Virginia Woolf's Women

by Vanessa Curtis

  Vanessa was often to be found sitting at her easel in the attic studio at Charleston, or in the garden room, sewing or sleeping while the men entered into animated discussion. She was serene and measured, earthy yet controlled, likened by Virginia to a bowl of golden water that bubbled up to the brim but never overflowed. In contrast, Virginia was edgy, nervous and often hyperactive. All her life she was prone to fits of excitement or temper, both of which set alarm bells ringing in Leonard, for they often indicated the beginning of a bout of debilitating illness. She was ungainly when she walked; tall and thin, awkward, ill at ease in her own body, unsure of her femininity, insecure and reluctant to look in the mirror. Even so, her many friends and admirers were transfixed by her face as it changed and grew expressive in conversation. Her looks were more unconventional than Vanessa’s; delicate, transitory, ethereal; changing, in her forties and fifties, into a very fragile, haunted beauty. Although in her youth she had not resembled Julia as much as Stella or Vanessa did, something of Julia Stephen’s weary severity crept into Virginia’s face as she grew older.

  Virginia was unhappy with her body image and weight for most of her life, finding it difficult to eat and going for long periods without doing so. Vanessa, on the other hand, although a frugal eater who disliked foreign food, started each day with a breakfast of toast and salt, dined off roast meats in the evening and was generally well nourished both by the produce from the Charleston farm and by her capable cook, Grace, who transformed it into delicious meals.

  A certain amount of rivalry also arose over the respective merits of each sister’s country house. Naturally, Virginia thought Monk’s House to be far more tasteful than Charleston, but Vanessa disliked the quietness and austerity of Monk’s, preferring the cheerful, rough-and-tumble informality of her chaotic farmhouse.

  The sisters threw themselves into their work in the way that they themselves had predicted back in the nursery at Hyde Park Gate. For both women, work was a compulsion rather than purely a pleasure. Vanessa painted away the hidden frustrations of her personal life, although even her paintings did not always reveal much of her inner emotions, prompting Virginia once to write that her sister’s pictures were ‘silent as the grave’. Virginia focused her mind away from illness and depression into fiction, although on some occasions she saw the benefit of being ill for short periods, and used these times to mull over new ideas.

  She was always to say, somewhat unfairly, that she deserved the career success as Vanessa had got the family life, and she kept a nervous eye on Vanessa’s growing reputation as a painter, deeming it unfair that her sister should have both. It is certainly true that if Vanessa had not had the three children to look after, she might have achieved considerably more fame as a painter. Yet she had domestic help with the children, enough money to live comfortably, and a few hours per day to concentrate on her art, which, on the infrequent occasions that she exhibited, sold well and was admired by other artists. Vanessa was innovative, inspiring several designs for Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops and showing her paintings at both his Post-Impressionist Exhibitions. In return, he reviewed her work favourably for Vogue magazine in 1926, declaring that she must take her place with the leading British painters of the day. Virginia remained envious of Vanessa’s family and the hectic, affectionate atmosphere at Charleston, although her pain was alleviated by realizing that she was becoming financially successful through her writing (To the Lighthouse financed several improvements to Monk’s House).

  The sisters found the expression of emotions to anyone other than each other, difficult. Vanessa’s calm exterior hid a passionate nature, and as a wife she was demanding and needy, marrying Clive in the confident hope of sustaining a full, satisfying sexual union. Although the marriage produced two children and enabled Vanessa to boast to Virginia about her sexual expertise (in comparison to Virginia’s apparent frigidity), the physical side was short-lived, resulting in her damaging affairs with Roger Fry and Duncan Grant. Again, after the initial passion had worn off between Vanessa and Duncan, that relationship settled into the familiar pattern of Vanessa providing comfort and acting as confidante to Duncan, who brought a string of male lovers back to Charleston for her to look after. The effect on this passionate but emotionally repressed woman must have been devastating, but once again Vanessa kept her true feelings tucked away, concentrating instead upon her artistic talent and the demands of motherhood. Although Vanessa and Duncan were to remain together for more than forty years after Angelica’s birth, Vanessa rarely had sexual relations again during that period.

  Virginia’s sexuality was far more complex, but unlike Vanessa, she had the constant and total support of a husband who was rarely absent from her side. Although after her honeymoon it seems as if the marriage became platonic very quickly (even during the honeymoon Virginia had written to her friend Ka Cox, enquiring in a puzzled way as to why people made such a fuss about copulation), there was instead a bottomless supply of affection, loyalty and intimacy to be drawn upon. Leonard was forced to do exactly what Vanessa Bell had done – he buried his physical desires deep down inside and substituted other pleasures instead: writing, publishing, gardening and pets. Virginia was not to be pressured or worried in any way, so a companionable routine of walks, talks and writing became the preferred existence for them both. Their relationship was based on trust and hard work, and they remained close enough to bemoan any absences from one another greatly, using pet names such as ‘Mandril’ and ‘Mongoose’ to demonstrate intimacy.

  Virginia adored Leonard, writing that ‘of course the way to make me want Mong[oose] is to be away from him: it is all rather pointless and secondrate away from him’. Virginia, unlike the resolutely heterosexual Vanessa, was to become tempted by both men and women, but her passions were based on what she remembered of Stella and Jack’s courtship before their marriage: flirtation, without the inclusion of the body. She formed close and ardent friendships with women all through her life, from Violet Dickinson in the 1890s to Ethel Smyth in the 1930s, but although the flames of desire certainly burned within Virginia’s novels, they rarely did so in her life, with the exception of her relationship with Vita Sackville-West. Her marriage took priority, steady, rock-solid and always the source of much pleasure. Even after twenty-five years, as she walked hand-in-hand with Leonard around a London square, Virginia marvelled at how happy they still were.

  Whilst Vanessa shone quietly and privately at her art, Virginia not only excelled at writing, but also at conversation; of the two sisters, she became the more extrovert. She ‘held court’ at any number of intimate, literary gatherings at Monk’s House or Charleston, indulging in long witty monologues that had her admiring audiences in hoots of laughter. She often talked in the style that she wrote in, using long, unfurling, endless sentences that spiralled up and around the heads of her guests before exploding into spectacular flights of fantasy. Vanessa could not have appeared more different in company, feeling no need to compete with Virginia for the limelight. Her daughter Angelica recalls that:

  She presided, wise yet diffident, affectionate and a little remote, full of unquenchable spirit. Her feelings were strong, and words seemed to her inadequate. She was content to leave them to her sister and to continue painting.

  In 1937, tragedy struck the ordered lives of the Bell and Woolf families. A shell killed Vanessa’s eldest child, Julian, during the Spanish Civil War. He had been part of a British medical unit based in Spain, on the Palace of the Escorial, for the Republican offensive to cut the supply route of the Nationalists encircling Madrid. Mortally wounded, he died in the dressing station at the Escorial at the age of twenty-nine. His body was never brought back home to England.

  For the first time in her life, Vanessa fell totally to pieces. The roles that had been played out between 1913 and 1915 were reversed once more; now Virginia became the caregiver, Vanessa the invalid. Vanessa was later to write to Vita Sackville-West saying that she would never have got through the dreadful months follo
wing Julian’s death if it hadn’t been for Virginia’s love and support. Virginia dealt with her own grief in her customary way, by writing a memoir of Julian a few days after she had received the news. In it, she candidly analysed her relationship with her sister’s eldest child, remembering that she had tried to persuade him not to go to Spain, comparing him with Clive, his father, and recalling fondly that they had both teased her rather caustically. It seems that Virginia, still repressed by her upbringing, had experienced difficulty in relaying this fondness to Julian himself:

  But our relationship was perfectly secure because it was founded on our passion – not too strong a word for either of us – for Nessa. And it was this passion that made us both reserved when we met this summer.

  Vanessa spent the first week of her grieving in bed at the studio in Fitzroy Street, unable to be moved back to Charleston. Eventually she was brought back to the farm, where her recovery from the shock was slow and traumatic. During this period, Virginia put her own work on hold and visited her sister several times a week, writing every day. The letters are those expected from a descendant of the ‘Angel in the House’, tender, compassionate and selfless. Virginia’s pen sought to give Vanessa the comfort she needed by reverting back to the animal nicknames of childhood years; ‘singe’, ‘dolphin’ and other old familiars pepper the letters. In an ironic reversal, Virginia’s letters are also full of concern over Vanessa’s eating and sleeping habits. Mainly, though, they are poetic, amorous love letters, one even ending with a quote from The Winter’s Tale (‘How I adore you! How astonishingly beautiful you are! No one will ever take the winds of March with beauty as you do’).

  Julian’s death brought the sisters closer than they had been for many years, stripping the relationship bare of any petty rivalries, allowing Virginia to lay open her feelings for the sister she adored and needed. Vanessa, though, could still not open up her heart directly to Virginia; she chose, instead, to express her gratitude in a letter to Vita Sackville-West, who in turn relayed it to Virginia. Very occasionally, however, Vanessa managed to swallow her pride and find the right words. At the beginning of 1938, she wrote, to her sister:

  You do know how much you help me. I can’t show it and I feel so stupid and such a wet blanket often but I couldn’t get on at all if it weren’t for you.

  Towards the end of 1937, Virginia was not progressing well with her work. Caring and worrying about Vanessa had sapped her of strength and precious writing time, but she published The Years and forced herself to press on with Three Guineas and Roger Fry. Her health was becoming precarious; the final typing of The Years had brought on several bouts of flu-like illness and agonies of self-doubt. As Vanessa slowly began to recover over at Charleston, Virginia was beginning to deteriorate, finding it hard to eat or sleep, increasingly losing faith in her ability to write. She still enjoyed any visit from Vanessa, though, and Angelica Garnett recalls that:

  There were many occasions when I went to see Virginia alone with Vanessa and I amused myself while they enjoyed what they called a good old gossip … they understood each other perfectly and were probably at their best in each other’s company. They were bound together by the past and perhaps also by the feeling that they were opposite in temperament and that what one lacked she could find only in the other.

  At this stage, towards the end of her life, Virginia’s truly close friends were few; Vita, Ethel Smyth, Leonard and Vanessa were the only people whom she trusted well enough to confide openly in. Despite Angelica’s observations about each sister finding the qualities she lacked in the other, Virginia was unable to find the will to live, even from her beloved Nessa. Vanessa became greatly concerned about Virginia in the last few weeks of her life, but her letters, particularly the final one, are bossy and not overly sympathetic; perhaps this was Vanessa’s way of convincing herself that Virginia was not about to descend again into the grip of terrifying mental illness. That final letter may have unwittingly caused additional despair, with its emphasis on Virginia having to pull herself together to be able to cope with the war, and for her not to worry Leonard; but, despite the dictatorial content of the letter, Virginia still loved to receive it and wrote to tell her sister so – in one of the suicide notes that were left propped up on her writing desk.

  Vanessa was not as devastated after Virginia’s death as those close to her thought that she would be. Fearing a similar collapse to the one that had followed Julian’s death, the family clustered around her anxiously in the days following the discovery of Virginia’s body. Instead, Vanessa withdrew further into painting and lived the next twenty years of her life in relative isolation, relying only on the company of Duncan, her children and grandchildren, and the calming routine of putting paintbrush to canvas. She continued to maintain an affectionate relationship with her brother-in-law, Leonard Woolf, up until her death, corresponding with him on the subject of Virginia’s letters (which he was considering publishing) with some apprehension:

  In most of those I have read yet there are a good many remarks about all her friends that they wouldn’t like … a great deal about Clive that would enrage him.

  The letters were not, in the end, published in their entirety until many years later, when most of the friends that Virginia had referred to were dead.

  Vanessa Bell became, in her old age, something of a reluctant authority on the ‘Bloomsbury Group’, receiving letters from students, writers and curious members of the public, some of which prompted weary and occasionally biting responses. Vanessa would patiently reply to each enquiry, but confided to Leonard that

  There was never such a thing as the Bloomsbury Group. I don’t want to be brutal to the woman but I simply cannot go on telling people about such things.

  Vanessa continued to retain a sense of humour as she entered her seventies, writing mischievously and with a hint of her old bossiness to Leonard after he had gone into hospital for an operation:

  Don’t be too severe with them [nurses] for you are completely at their mercy and I’m sure they’ll think nothing of murdering you if you upset them too much.

  No doubt Vanessa and Leonard must have found it a relief to be able, finally, to joke about nurses after the early, terrible years of Virginia’s illness.

  Other than the company of friends, one of the great pleasures that old age brought to Vanessa was a clutch of grandchildren. Angelica had married David Garnett and produced four daughters; Quentin had married Anne Olivier Popham and had two daughters and a son. The children knew Vanessa as a doting grandmother, and Duncan and Clive as two amusing grandfathers who would allow them to experiment with paints and brushes in the airy studio.

  The traditions of Angelica’s childhood continued with parties, dressing-up and swimming still part of the magic of Charleston, but Vanessa was growing increasingly frail. She was still working hard, designing book jackets for posthumous editions of Virginia’s work, and she made the occasional trip to France with Duncan. There was a more marked remoteness about her, which frustrated Angelica, who found her mother cool and distant. Vanessa’s faithful servant, Grace Higgens, was to realize that, after forty years of working for ‘Mrs Bell’, she knew little more about Vanessa than she had on the day she started service. Vanessa had withdrawn almost entirely from everyday life. The barriers she had been putting up since the loss of Julia and Stella at Hyde Park Gate were now so firmly bolted into place that she could not have knocked them down – even if she had wanted to.

  Silent and uncomplaining to the last, Vanessa Bell died at Charleston at the age of eighty-one after a bout of bronchitis, almost twenty years to the day since Virginia had ended her life in the River Ouse. Vanessa’s shadows haunt the studios at Charleston; her pictures hang on the walls and her painted furniture remains in the rooms. Her paintings sell for enormous amounts of money and have been widely exhibited, most notably at an important exhibition of Bloomsbury art at the Tate Gallery. Her talent for art and design has been passed down to the next generations, in particular t
o Angelica, a sculptor, artist and writer, and to Vanessa’s granddaughter, designer Cressida Bell.

  Virginia and Vanessa paid touching tribute to each other in their chosen media of art and literature; a far easier way for Vanessa, in particular, to do so. She always found it hard to express her feelings face-to-face or even in letters, but putting paintbrush to canvas, she was able to capture the essence of Virginia with greater ease. Three early, famous paintings of her sister can be seen today. The first, painted in 1911 and now in the National Portrait Gallery, was painted at Little Talland House. Virginia, at that stage in her life, was working on The Voyage Out and was aware that Leonard Woolf had fallen in love with her. The new style of contemporary painting that her sister favoured was having a profound impact on Virginia’s own writing, although this was not to emerge until later in the decade. Despite taking pleasure in the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1910, Virginia resented the amount of excited conversation about art that threatened to overshadow her own literary discussions:

  The furious excitement of these people all over the winter over their pieces of canvas-coloured green and blue, is odious.

  Vanessa’s 1911 portrait of Virginia is the most vividly coloured of the three. Virginia is shown subsided into the corner of a bright orange armchair that is boldly outlined in black. Her knitting is a startling red, but in contrast to the props, Virginia’s clothing is subdued, in muted greys and browns. Her demeanour is timid and withdrawn, and she has a forlorn air about her. Vanessa has deliberately left the face featureless, save for the nose and a vague impression of downcast eyes. The lack of features becomes a comment on the shyness and doubts that Virginia possessed at that time, for whilst Vanessa already had marriage and painting, Virginia was embarking uncertainly on a first novel with no guarantee of publication, let alone success. She had survived two serious breakdowns and was not far from beginning another. Although at first glance the picture suggests a moment of relaxed intimacy between sisters, a further study reveals it to be a disturbing portrait, revealing sadness and self-doubt in the sitter.