons.
Beneath Julia’s warm and caring exterior was a rigid anxious woman, fearful of exposing her deeper feelings. She never confided. She rarely expressed anger – icy disapproval was her usual reaction – but when it flared up the shock was the greater for being unexpected. It took Leslie by surprise and shook Virginia. ‘She would suddenly say something so unexpected, from that Madonna face, one thought it vicious.’4
In company Julia could be gay, the life and soul of any party. When she was absent Hyde Park Gate became dark and dull for Virginia, despite the merriment of siblings. Leslie’s gloomy mood and the resulting stultifying atmosphere were alleviated by her presence. Julia had a gift for drawing out people of all classes and listening to their troubles. She soothed unhappy children to sleep with her stories. She listened patiently to her husband and gave him the encouragement and assurance he wanted. She laughed and chatted in society. But when not engaged, sitting with a book or sewing, signs of melancholia emerged. Virginia used to watch her and came to recognise her sadness, the gloom and silence within. She did not enjoy her existence. She had no wish to end her life but she believed death would be the greatest boon. Her melancholia distressed Leslie; it was somehow deeper, all-embracing and different from Leslie’s histrionic depressions. When he chided her for being ‘less happy than I could wish’, she answered that her contact with ‘sufferers’ and the ‘terrible havoc made by death’ outweighed peace and happiness.5
It was a woman’s duty, Julia declared, to care for her kith and kin, to devote herself to the happiness of her husband and children, and give any time left to others. Women should never put themselves first. Julia was a powerful personality and she stamped herself and her views firmly on her daughters. Not until she was in her mid-forties, writing To the Lighthouse, did Virginia begin to loosen the ties with her mother.
* * *
Julia’s mother, Maria (Mia) Jackson née Pattle, was born in India, the middle of seven sisters, all but one of them renowned for their beauty. Nervous and delicate, she grew up feeling closer to Sara, her next oldest sister, than to her mother. When that sister became engaged, Mia was thrown off balance and lunged headlong into marriage when barely 17 years old.
Her husband was a good-looking Calcutta physician, Dr John Jackson, 14 years her senior. Trained at Westminster Hospital Medical School, he joined the medical services of the Bengal Presidency. He was well regarded professionally, by not only Europeans but ‘Indian Ranees and Natives of the highest classes’, and lectured at the Medical School of Calcutta.6 Mia was looking for a prop and perhaps he provided one at first, but before long he began to bore her; she thought him dull, his interests narrow. Like her sister, Mia’s main interest lay in the arts, but Dr Jackson was lukewarm. His granddaughter Virginia looked on him in later life as ‘a commonplace, prosaic old man’,7 but that was probably pure hearsay, picked up from her parents, for she was only five when he died.
Perhaps another reason for choosing John Jackson as husband was Mia’s lifelong valetudinarianism. Nothing pleased her so much as discussing her ailments with a sympathetic, or helpless, listener. Her emotional needs, trivial or otherwise, were transplanted in to bodily discomfort: headaches, indigestion, rheumatic pains, abdominal complaints. Pain was Mia’s chief means of communicating boredom, dissatisfactions, and disappointments. Dr Jackson either failed to recognise his wife’s signals or, one suspects, turned a blind eye to them. At any rate, the Jacksons’ relationship slowly deteriorated.
Mia Jackson produced two daughters and then, after a six-year interval, Julia was born in 1846. Mia at once made Julia the centre of her life to the virtual exclusion of her husband. It is more than likely that Julia’s health and, no doubt, her own was the excuse for quitting India when Julia was two and returning to London. Leslie claimed that Julia believed she was her mother’s least-loved daughter, although the evidence points to the fact that Mia worshipped Julia.
Dr Jackson stayed on in Calcutta for another seven years after his wife’s departure. When he gave up his practice and returned to London, shortly before the Indian Mutiny, he was a stranger in every sense to the nine-year-old Julia. She felt no affection and seems to have been indifferent to his presence, much as her mother was. He set up in medical practice for a time but he had few or no outside interests, and no influence with any of his family. Leslie Stephen observed that ‘he did not seem to count as fathers generally count in their families’.8
Mia Jackson quickly found her feet in London with the help of her sister Sara and husband Thoby Prinsep. The Prinseps were living in an old converted farmhouse, Little Holland House, in what is now West Kensington. Holland House itself had been the centre of the Whig aristocracy at the beginning of the century and in the 1860s Little Holland House became an ‘Aristocracy of Intellect’, the ‘Temple of the Arts’.9 Sara Prinsep – known as the ‘Principessa’ – was the driving force, and the power of her personality, together with the deep interest and involvement she and her husband had in all the arts, attracted painters and writers, and even politicians of the time, to the Sunday afternoon gatherings. Cultural snobs the Prinseps may have been but their home provided a stimulating, Bohemian atmosphere for Mia Jackson and her daughters.
Tall, elegant and handsome, Mia attracted much attention. Thomas Woolner, the pre-Raphaelite sculptor, was loud in his praises for ‘the beautiful Mrs Jackson and her three beautiful daughters’. But it was on Julia, as she grew into adolescence, that the painters’ eyes became fixed. Burne-Jones took her for his model in The Annunciation. G. F. Watts played with her. Holman Hunt and Thomas Woolner each wanted to marry her. Aunt Sara and Uncle Thoby were proud of her. Her mother was delighted, for looks came a close second to illness in Mia
Jackson’s book.
Julia’s beauty was remote, cold and, from the beginning, touched with melancholia. Men put her on a pedestal and admired her from a distance. Part of her reserve came from shyness and a sense of intellectual inferiority – although she spoke French well and knew enough Latin and History to instruct her children in those subjects – but some of it, perhaps, hid boredom. At a party or a picnic on the river she might be seen standing alone and unattended, her mind apparently elsewhere.
Yet Julia, particularly before her second marriage, possessed a warmth that would emerge when she was at ease and enjoying herself. Then her gaiety was infectious and could spread like fire through a room. Even in later life it would be felt by her children. It was Julia who created ‘that crowded merry world which spun so gaily in the centre’ of Virginia’s childhood and which for Virginia vanished on her death.10 Many people saw her as ‘stern and judgemental’. There was certainly no mistaking her disapproval: ‘If she had looked at me as I have seen her look at some people, I would sink into the earth,’ Leslie Stephen told his children.11
Julia’s interest in nursing and ‘good works’ developed early through her experiences with her mother. Discussion of her mother’s symptoms, and those of family and friends, occupied a good slice of the day and when Mia Jackson was particularly troubled Julia would rarely be long away from her side. Not that Mia’s ills were entirely psychosomatic for, in her late thirties, when Julia was nine or ten, she developed the first attack of what sounds to have been rheumatoid arthritis. That lasted several months and Julia was closely concerned with looking after her. Although, characteristically, the disease remitted, there were further attacks and in old age she was badly crippled and restricted to spending most of her days in a chair.
Julia’s satisfaction was to fetch and carry for her mother, pour out this or that of the numerous medicines – which included morphia and chloral – discuss her condition and make her comfortable. In her mother’s eyes, Julia was perfect and indispensable.