Virginia Woolf's Women

by Vanessa Curtis

  It was good to have time to talk to you; we have got the same job, Virginia, and it is really very curious and thrilling that we should both, quite apart from each other, be after so very nearly the same thing.

  Ironically, as Katherine began to blossom as a writer and receive serious recognition for her work, her health began to slip away, firstly with a recurrence of gonorrhoea and then with the onset of the tuberculosis that was to kill her. Photographs record her plumpness falling away from her bones, her body becoming gaunt, her eyes looking eerily big and scared in a pale, drawn face. She was forced, by the dangers of wintering in cold England, to go to the south of France, alone and away from Murry. Her letters to him over the next three months reveal her insecurities and her bravery over illness, but also her insensitivity and selfishness. Devoted Ida Baker, arriving in France to help Katherine, was accused of being overweight, greedy and stupid. Indeed, next to Katherine, who existed on nothing other than cigarettes and coffee, it is hardly surprising that anyone else was considered gluttonous by comparison! Katherine’s harshness extended into her letters to Murry, where she viciously attacked poor Ottoline Morrell while at the same time sending the subject of this wrath the most flattering, false letters of adoration. This situation was further complicated by the fact that Murry considered himself to be temporarily in love with Ottoline, but all the while kept up the charade of distaste in his replies to Katherine.

  After three months in France, during which time she became even more unwell, Katherine decided that the separation from Murry was too painful to bear any longer, and came home. She was to be disappointed at their reunion; Murry, rather than embrace her with the passion she needed, turned his face aside, fearfully covering his mouth to avoid infection.

  On 3 May 1918, in Kensington, Murry and Katherine finally got married. They moved to Portland Villas in Hampstead. Virginia received a visit from Katherine shortly after the wedding, and noted that she was deteriorating fast, but claiming to be very happy in her marriage. Despite such claims, Murry was ill and unhappy and Virginia noted that he seemed pale and desperate when the Murrys came to Richmond for dinner in June. Katherine also appeared haunted both by her inability to get pregnant and by the terrifying prospect that she might die, or at the very best, never be properly well again.

  Virginia called in at Portland Villas in November 1919 and was shocked to see her friend hobbling about feebly with a body like that of an old woman’s. She wrote in her diary that Murry and ‘the monster’ (Katherine’s cruel name for Ida Baker) hung about helplessly, watching and irritating Katherine. Leonard Woolf recalled later on that Katherine, who could be jolly and stimulating company, seemed a different person altogether with Murry, who got on her nerves and encouraged her sharp tongue, bringing to the fore all her most unattractive qualities and making any time spent in the couple’s company embarrassing and awkward. Leonard, always a good judge of character, presents us here with a very different, perhaps more valid, picture of Katherine than the one provided by loyal Ida Baker; after all, in Ida’s eyes, Katherine could do no wrong. Patient Ottoline, continuing to offer hospitality to Katherine at Garsington, also tired of her guest’s unpleasant behaviour:

  I certainly don’t think you would have cared for Katherine, who is here now – she is too terribly unmoved – and uncaring – about everything.

  Virginia continued to send gifts of flowers and cigarettes to Katherine, keeping up a correspondence that at times proved entirely one-sided. Katherine became unreliable at keeping in touch with Virginia, who was hurt and baffled both by this and by Katherine’s stony review of Night and Day, which had appeared in the Athenaeum during November 1919.

  Swallowing her pride, Virginia continued to visit Katherine, although there was a long period of silence between the two women that lasted until the summer of 1920 when Katherine, returning from another winter abroad, allowed Virginia to call in at Portland Villas. Analysing the visit in her diary, Virginia recalled that Katherine had given her a cold welcome and had not expressed any pleasure at seeing her – until the topic of ‘solitude’ arose, at which point Katherine relaxed, became interested and waxed lyrical on the subject for some time, easing the situation between the two women. That is, until Murry entered the room, when Katherine became derogatory towards him. Finally the two writers got back onto the topic of literature, and Katherine was now praising Night and Day, which further confused Virginia, who was still smarting slightly from the unfavourable published review. All this considered, it must have been a struggle for Virginia to stay loyal for the two years that were left of Katherine’s life, but not only did she remain fond of her, she also paid her a high compliment:

  To no one else can I talk in the same disembodied way about writing; without altering my thought more than I alter it in writing here. (I except L [Leonard] from this).

  Katherine wrote to Virginia from France, where she returned towards the end of 1920, but only once. It was a warm letter, but even though Virginia wrote again, Katherine never did. Something in her was always to mistrust Virginia and Bloomsbury fundamentally. She moved to Switzerland and then on to Fontainebleau, where she remained until the end of her short life. She choked on her own blood and died only just reconciled with Murry, on 9 January 1923. Virginia, unaware of how ill Katherine had been, mistakenly believed her friend to be making a good recovery abroad.

  Although Virginia knew other modernist writers (including T.S. Eliot and James Joyce, whose work she disliked and had refused to publish), her choice of themes and subjects was matched most closely by Katherine Mansfield. For all their differences of character, which were many, their short friendship was both encouraged and enhanced by a mutual commitment to producing superior fiction. They were united by their attitude towards literature, and on this level they had much in common. Both were prodigiously hard-working and prolific, despite being hampered by debilitating health problems; both women fought against their Victorian/Edwardian upbringings to take their writing careers to the forefront of their lives; and they were both married to their own publishers. They had many friendships in common as the two writers were connected, or intimate with, various members of the Bloomsbury Group and also with Ottoline Morrell and D.H. Lawrence.

  Although Woolf and Mansfield captured their lost childhoods in their writing and were inspired by their dead relatives, using them to exorcize the pain of hidden grief, each woman still maintained a very distinctive, individual writing style; whilst Mansfield’s characters are bold, comic and sometimes undignified, Woolf’s appear unfailingly elegant, well spoken and thoughtful. Her fictional characters inhabit lives against a civilized backdrop of books and paintings, whereas Mansfield’s characters carry props (such as flowers or handkerchiefs) full of symbolism. But, when Mansfield and Woolf craft their prose to describe scenery, each writer’s words seem to mirror and complement the other’s. Their use of colour, for example, vividly evokes the seaside holidays of childhood:

  The sun was not yet risen and the whole of Crescent Bay was hidden under a white sea-mist. A heavy dew had fallen. The grass was blue. Big drops hung on the bushes and just did not fall; the silvery, fluffy toi-toi was limp on its long stalks, and all the marigolds and the pinks in the bungalow gardens were bowed to the earth with wetness.

  ‘It suddenly gets cold. The sun seems to give less heat,’ she said, looking about her, for it was bright enough, the grass still a soft deep green, the house starred in its greenery with purple passion flowers and rooks dropping cool cries from the high blue.

  The first passage above is quoted from the short story At The Bay (1921) by Katherine Mansfield; the second is from a novel, To the Lighthouse (1927), by Virginia Woolf. The shape of the sentences in each extract, the references to temperature, the colours of grass, flower and trees, suggest a kinship in writing that each woman recognized and admired in the other. Often their short stories use similar themes – those that occur most often in both include: Victorian/Edwardian society; the oppression of women
; the distress associated with eating and the female body; the hopeless pursuit of heterosexual love; and the minutiae of animal and insect life in parks and gardens.

  In The Botanical Gardens (1907) is a short story by Katherine Mansfield where the opening paragraph informs us that

  From the entrance gate down the broad central walk, with the orthodox banality of carpet bedding on either side, stroll men and women and children – a great many children, who call to each other lustily, and jump up and down on the green wooden seats.

  This passage could easily be followed by the next, from Virginia Woolf’s short story Kew Gardens (1919):

  The figures of these men and women straggled past the flower-bed with a curiously irregular movement not unlike that of the white and blue butterflies who crossed the turf in zig-zag flights from bed to bed.

  Both writers examined the oppressive and shallow world of the society party circuit, Virginia reminiscing in fiction and also in autobiography about the nightmarish experiences she had whilst attending balls and dinners with the Duckworth brothers. She based stories such as The Evening Party (1921) on the literary conversations that she remembered from the visits by Leslie Stephen’s friends and colleagues to 22 Hyde Park Gate. She was also to use these themes in her novels, in particular The Years, with its Victorian tea-table conventions, To the Lighthouse, with the heart of the novel set over the Victorian dinner table, and Night and Day, where Katharine Hilbery is forced to choose between her role as hostess and her secret ambition to be a mathematician.

  Mansfield used her wealthy family from New Zealand, with their ceaseless hosting of Edwardian luncheons and dinners, as inspiration for various stories, most famously The Garden Party (1921). There are also parallels between this and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925); each deals with the preparations for a grand party, and each makes much of the contrast between the frivolity of a social scene and the horrific, tortured death of a man that occurs in the midst of all the festivities.

  Woolf and Mansfield were acutely aware of the effects of serious illness on the body, and they explored this theme extensively in their fiction. Katherine Mansfield’s insecurities about her appearance stemmed from living with a mother who had accused her, as a child, of being overweight. Virginia Woolf’s arose from the treatment that she received at the hands of the Duckworth brothers. In their work the two writers repeatedly questioned the female societal role and issues surrounding female identity. At times their stones even had similar titles – Woolf’s The New Dress (1925) and Mansfield’s New Dresses (1912) both convey, through the device of clothing, the feelings of conflict between the body’s outer appearance and the person’s inner emotions. The female protagonists of these stories are only allowed to reveal distress through the motif of dress. Woolf’s heroine, Mabel Waring, cannot bring herself to look at her reflection, fearing herself repulsive (Woolf herself had a lifelong dislike of mirrors, believing herself to be lanky and too tall; she describes this phobia in the 1929 story, The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection). The heroine of Mansfield’s story, Helen, has a mother who fails to boost her self-confidence; as a result, Helen creates a false self to appease her mother, finding comfort only in a new dress.

  Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield often expressed antagonistic views of heterosexuality in their fiction – anger that was directed particularly towards men and patriarchal oppression. Although their bitter, scornful and, at best, reluctantly affectionate attitudes towards the men they created in fiction were similar, their behaviour towards men in real life was markedly different. Katherine felt superior towards them, and had been promiscuous since her late teens, frequently using men for her own pleasure and then moving on once the initial thrill had faded. She fell in love quickly, but until Murry entered the picture, seemed not to possess the stamina needed to develop a relationship more lasting and meaningful. Even once she was married to Murry, she still envied the settled and caring relationship enjoyed by Virginia and Leonard; the manner in which Leonard provided the stable background crucial to Virginia’s prolific output, or how he anxiously protected and nursed her when she was ill. Although Murry did, when the couple were together, express devotion to Katherine and try to look after her when she was unwell, his attentions seemed to bring her little benefit (in fact they caused her intense irritation). Yet during their frequent absences from one another, her letters pour forth full of love, anguish and pleas for him to rejoin her. The relationship, then, could never be like that of Virginia and Leonard, who were compatible friends, confidants and critics of each other’s work. Virginia had never been promiscuous, and after a childhood dominated by the overbearing George and Gerald, the gruff, difficult Leslie and the highly sexed Jack Hills, she generally preferred the company of her sister, her women friends, or openly homosexual men such as Lytton Strachey and Duncan Grant. Often she found heterosexual men repulsive, as in fact was the case with Katherine’s Murry, whom she once described as ‘a posturing, Byronic little man; pale; penetrating; with bad teeth’.

  In her short stones, Katherine Mansfield usually portrayed men as the ‘baddies’, the buffoons who destroyed or threatened a woman’s peace of mind. In At The Bay, the women of the family rejoice, after the departure of the blustering and demanding Stanley, at ‘the relief, the difference it made to have had the man out of the house. Their very voices were changed as they called out to one another’. In The Lady’s Maid, the maid, who is narrating, reminisces about her fierce grandfather who had shut her fingers in a pair of tongs; she then decides to leave her husband-to-be in order to stay with her female employer, the ‘Lady’ whom she is in devoted service to. In The Stranger, written in 1920 when Mansfield was putting up with Murry’s frequent assignations with other women, her heroine, Janey Hammond, returns home reluctantly from a cruise, a voyage of self-discovery, to her weak, overdevoted husband and her suffocating, insubstantial marriage.

  Virginia Woolf expressed her views on heterosexual men and marriage in several novels, and her men, like Mansfield’s, are usually bullies. As with Mansfield, there is much barely repressed anger towards men; Woolf focuses in particular on the peculiar power of the Victorian patriarch. In The Voyage Out, her first novel, she asks her readers to ‘consider what a bully the ordinary man is … the ordinary hard-working, rather ambitious solicitor or man of business with a family to bring up and a certain position to maintain’. In Night and Day, Mr Hilbery, the ‘extravagant, inconsiderate, uncivilized male’, who is based in part upon Leslie Stephen, goes bellowing from the room, leaving his daughter Katharine in tears and the rest of the female members of the family stunned. His daughter admits to finding herself ‘cheated as usual in domestic bargainings with her father and left to do the disagreeable work which belonged, by rights, to him’. In To the Lighthouse, another fictional portrayal of Leslie Stephen, Mr Ramsay, intimidates his youngest son, shouts at his children, frustrates his wife (who longs for a moment to herself) and confuses his guests.

  Woolf’s views on the tyranny of men, the misery of heterosexual marriage and the terrifying prospect of motherhood are no more apparent than in her short story Moments of Being: Slater’s Pins Have No Points (1927):

  ‘They’re ogres’ she had said, laughing grimly. An ogre would have interfered perhaps with breakfast in bed; with walks at dawn down to the river. What would have happened (but one could hardly conceive this) had she had children?

  It is little wonder, then, that it is women who emerge as the stronger, cleverer and more desirable characters in the fiction of both Woolf and Mansfield. Women, even those who are repressed by marriage and/or society, are portrayed variously as fragrant, exotic, witty, rebellious and perceptive creatures. Women in these writings desire only each other and long to be like one another, to spend time together alone and put up a united front against the angry, violent, bullying or weak men who attempt to impose restrictions upon them.

  Although Katherine Mansfield was bisexual, there is no evidence of her ever enjoying anything ot
her than a platonic friendship with Virginia Woolf. She admired Virginia, was stimulated by her company and respected her work (with one or two infamous exceptions). Virginia, in turn, seemed to love and admire Katherine, but, as she had done with Ottoline, she fluctuated between disgust and admiration; she detested Katherine’s perfume and bad table manners, but admired her doll-like prettiness, exotic make-up and penchant for short skirts.

  As Virginia was always the one to make more effort at correspondence than Katherine, it is tempting to imbue their relationship with more physical desire on Virginia’s part than on Katherine’s, but Virginia was, at this stage in her life, entirely chaste, happily married to Leonard with only her youthful fascination with Violet Dickinson to declare. Katherine had fallen in love with many women and had passionate affairs with them. Her journals refer unashamedly to the ecstasy of her physical union with these women, and after one such affair (with Edith Bendall) finished in 1907, she wrote a remarkably frank lesbian short story, Leves Amores. In nine brief paragraphs the story sets the scene for a seduction between two women in a hotel. Predictably, this piece of work was not included by Murry in his collection of Katherine’s short stories, published after her death. The language is blunt and unadorned; the purpose of the tale is obvious:

  She told me as we walked along the corridor to her room that she was glad the night had come. I did not ask why. I was glad, too. It seemed a secret between us. So I went with her into her room to undo those troublesome hooks.

  When Virginia Woolf writes of love for women, it is often in a more analytical, considered fashion; it merely hints at what might lie ahead. Here, in Mrs Dalloway, the passage even seems, consciously or otherwise, to sum up Virginia’s feelings for Katherine herself: