Virginia Woolf's Women

by Vanessa Curtis

  The Woolfs were the last people to see Carrington before she shot herself, visiting her the night before to try and alleviate the depression that had followed on from Lytton Strachey’s death. Carrington’s suicide had a sobering, but positive effect on Virginia, who resolved not to end her own life, declaring that there was far too much left to enjoy in it. Woolf’s decision, later on, to terminate her life precisely echoed Carrington’s, and for that reason it is possible to assume that each woman recognized aspects of herself in the other, leaving it impossible and unnecessary for Virginia ever to put on a protective ‘mask’ in front of Carrington. There are many comparisons to be drawn between the life of Carrington, who constantly suffered agonies of doubt about her own artistic talent, and that of Virginia Woolf. Their attitudes to their chosen careers, their long-term platonic partnerships, their awkwardness with their own bodies and their attractions to and for other women, make them appear, in retrospect, uncannily similar. Perhaps the realization of these similarities was the overriding reason why their friendship never developed further; since although fond of each other, the two never became close.

  A book looking at the women in Virginia Woolf’s life would not be complete without a glimpse of the two characters who, from her middle age onwards, brought Woolf the most pleasure, but also the most pain, in her entire life. Vita Sackville-West was the first to stride manfully into Virginia’s ordered, married existence. Sackville-West had the advantages of an aristocratic background, a strong, beautiful physique and a curriculum vitae of well-documented previous love affairs, including her highly sensational romance with Violet Trefusis. By the time Virginia met Vita Sackville-West, she had already experienced a love affair of sorts (Violet Dickinson), dabbled with the aristocracy (Ottoline Morrell), achieved success as a writer, got married, and dealt with many of the insecurities that had plagued her as a young woman. Vita then, unexpectedly sparked off a return to areas of Woolf’s life that she thought were already well and truly explored. Here, once again, was the aristocracy in all its glory, laid out in front of Virginia’s greedy eyes. Here was a woman capable not only of inspiring passion, but also of giving it, in copious quantities.

  Vita resurrected many of the turbulent feelings that Virginia, settled in her marriage to Leonard, thought had died years earlier. Suddenly Virginia began to crave maternal affection again, demonstrating more jealousy and petulance when Vita spent too much time with other women, writing cruel words born from a fear of loss. Virginia, in a safe, loving, but platonic marriage with Leonard Woolf, had started to explore her physical desires for other women in fiction, but had not, until now, had any other valid outlet for them. Her relationship with Vita was sexual for a short while, but was mainly fuelled through an intimate, sometimes explosive and lengthy, correspondence. Vita also prompted Virginia’s wit and her skill with words (after all, Virginia was considered by both women to be the superior author, although Vita’s books sold vastly more copies).

  Woolf had an attractive vulnerability, but also a superiority complex: she had lived longer than Vita, and therefore considered herself to be far wiser. However, the age gap also brought to the fore Virginia’s uncertainties, making her feel ‘dowdy’ in comparison to the glowing, full-figured Vita. Whatever negative traits were exhumed by Vita, the many positive ones – the greatest of which was Virginia’s capacity for true and lasting friendship – more than compensated.

  Vita Sackville-West was obsessed with Virginia’s mental fragility, her beauty and her prolific output of fiction, and she was utterly seduced by Virginia’s portrayal of her as ‘Orlando’ (after which, seemingly purged at last of her desires, Virginia’s physical cravings for Vita simmered down, to be replaced mainly by love and affection). Sadly, Vita could also be fickle, and soon the relationship started to cool as she began a new, intense affair with the Head of Talks at the BBC, Hilda Matheson, and then had more affairs with others, including the journalist Evelyn Irons. Her letters to Virginia became less frequent, causing the older woman to feel betrayed and that she had lost Vita’s attention to newer, younger lovers, but their friendship, although never as deep again, did survive. Orlando had bonded the two women together for life. Although their initial ardour cooled after only two years, Vita remained a close friend, and Virginia craved her company right up until the end. After the loss of Virginia, Vita drew strength from her husband, Harold Nicolson, and paid moving tribute to Woolf with a specially written poem published in the Observer. Vita was always to live with the agonizing question of whether she, as a close friend, could have prevented Virginia’s suicide.

  The last woman to make a sizeable impact on Virginia’s life was the composer and writer, Ethel Smyth. Ethel was responsible for revealing more (previously unseen) aspects of Virginia’s character than any other woman had managed to. She coaxed Virginia’s feminist beliefs, which had previously been suppressed, out into the open and onto the written page. With this sudden unleashing of long-repressed anger came a new honesty and frankness of Woolf’s character that permitted almost any topic to be freely discussed in letters. Virginia demonstrated her biting wit and agility of mind more strongly in letters to Ethel than to anyone else. Ethel merely lit the touch paper, sat back and enjoyed the heat from the sparks. Virginia learned to argue, to debate with brilliance, to relate with candour and wit, and while she never managed to kill off the legacy of the ‘Angel in the House’ completely, she certainly managed to dent the angel’s wings quite severely through her correspondence with Ethel. Her endless thirst for knowledge, always strong, became more intense as she witnessed Ethel’s own artistic process of composition.

  Ethel, unlike Vita, did not particularly enjoy Virginia’s fiction, but she greatly admired her feminist polemics, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. She also respected The Common Reader, and on the strength of her curiosity about its author invited herself round to Tavistock Square. She burst into the house, firing non-stop questions. At the age of seventy-two, Ethel found herself in love with Virginia (who at first found the idea repulsive) and she bombarded her with letters and invitations. Slowly, during the ensuing eleven years, Virginia began to open up to this appreciative audience, confiding intimately to her about her work, her sexuality, her depression, her family background and her medical history. Although not an admirer of Ethel’s musical compositions (despite having been a keen concert-goer as a young woman), Virginia admired immensely the actual method of her composing. The creative process that Virginia followed through in her fiction, and her tendency to improvise in bursts, were not dissimilar to the work of a musical composer, leading to some interesting parallels being drawn between the work of the two women. Ethel’s own life and career influenced Virginia profoundly, providing the fortitude of character necessary for her to write Three Guineas and The Years.

  Virginia’s association with Ethel initially made her feel younger and more beautiful, clever, loved and admired than she had done for years. In many ways, acquaintance with Ethel must have provided Virginia with a pleasing ego-boost. Next to square-jawed, solid Ethel, Virginia was undeniably a beauty, able to recapture some of her old pleasure in her looks. Unfortunately, there were numerous stresses arising from this friendship: Ethel’s fits of ardour, temper and boundless energy reduced Virginia to frustration and tears; she in turn could be scathing about Ethel’s appearance and ungainly dress or eating habits. Her head ached with the strain of trying to find peace and quiet to write, away from Ethel’s interruptions.

  Ethel also brought to the fore a very real and painful fear of Virginia’s – ageing. When they met, Ethel had already been in her seventies and Virginia found her at once revolting and intriguing. Because neither Julia nor Stella had reached healthy old age, Virginia had only limited experience of associating with the elderly (in fact, Stella had spoken of her own beauty as a ‘thing of the past’ at the tender age of twenty-six!). Julia’s beauty had always remained visible beneath her severity, and she had not even reached her fiftieth birthday before
she died. Thus Ethel brought out a side of Virginia that was disgusted by the ageing process, particularly because Virginia, shortly before her first meeting with Ethel, had just realized that she herself was no longer that young. On a visit in 1929 to an oculist, who had innocently commented ‘Perhaps you’re not as young as you were’, Woolf recorded her shock and surprise:

  This is the first time that has been said to me; and it seemed to me an astonishing statement. It means that one now seems to a stranger not a woman, but an elderly woman. Yet even so, though I felt wrinkled and aged for an hour, and put on a manner of great wisdom and toleration, buying a coat, even so, I forget it soon; and am a ‘woman’ again.

  It is significant that in this diary entry, as in other later ones, Virginia fails to connect being a woman with old age, seeming to believe that it is not possible to be both at the same time, that to be a ‘woman’ is far preferable. With this split in her personality, it was obvious to those who knew her well that Virginia’s passage into old age would not be graceful or particularly easy. Ethel, for her own part, became difficult, forgetful and impatient with increasing age, and her friendship with Virginia finally became less intense, but in 1939, Virginia was still amusedly playing confidante to this incorrigible woman, who had yet again fallen in love, this time at the ripe old age of eighty-one!

  Although it is impossible to separate fully Woolf the woman from Woolf the writer, writing being an integral part of her daily life, the final part of this book deals predominantly with the former, starting with the difficult details of Virginia’s Victorian upbringing and then tracing her development, via some lesser-known photographs, from an unhappy teenager into a confident reviewer and writer whose beauty and intellect had a profound impact on those around her. A selection of previously unpublished letters of condolence, written after Virginia’s death, to Vanessa Bell, divulge more information about Virginia’s personality than most biographers could hope to, and go some way towards dispelling the myth of Virginia being permanently depressed. I take a walk around the three houses that most influenced Virginia’s development as both a writer and a woman, where there is still something remaining of the atmosphere that she would have experienced at the time. A visitor to these ‘literary shrines’ might well believe that they have come away knowing a little more of Virginia’s personality from soaking up the atmosphere at these houses. Finally, the book reveals how the surviving four of ‘Virginia Woolf’s women’ came to terms with her death in 1941.

  Through the eyes of ‘Virginia Woolf’s women’, those women who knew her intimately, and from the effect, in turn, that they had on her life and fiction, I hope to draw an affectionate, unusual and honest picture of Virginia Woolf as a daughter, sister, writer, critic, friend – and woman.

  1 The ‘Angels in the House’ – Maria, Julia and Stella

  She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily … in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathise always with the minds and wishes of others.

  VW, ‘Professions for Women’, from Killing the Angel in the House: Seven Essays

  From the moment of her birth on 25 January 1882, until the day she died, a steady stream of unusual, enigmatic and troubled women shaped and inspired the life and work of Virginia Woolf.

  The power and influence of the three earliest of these women, her grandmother, mother and half-sister, should not be underestimated, for these ‘Angels’, with their self-sacrificing ways, haunted and tormented Virginia for many years after their deaths. They lived, ate, slept, entertained, worried, gave birth, became ill and died within the dark confines of a house that was painted black inside. They took up permanent residence in the dark recesses of Virginia’s mind, watching over her, imbuing her with the deep-rooted Victorian values that she adhered to, sometimes willingly, at other times not, for the rest of her life. These three female stalwarts of the cluttered Victorian household at 22 Hyde Park Gate were responsible for the 59-year-long emotional war that Virginia fought and ultimately lost, although she finally managed, as she entered her forties, to find her own voice and defeat the ultimate enemy – the ‘Angel’ who had for years bestowed on her an inability to express herself freely with a pen. Her anger at these years of repression is finally laid bare on the pages still available to us, predominantly in A Room of One’s Own, The Years and Three Guineas.

  Adeline Virginia Stephen was only ten years old in 1892 when her grandmother, Maria ‘Mia’ Jackson, died after years of poor health. Even as an adult, Virginia could still recall the stifling, syrupy affection that Maria poured upon all her grandchildren as she ‘held one so long in her arms’. After the death in 1887 of her kindly, well-meaning husband, Dr Jackson, Maria spent most of her time suffering protractedly at the Stephen family home, 22 Hyde Park Gate, relying heavily on her daughter, Julia, and wallowing in hypochondria. She played the overprotective grandmother with a determination that bordered on the sinister (her letters, some nine hundred black-edged epistles of gloom, survive today, warning her family of the perils of eating sausages and not attending to the workings of their bowels).

  Mia was one of the famous Pattle sisters, each renowned for their beauty (save for one, Julia Margaret Cameron, who compensated for her lack of visual appeal by becoming a famous photographer). Mia was certainly beautiful, but also puritanical and demanding. She married the gentle Dr Jackson of Calcutta and then allowed him to fade into insignificance beside her. She was an exhausting and stiflingly over-concerned wife. After her husband’s death, Mia refocused her attentions on her daughter Julia, who had also lost a beloved husband, Herbert, and was now married a second time, to the biographer and writer Leslie Stephen. Leslie was understandably frustrated by his wife’s devotion to her ailing mother, who seemed to spend most of her time living with them in Kensington, on holiday with them at St Ives or dragging Julia away to her house in Brighton. Maria’s dependency fed greedily on Julia’s tireless commitment, with the result that they were pulled inextricably closer together in a way that was to have an adverse effect on all of Julia’s children. There were many emotional tensions and sentimental scenes played out at 22 Hyde Park Gate; these were the scenes that instigated in the young Virginia Stephen her earliest awareness of how a female family member ought to behave: with devotion, femininity, and utter disregard for her own health in preference to that of others.

  During her lengthy periods of ill health, Maria wrote to Julia on a daily basis, even on days that they had spent together. The black-edged envelopes doggedly followed Julia around the country, dropping heavily onto the mat of whichever house she happened to be in, including Talland House, the family holiday home in St Ives, Cornwall. Maria joined the family for several of these annual sojourns and sat idly in the garden while her friend, the Victorian poet Coventry Patmore, read aloud his latest sentimental offerings.

  It is hard not to dwell on the significance of Maria befriending and adoring this writer of ‘The Angel in the House’, with its message advocating the virtues of sympathy, charity, beauty and selflessness. Maria probably considered herself to possess all these virtues, but although she had indeed been a great beauty as a young woman, she appeared, in old age, far too obsessed with her own hypochondria to have any time to promote selflessness. What she lacked in the ways of charity and sympathy, however, Mia’s virtuous daughter, Julia, more than compensated for during her short and ceaselessly tiring life.

  ‘Cameron’s women do not smile. Their poses embody sorrow, resignation, composure, solemnity, and love, determined love, love which will have a hard time of it’ writes Sylvia Wolf in the introduction to her powerful selection of photographs, Julia Margaret Cameron’s Women (1998). Cameron’s niece, Julia Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson), fascinated her photographer aunt, and as Julia grew up, she was also much in demand from other artists and photographers, including Edward Burne-J
ones (who used her as a model for The Annunciation).

  Julia Stephen did indeed have a ‘hard time of it’ as far as love was concerned; in a series of photographs taken by Cameron between 1864 and 1874, the rapid progression of heartbreak and illness in her early adult life is eerily charted for posterity. The early shots of Julia aged sixteen and eighteen show a demure, innocent girl with her hair tied back humbly, gazing with modesty and humility into her aunt’s all-seeing lens. In 1867, Cameron took a strikingly different set of photographs just prior to, and then after, Julia’s marriage to her first husband, the handsome barrister Herbert Duckworth.

  In these stark, pioneering, strangely timeless photographs, an unadorned Julia bursts, fiery and challenging, onto the pages. Here is Julia at the only time in her life when she was ready to defy the ‘Angel in the House’: an exciting world appears to lie ahead of her, where anything is possible, where women are strong, ambitious and in control. Her face radiates supreme confidence, reflecting the inner knowledge of her own beauty. Her hair streams loose and uncontrolled around her shoulders; her skin is rough-textured and porous, and yet her unadorned beauty here is breathtaking. This is the image that Virginia Woolf was to live in awe of all her life; these are the photographs that decorated the dark hallways at Hyde Park Gate, that were hung in mourning on holiday at Hindhead House and were later moved to the whitewashed walls of 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury. If there was ever a caption to be added now underneath this stunning series of photographs, it should surely be taken from her future daughter Virginia’s story, ‘The Moment: Summer’s Night’ (1947):

  Then comes the terror, the exultation; the power to rush out unnoticed, alone; to be consumed; to be swept away; to become a rider on the random wind; the tossing wind; the trampling and neighing wind; the horse with the blown-back mane; the tumbling, the foraging; he who gallops for ever, nowhither travelling, indifferent; to be part of the eyeless dark, to be rippling and streaming, to feel the glory run molten up the spine, down the limbs, making the eyes glow, burning, bright, and penetrate the buffeting waves of the wind.