Virginia Woolf's Women

by Vanessa Curtis

  Darling Virginia – Pay no attention to my grumble of yesterday. After all, you have given, and give me the greatest joy of my latter end. As it said in that wonderful American poem: ‘I am content,’ said the soldier. Yes, by God I am. Bless you, my dearest.

  Ethel, shaken and terribly dismayed by her friend’s suicide, continued to write to Vanessa and Vita, offering the two them her support and sharing with them her memories of Virginia.

  Ethel Smyth died three years after Virginia Woolf, in May 1944, quietly and uneventfully, at home in Woking. She was eighty-six. Many of her friends expressed surprise that this spirited woman, who wrote, composed and lived with ‘violence, passion, indignation, loyalty, integrity, incorruptibility, shameless egoism, generosity, excitability, energy, a hundred horse-power drive’, had actually been extinguished at all.

  One such disbeliever, Vita, paid tribute to her in a poem that surely would have echoed the thoughts of their mutual friend, Virginia, had she lived longer:

  You were marked out to meet a violent end

  You should have matched the violent young men

  Stormers of evil in all elements

  Earth, water, air, and in the daring mind.

  They were your peers; their life, their death were yours:

  Not in a Surrey villa, of old age,

  Where you who greatly lived have gently died.

  8 Virginia

  Take away my love for my friends and my burning and pressing sense of the importance and lovability and curiosity of human life and I should be nothing but a membrane, a fibre, uncoloured, lifeless.

  Throughout the previous chapters, we have met a selection of women who profoundly interested Virginia Woolf not only as friends, but also as role models for many of the female protagonists in her fiction. By studying her correspondence and relationships with these women, several diverse aspects of Virginia’s personality have come to light: her insecurity, sense of repression and aversion to physical passion (Julia, Stella); her capacity for strong, enduring and all-consuming love, (Violet, Vanessa, Vita); her fervent, angry beliefs in equality for women (Ethel); her strange capacity to demonstrate fascination simultaneously with repulsion, cruelty and snobbery (Katherine, Ottoline); and her ability to empathize (Carrington). We have gradually been able to build up a picture of Virginia Woolf as a real, if complex, woman. But there are gaps still left unfilled; Woolf’s early life, for instance, is less well documented generally and yet, once probed, it yields a most rewarding and intimate glimpse not only into late-Victorian Britain, but also into the heart, mind and ambitions of an extraordinary young woman.

  To those who know little about Virginia Woolf other than from reading snippets of sensationalist reportage about her suicide and sexuality, or witnessing the tired portrayals in books and films of a ‘mad’ woman obsessed with suicide, the predominant image called to mind when the name ‘Woolf’ is mentioned will be that of the haunted, elderly, fragile lady of her later photographs. It is an unavoidable and frustrating fact that, to many people, the most interesting fact about her life is how she chose to end it.

  But Virginia Woolf lived for fifty-nine long, rich, event-filled years, and whilst it is often, sadly, only the last of those years that are recalled and debated, it is the early ones, between 1895 and 1906, that prove to be far more fascinating; partly because they are less explored to date by contemporary biographers, but primarily because these are the years when Woolf’s raw emotions, burgeoning writing talent and development as a woman were all being shaped and affected by the harrowing experience of living as a young Victorian under the restrictive conditions at 22 Hyde Park Gate.

  None of the other women featured in this book suffered anything approximating the incredible chain of bereavements, breakdowns and traumatic events that Virginia had endured and survived by the time she had reached her mid-twenties; aided by conventional education, great wealth or liberal-minded families, most of them in fact enjoyed relatively unremarkable childhoods. Therefore it is even more astonishing that Virginia, formally uneducated, insecure and almost permanently in mourning during her teenage years, should have managed to fight back from such a difficult beginning; she not only survived life at Hyde Park Gate, but also was able to use it as inspiration. She rose up into and maintained a position of great literary success, becoming more famous than any of her female friends and contemporaries. For this reason, whilst it is sometimes difficult to feel much warmth towards Virginia Woolf as a person (for, like most people, she could be cruel, dishonest and impatient), it is much more difficult not to respect her achievements.

  If the persistent researcher or reader is interested in delving beyond the commonly known facts of Woolf’s life, widely available in her fiction and the many biographies about her, with the intention of revealing more about her as a person than as a writer, although it is of course impossible to separate fully the former from the latter, there are a few further routes that he or she might decide to take, which I will explore here. The most immediate, fascinating and corporeal route is via the scrutiny of early, unpublished archive photographs. Another, more widely followed way is to read her intimate diaries and letters, now published in their entirety. A visit to the Sussex archives that contain the honest reminiscences (soon to be published) of those who, after Virginia’s death, wrote in sympathy to her husband and sister, will help to fill in many further details. Finally, by visiting and spending time in the key places where Virginia once lived and worked, it is possible to achieve some additional insights, however transitory, into her personality.

  Many of the popular photographic images of Virginia Stephen/Woolf, particularly those taken by George Beresford, Gisèle Freund and Man Ray, are overly familiar to us, having been reproduced endlessly in biographies and documentaries, on stationery and gallery posters; but it is not these photographs, but rather the other, far earlier ones, which lie scattered between America and England, unprobed and largely forgotten about in dusty archives, that most poignantly and accurately chart the remarkable change of Virginia Stephen from a chubby child, through nervy adolescence, into a reluctant yet successful adult. Studied in conjunction with her own diaries and journal pieces of the time, these photographs give us a fascinating insight into what it was like to be a girl, and then a young woman, growing up in Victorian Kensington.

  The camera lenses during the latter half of the nineteenth century were unforgiving, with few special effects, and so here, raw and uncensored, is Virginia Stephen as she transforms from that painfully thin, plain-featured teenager into the ethereal, strong-featured beauty called Virginia Woolf. Many of the early photographs show her as a young girl who did not enjoy being the focus of attention; shy, modest and uncomfortable with her appearance, she is more often than not gazing at the ground or fiddling with a book or newspaper.

  As a very young child, Virginia Stephen had impressed virtually everyone she came into contact with. As a picture of her nestled up against Julia Stephen shows, she was plump, robust and vivacious, charming the grown-ups at Hyde Park Gate, prodigiously eloquent and aware of how to flirt with her father even before the age of two; she always managed to burrow her way into the coveted place by his side or on to his lap. She was a happy, confident toddler; in the very few extant photos from this time, she is almost unrecognizable as the forerunner to the skinny, angular child of only a few years later.

  Whereas Virginia’s sister, young ‘Nessa’, already possessed, by the age of four, something of the solemnity, gravity and solidity that were to stay in her expression for life, Virginia’s physical appearance was to change drastically after the age of six. Even her bright, button eyes, full of mischief and sparkling with fun, were to take on a fraught and serious melancholy from the age of seven onwards. Much of the little girl’s physical change of appearance was attributed to a bout of whooping-cough, an ailment from which all the Stephen children suffered; but although her siblings recovered fully, Virginia never gained back the weight that she had lost, emerging fr
om the illness quieter, thinner, more thoughtful and lacking in self-confidence. The growing contrast between Vanessa, always full-figured and statuesque, and Virginia, also tall, but thin and awkward, was already in place by the early 1890s, and despite their facial resemblance to one another, each sister was uniquely and differently beautiful.

  With only Stella Duckworth’s scribbled appointments diary for 1896 to give us any consistent written record of Virginia’s health, activities and emotions during this difficult year (during which she suffered from an early breakdown following on from Julia’s death), it is remarkable and gratifying to find that old photographs still survive from the 1896 Stephen family summer holiday at Hindhead House, Haslemere. These astonishing pictures show a thin-faced but pretty 14-year-old Virginia, still in mourning for her mother who had died the previous year. Sporting a black armband, she is shy, awkward, chisel-featured, with a long tight plait of hair down her back. Other pictures show her looking pale, with huge anxious eyes in a sensitive, slender-boned face. Vanessa, by contrast, often appears stubborn, resentful, and almost bulldog-like in her silent, stony resolution. Perched on the roof-terrace of Hindhead House, her hands protectively clasped around her knees, Virginia, a gentle, sensitive-looking child, averts her eyes from the camera. During this same holiday, it is possible to gauge her worried reaction to the engagement of Stella and Jack. This event was captured in a photograph that when enlarged several times, shows the newly unwrapped wedding rings of the engaged couple resting on the grass at their feet.

  During a holiday to Boulogne in the company of their Aunt Minna, later in the year, another photograph leaves us with a breathtakingly clear picture of the two Stephen sisters; in their black travelling capes, unsmiling, gloved (it was November), they are still visibly scarred by their mother’s death. Virginia’s long plait weaves snakily out from under a beret; Vanessa, aged sixteen, has been allowed to wear her hair up. Again, Virginia avoids the camera’s gaze; Vanessa, challengingly, meets it head-on.

  After Stella’s traumatic death in 1897, a picture taken only three weeks later remains pitiful and poignant to the eye of the contemporary researcher. Skinny, hunched over and clad in black Victorian mourning dress, Virginia sits on a step at The Old Vicarage in Painswick, Gloucestershire. Two walking canes lie beneath her feet, suggesting that she was frail enough not to be able to walk unaided. Her eyes look up beseechingly towards the camera, imploring it not to take a photograph. Never did Virginia’s later nickname of ‘Sparroy’ seem so terribly appropriate; in this mournfully sad photo, she resembles a fledgling that has fallen out of the nest away from its mother (indeed Virginia herself had been weaned too early from Julia). The picture confirms what we know of Virginia’s life in the dark days after Stella’s death, but it still comes as a shock to witness it so clearly in black and white; Virginia, at the age of fifteen, was a sickly invalid.

  During this stressful holiday at Painswick, Virginia kept a few brief, disjointed entries in her diary that help us to understand better her pathetic appearance, although many of the entries make little direct reference to Stella’s death. The agony and frustration of the emotional repression required of the time is visible in Virginia’s anguished features, for it was not the ‘done thing’ for young Victorians to speculate emotionally, on paper or otherwise. Virginia was inevitably recalling the limitations that her upbringing imposed at this time, when she wrote Orlando (1928):

  The sexes drew further and further apart. No open conversation was tolerated. Evasions and concealments were sedulously practised on both sides.

  Virginia’s arrested development and the mental turmoil that she experienced during this holiday do occasionally show through in her diary accounts. With a writer’s technique, albeit subconsciously, she manages to convey maximum distress with the minimum of words:

  Nessa and I walked round and round the tennis lawn after dinner (our custom nowadays) and discussed everything. It is hopeless and strange.

  Even more hopeless was the plight of Stella’s widower Jack Hills, who joined the family on this holiday expecting constant support and sympathy. It was left to Virginia and Vanessa to sit with him in the summer house while he gripped their hands and they stared at a barren, leafless tree. This tree appeared to symbolize for Virginia the loss of Stella, and although it was never mentioned, Stella’s unborn child. Jack bemoaned loudly his lack of a sexual partner and wrung his hands. By her own admission, Virginia was becoming patently ‘ill-adjusted; growing painfully into relations that her death had distorted’. It was not a healthy growing-up process for a 15-year-old girl and Virginia was unable to record her feelings succinctly at the time. Only in 1939 could she fully explain what that dreadful holiday had meant, and why she had appeared so wretched in those photographs:

  But trees do not remain leafless. They begin to grow little red chill buds. By that image I would convey the misery, the quarrels, the irritations, half covered, then spurting out, the insinuations, which as soon as family life had started again began to prove that Stella’s death had not left us more united; as father said.

  Virginia did not record details of the next Stephen family summer holiday, taken at Ringwood Manor in the New Forest during 1898, but a photograph taken during that holiday conveys its mood. Happily, there is a marked difference between the scowling, pitiful girl photographed in 1897 and the young lady now seen sitting in a chair reading the newspaper. Here, for the first time, is a clear indication of Virginia Stephen’s ambitions as an aspiring journalist, as she avidly reads a broadsheet, taking no notice of the photographer. Her face is serene, contemplative; she seems to be moving, without further interruption, towards adulthood. The shock of the deaths of Julia and Stella appears to have abated.

  The process of Virginia changing from a teenager into a young woman is even more evident pictorially in a photograph of Virginia taken at Warboys, Huntingdonshire, during summer 1899. With her hair pinned up under an elegant, wide-brimmed hat, her dress no longer black but light and edged with lace, Virginia Stephen has clearly passed into adulthood. Her journals reflect this newfound maturity as well; the prose becomes expansive, acutely observant, carefully shaped. The Warboys journal is descriptive, yet still slightly detached. It demonstrates the slightly self-conscious and endearing pomposity of a young woman determined to make her name as a serious writer; for instance, she writes that Vanessa had the nerve to ‘insinuate, with some pertinacity’ that Virginia had stolen her scissors.

  By the time she turned twenty-one, Virginia had entered fully into early Edwardian society, as a photograph taken at Netherhampton House, Salisbury, shows. In this 1903 posed shot, Virginia is seated on the grass amongst a group that also includes Vanessa, (who was now very beautiful), and the laid-back Thoby Stephen, his arms stretched casually behind his head. Virginia gazes away from the lens, as she usually does, towards the ground, perhaps at the book on her lap, which she was probably longing to get back to. The journal that she kept during this holiday at Salisbury is a mature and elegant piece of travel writing, full of signs that she was now finally beginning to move on from the dreadful late 1890s and towards a confident future as a writer.

  Even when this holiday, much enjoyed by the whole family, came to an end and Virginia was forced to return to her dreaded ‘cage’ at Hyde Park Gate, she accepted the situation pragmatically, turning her hand to writing a series of descriptive pieces about London and Kensington Gardens. Unfortunately, fate was to deal yet another blow. Soon after their return from Salisbury, Leslie, who had been ill with stomach cancer for some time, took a turn for the worse and died. His death in February 1904 catapulted Virginia straight into another breakdown and worst of all, it put a further obstacle in the path of her development as a woman. She degenerated into illness with periods of psychotic behaviour and regression, and took nearly two years to recover, only to be hit within another two years by the early death of Thoby.

  It was not until these bereavements had happened, been mourned and some sense of
reality restored, that Virginia Stephen could continue to take the steps needed to ensure her place as a great writer. Even her first job as a reviewer for the Guardian and subsequent work for the Times Literary Supplement, were marred by what amounted almost to another bereavement: the marriage of her beloved Nessa to Clive Bell. Therefore it was not until 1909, when Virginia had left the house at 46 Gordon Square to Vanessa and Clive, and was living with Adrian at Fitzroy Square, that she finally began to live confidently as an independent, money-earning journalist.

  Virginia Stephen was at the height of her unusual and mesmerizing physical beauty in her early to mid-twenties. The infamous Beresford photographs of 1902 clearly portray a woman blessed with classical features and a gentle, ethereal loveliness, but a far more seductive image of Virginia Woolf the real woman is given (unwittingly) by her brother Adrian in his diary for 1909. Virginia, we are told, has attended a fancy-dress ball at the Botanical Gardens, dressed as Cleopatra:

  She looked very fine in long flowing robes with her hair down, though more like Isolde than Cleopatra.

  Her beauty continued to attract admirers, among them Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, and Philip Morrell, Ottoline’s amorous, unfaithful husband, and, of course, Leonard Woolf, whom she married in 1912. As Virginia entered her forties, her good looks, whilst still feminine, took on a severer quality, reminiscent of her mother’s, and those who knew her continued to regard her as beautiful well into middle age, although as with Julia Stephen before, her appearance became tainted with the legacy of weariness and depression. However, photographs of Virginia in later life, according to her nephew Quentin, did scant justice to their subject: