Virginia Woolf's Women

by Vanessa Curtis

  Another oil painting of Virginia, finished c. 1912, evokes a similar mood, but this time the face of the sitter is left completely blank, in complete contrast to the detail shown on her lace collar, her hat and the deckchair she sits on. Vanessa has added red pieces to Virginia’s dull brown dress, and at first it is these that catch the eye. On further scrutiny, however, this painting proves to be as sad and disturbing as the previous one. The arms of the sitter are folded defensively, and if Vanessa had added features to Virginia’s face, they would probably have been screwed-up with impatience and looking slightly confrontational; Virginia did not like intrusive probing of her character, or being the subject of paintings and photographs. That featureless face suggests annoyance, but also wistfulness. On seeing it at an exhibition in the 1960s, Leonard Woolf remarked that it captured more of the true spirit of Virginia than any other portrait had ever done.

  The third Bell painting, completed in 1912 and now hanging at Monk’s House, is the only one of the three to attempt some form of conventional likeness, although it perhaps goes too far to the other extreme, presenting a doll-like, rounded Virginia with full cheeks and doe-like eyes. In muted shades of green (matching the colour that Virginia favoured for the walls of Monk’s House), Vanessa imbued her sister with a gentle prettiness and a soft, pensive expression. Virginia is shown seated at a table with an open book in front of her. Her clothes are feminine, her hair is fetchingly waved. It is a physically more flattering, yet less revealing, portrait of Virginia Woolf, lacking the emotional intensity and complex layers contained in the previous two.

  Virginia, in turn, portrayed Vanessa recognizably in three books. The Voyage Out, her first novel, explored the struggle that Virginia had in the early days of her marriage. It also dissected the relations between men and women in a patriarchal society and captured the emotional intensity surrounding the early deaths of several people whom she loved. The ‘voyages’ that the book describes are inspired by the trips Virginia Stephen took to Paris and Italy in 1904 and 1906, the year of the fateful trip to Greece that resulted in Thoby’s death. One of the book’s characters, Helen Ambrose, is a calm, maternal figure, married and, in the early stages of the novel, espied embroidering, or reading G.E. Moore’s Principa Ethica (a book that Vanessa would have once discussed excitedly with the rest of the Bloomsbury Group and which formed the basis of their morals and values). The other heroine of The Voyage Out is Rachel Vinrace, who is eager, impulsive and inquisitive. It is easy to draw true-life parallels between Helen/Vanessa and Rachel/Virginia, or to view the two female protagonists as a ‘contrast of Greek and Biblical figures: Vanessa’s statuesque splendour; Virginia eager, impulsive, searching’.

  By studying the love triangle at the heart of The Voyage Out, between Helen, Terence and Rachel, comparisons can be drawn to the 1908 real-life triangle between Vanessa, Clive and Virginia. The pleasure that Virginia got from Clive’s company, and he from hers, particularly at the embryonic stage of the flirtation in Cornwall, is clearly visible on Woolf’s page as the enjoyment that Terence and Rachel have during their long cliff-top walks. Terence, like Clive Bell, despises ‘conventional marriage’, preferring to envisage Rachel in his arms as they exchange the feelings that they believe are inexplicable to others. It is as though Woolf were trying to exorcize the complex happenings of the year 1908 by exploring them in fiction. This was not altogether successful, owing to her inability to divorce herself entirely from her characters’ feelings, and for this reason Vanessa Bell disliked the book, finding it too painful to read.

  Virginia Woolf’s second novel, Night and Day, was dedicated to Vanessa with the words ‘To Vanessa Bell, but, looking for a phrase, I found none to stand beside your name’. This time, the heroine, Katharine Hilbery, is an undisguised portrayal of Vanessa. Katharine is possessed of a deep romanticism, has an air of being elsewhere and is under enormous pressure from her family to be practical, whilst secretly she longs for a career. Whenever Katharine is feeling troubled by having to entertain an endless succession of dull visitors to the Victorian family home, she absorbs herself in mathematics – this clearly echoes Vanessa’s longing to return to paints and turpentine when she was being forced by the Duckworth brothers to play the role of the perfect hostess. Katharine, like Vanessa, possesses a strange combination of the ethereal entwined with a tendency towards a ‘solid’ existence. Virginia wanted to capture and pay tribute to her sister’s enigma in the character of Katharine, telling Vanessa that Katharine should be:

  Immensely mysterious and romantic, which of course you are, yes, but it’s the combination that’s so enthralling; to crack through the paving stone and be enveloped in the mist.

  Physical descriptions of Katharine are also inspired by Virginia’s observations of Vanessa. Katharine has ‘quick, impulsive movements’ like her mother, Mrs Hilbery (and Julia Stephen had also been described as having these movements), she possesses ‘decision’ and ‘composure’, again two characteristics very marked in Vanessa. Katharine Hilbery has little aptitude for literature and is ‘inclined to be silent’, shying away from expressing opinions in front of others. She does, however, enjoy a happy ending, finding a partner, Ralph Denham, who understands her passion for mathematics. When Ralph finds Katharine to be a very different person in the flesh from the beautiful woman he fantasized about marrying, here again the couple appear to be based on Clive and Vanessa Bell.

  Virginia Woolf’s tribute to her childhood holidays in Cornwall, To the Lighthouse, also features characters who bear some similarity to Vanessa Bell. Although the main inspiration for Mrs Ramsay is Julia Stephen, there are elements of Vanessa, in this portrayal of a solid, real woman living in a shifting, uncertain world. Mrs Ramsay’s matriarchal role in the household also brings to mind Vanessa at Charleston. However, there is more of Vanessa to be seen in the character of Lily Briscoe. Lily has severe doubts about her own painting, and is not always able to vocalize these doubts easily. She has not been educated well and has not travelled extensively, but she is self-possessed and emotional beneath a cool exterior. Like Vanessa, she has the tendency to draw vertical lines down the middle of her paintings (Vanessa employed this technique on her tiled fireplace design of Godrevy Lighthouse, still visible at Monk’s House). Lily advocates abstract art, stating that it is acceptable, as it was to Vanessa, to paint figures without any definite facial features. Lily’s overriding love and admiration for Mrs Ramsay is one of the main focal points of the novel; here, poignantly, Virginia has captured Vanessa’s love and respect for their own beautiful mother, Julia Stephen.

  The true love of her life, Duncan Grant, struggled on at Charleston, putting pen to paper two months after she had died to try and make sense of it all. He pondered his many years of what he called ‘deference’ to Vanessa’s opinions and feelings, concluding that he could still continue to guess what her opinions were likely to have been on most matters, but as her feelings no longer existed, he now had to consider himself to be well and truly on his own. He lived on at Charleston with many visitors, but essentially alone, until his death in 1978.

  3 Violet

  In the first Elizabethan age

  When Shakespeare stood on Southwark’s stage

  A sprig of an unknown tree and place

  Sired two sons from an Eton base

  And founded a dynasty. Mid hopes and fears

  Descendants winged westward across the years,

  From William the priest, to the pilot Cay

  Each travelled serenely a pilgrim way.

  Joy Burden, ‘The Dickinsons’, from Winging Westward

  In Virginia Stephen’s diary for 2 April 1897, she makes her first, unremarkable mention of the older woman who, over the next forty-two years, was to become both an intimate friend and a supporter of Virginia’s literary career. The occasion was the fitting of Stella’s wedding dress at Mrs Young’s in South Audley Street:

  Margaret Massingberd was there, and Violet Dickinson, and soon Cousin Mia galumphed i
nto the room with a parcel for my darling Stella …

  Violet Dickinson was a friend of the whole Stephen family, but was particularly close to Stella (who at the time of Virginia’s first mention of Violet was only three months away from her death). Violet shared Stella’s philanthropic outlook on life and was given to acts of kindness and charity, helping the poor and volunteering in London’s mental hospitals.

  ‘Dickinsons aren’t easily defined … we put in our thumb and we pull out our plum from a miscellaneous company of yeomen, merchants, bankers, squires’ admitted Violet in her history of the Dickinson family. She was certainly well connected; her father was a landowner in Frome, and her maternal grandfather was the Bishop of Bath and Wells. Generations of Dickinsons had inhabited the family seat, Kingweston, in Somerset, and Violet, as a favourite cousin, spent much time there throughout her life. Born in 1865, she weighed nearly ten pounds at birth and by the age of fifteen was six feet tall, which she later eccentrically attributed to ‘being planted on clay soil from infancy’. She was a tomboy, recording in her memoirs that some neighbours had tried to present her with ‘a large bulky doll of singularly unattractive appearance’.

  Violet had no need to work for a living, residing comfortably with her brother, Ozzie, in a house at Manchester Square and a cottage, Burnham Wood, near Welwyn, which she had designed and built herself. Never marrying, she cheerfully advocated spinsterhood and retained total independence throughout her long life. She visited mentally defective criminals and also those who were suffering from mental illness at the London Hospital; experiences which doubtless aided her understanding and support of Virginia Stephen’s nervous breakdown during 1904. Although Violet’s charity work put her in the same selfless category as Julia Stephen and Stella Duckworth, there was one essential difference: Violet was full of happiness, brusque common sense, jollity and optimism, all of which were qualities much needed and admired by the young Virginia.

  She was an ardent traveller, setting off around the world in the company of Lord and Lady Cecil or the daughters of the Marquis of Bath, Beatrice and Katie Thynne (with whom Violet always spent Christmas at the family seat, Longleat). Violet was just as at home yachting in Norway, sightseeing in Spain or spending time at Kingweston with her cousins. Here, she insisted that wireless sets be installed in every room, including the servants’ quarters, as well as the library and schoolroom. Violet’s impeccable connections, her modesty, chastity and respectability were to become the subjects of much good-natured teasing between herself and Virginia during the first year of their friendship; in their early correspondence there are many joking references to Violet’s imaginary husband and improbably large number of illegitimate children.

  Virginia’s passionate and all-consuming longing for Violet Dickinson developed rapidly during the summer of 1902, shortly after Leslie had received his diagnosis of cancer. Since 1897 until then, her emotional pen had been mainly reserved for her cousins, Madge and Emma Vaughan – Madge had been Virginia’s very first ‘crush’ as a teenager (although Madge was some seventeen years older) and Emma became a treasured confidante and playmate, as well as a willing recipient of Virginia’s juvenile fiction and drawings.

  The first recorded letter from Virginia to Violet, sent in the early months of 1902, is a short and polite note to ‘Miss Dickinson’, offering to lend her a book on Scottish lighthouses. Virginia was only twenty years old, Violet seventeen years her senior, and in these first, hesitant letters, it is possible to pick up on Virginia’s heightened awareness of that age difference. Violet, after all, was a well-travelled woman of the world, with many distinguished acquaintances; Virginia had yet to travel widely and was still living in the insular world of 22 Hyde Park Gate with the Duckworth brothers and Leslie, who was unwell and demanding. Throughout April 1902, Virginia’s letters to Violet retain their slightly stiff, distant style, signed under her initials and with a content mainly consisting of formal bulletins about Leslie’s health. As the summer progressed, the formal reserve began to slacken and many anxious requests for Violet’s company took its place. Virginia was starting to realize that the attention and understanding that she was lacking at home could become readily available from Violet’s kind heart. Missing Julia and Stella, and now deprived of Leslie’s gruff affection and literary conversation, Virginia was desperate to find these comforts in a new source.

  During the summer holidays of August 1902, Violet had joined Vanessa, Virginia and Leslie at their holiday home in Fritham, the New Forest. For the first time Virginia recorded her impressions of Violet on paper, in a fragment entitled ‘Violet Dickinson at Fritham’. The piece starts with a somewhat vague and confusing story about hounds chasing through the forest under the command of ‘Aunt Maria’ (Violet), who is six-feet-two and has ‘long travel-stained limbs’. It ends with a concise and frank summary of her new friend’s character, in language that clearly conveys her admiration and respect. The tone is wholly innocent, but boasts a privileged knowledge of Violet’s personality with its tone of superiority in the final line. It is not a mature piece of writing, compared with the twenty-eight short journal pieces that Virginia also began work on during 1903, but as a revealing portrayal of Violet’s appearance and character, and an affectionate tribute to a blossoming friendship, it is worth including.

  To a casual observer she would appear, I think, a very high-spirited, rather crazy, harem-scarem sort of person – whose part in life was (to be) slightly ridiculous, warmhearted and calculated to make the success of any kind of party. She has a very wide circle of acquaintances, mostly of the lorded and titled variety in whose country houses she is forever staying – and with whom she seems to be invariably popular. She is 37 and without any pretence to good looks – which humorously she knows quite well herself and lets you know too – even going out of her way to allude laughingly to her gray hairs, and screws her face in to the most comical grimaces. But an observer who would stop here, putting her down as one of those cleverish, adaptable ladies of middle age who are welcome everywhere and not indispensable anywhere – such an observer would be superficial indeed.

  By September 1902, Violet had become ‘my woman’ to Virginia, who started most letters with a variant on that phrase and began to sign herself off as, amongst other things, ‘your lover’ and ‘your loving goat’. She also began to refer to herself as ‘Sparroy’, a name made up from the curious mixture of ‘sparrow’ and ‘monkey’, suggesting a small animal that is at once cheeky and playful, yet also requires feeding and nurturing. In other letters she is a ‘kangaroo’ or a ‘wallaby nosing around with her soft, wet snout for a letter’. Many references are made to creeping into Violet’s ‘pouch’. Usually it is Virginia who expresses her cravings to be petted and nurtured by Violet, but occasionally she reverses the roles and offers to fold Violet in her ‘feathery arms, so that you may feel the Heart in her ribs’.

  The weaker Leslie became, the stronger Virginia’s emotions towards Violet grew, but it was not just Virginia who relied on Violet’s cheerful disposition to see them through this difficult time; ‘Violet is the family friend we all cling to when we’re drowning’ she admitted in a letter to the woman herself. Most of Virginia’s letters during late 1902 and early 1903 are a mixture of blunt updates on her father’s health, longings to see Violet, snippets of information about books and literary exercises, and endless allusions to animals needing, wanting and demanding comfort from each other. Sometimes it is easy to detect the old ‘separation anxiety’ in Virginia, the same anxiousness that had plagued her as a child when she peered anxiously from the window at 22 Hyde Park Gate, watching for Julia to return. Violet was taking Julia’s place as the ‘mother figure’ of the Stephen family, and Virginia felt her absences keenly.

  In April 1903, Violet moved into the cottage she had built for herself in Hertfordshire, Burnham Wood. She had approached the task of finding the land and building the cottage with her usual vigour and forthrightness:

  Sometimes she tappe
d a tree and nodded her head and wrote in the perennial notebook which swings by her side … sometimes she dropped on her knee and smelt the ground.

  The cottage was a great success – Virginia referred to an early visit as a ‘refreshment’ – and visitors flocked to stay with Violet, finding a perverse delight in digging her vegetable patch as a deviation from their stressful London lives, although Violet had ensured that the house was attractively and comfortably furnished for her guests. One such guest was Ella Crum, who with her husband, Walter, was a lifelong friend of Violet’s and the butt of many of Virginia’s jokes. Ella over-sentimentally recorded her impressions of the haven that was Burnham Wood in the visitors’ book:

  In Burnham Wood through all the summer day

  Stirred by soft airs, the pink-lipped foxgloves sway

  From seas of fern spring oak trees, straight and fine

  With clumps of Rhododendron, red as wine

  And hosts of woodland flowers in sweet array,

  Life loiters here; all beauty, leisure, play

  With it I loiter, both farewell to say