Thus we came to the church where my fathers lie buried. The famous stone Carver, Ralph of Norwich, has lately wrought a tomb for my grandfather, and it lies almost finished now, above his body; and the candles were flaring upright in the dim church when we entered. We knelt and whispered prayers for his soul; and then my father withdrew in talk with Sir John; and left me to my favourite task of spelling out the names and gazing down at the features of my dead kinsmen and ancestors. As a child I know the stark white figures used to frighten me; especially when I could read that they bore my name; but now that I know that they never move from their backs, and keep their hands crossed always, I pity them; and would fain do some small act that would give them pleasure. It must be something secret, and unthought of — a kiss or a stroke, such as you give a living person.
MEMOIRS OF A NOVELIST
When Miss Willatt died, in October 1884, it was felt, as her biographer puts it, ‘that the world had a right to know more of an admirable though retiring woman.’ From the choice of adjectives it is clear that she would not have wished it herself unless one could have convinced her that the world would be the gainer. Perhaps, before she died, Miss Linsett did convince her, for the two volumes of life and letters which that lady issued were produced with the sanction of the family. If one chose to take the introductory phrase and moralise upon it one might ask a page full of interesting questions. What right has the world to know about men and women? What can a biographer tell it? and then, in what sense can it be said that the world profits? The objection to asking these questions is not only that they take so much room, but that they lead to an uncomfortable vagueness of mind. Our conception of the world is that it is a round ball, coloured green where there are fields and forests, wrinkled blue where there is sea, with little peaks pinched up upon it, where there are mountain ranges. When we are asked to imagine the effect of Miss Willatt or another upon this object, the enquiry is respectful but without animation. Yet, if it would be [a] waste of time to begin at the beginning and ask why lives are written, it may not be entirely without interest to ask why the life of Miss Willatt was written, and so to answer the question, who she was.
Miss Linsett, although she cloaked her motives under large phrases, had some stronger impulse at the back of her. When Miss Willatt died, ‘after fourteen years of unbroken friendship,’ Miss Linsett (if we may theorise) felt uneasy. It seemed to her that if she did not speak at once something would be lost. At the same time no doubt other thoughts pressed upon her; how pleasant mere writing is, how important and unreal people become in print so that it is a credit to have known them; how one’s own figure can have justice done to it — but the first feeling was the most genuine. When she looked out of the window as she drove back from the funeral, she felt first that it was strange, and then that it was unseemly, that the people in the street should pass, whistling some of them, and all of them looking indifferent. Then, naturally, she had letters from ‘mutual friends’; the editor of a newspaper asked her to write an appreciation in a thousand words; and at last she suggested to Mr William Willatt that someone ought to write his sister’s life. He was a solicitor, with no literary experience, but did not object to other people’s writing so long as they did not ‘break down the barriers’; in short Miss Linsett wrote the book which one may still buy with luck in the Charing Cross Road.
It does not seem, to judge by appearances, that the world has so far made use of its right to know about Miss Willatt. The volumes had got themselves wedged between Sturm ‘On the Beauties of Nature’ and the ‘Veterinary Surgeon’s Manual’ on the outside shelf, where the gas cracks and the dust grimes them, and people may read so long as the boy lets them. Almost unconsciously one begins to confuse Miss Willatt with her remains and to condescend a little to these shabby, slipshod volumes. One has to repeat that she did live once, and it would be more to the purpose could one see what she was like then than to say (although it is true) that she is slightly ridiculous now.
Who was Miss Willatt then? It is likely that her name is scarcely known to the present generation; it is a mere chance whether one has read any of her books. They lie with the three-volume novels of the sixties and the seventies upon the topmost shelves of little seaside libraries, so that one has to take a ladder to reach them, and a cloth to wipe off the dust.
She was born in 1823, and was the daughter of a solicitor in Wales. They lived for part of the year near Tenby, where her father had his office, and she ‘came out’ at a ball given by the officers of the local Masonic Guild in the Town Hall, at Pembroke. Although Miss Linsett takes thirty six pages to cover these seventeen years, she hardly mentions them. True, she tells us how the Willatts were descended from a merchant in the sixteenth century, who spelt his name with a V; and how Frances Ann, the novelist, had two uncles, one of whom invented a new way of washing sheep, and the other ‘will long be remembered by his parishioners. It is said that even the very poorest wore some piece of mourning... in memory of “the good Parson.”’ But these are merely biographer’s tricks - a way of marking time, during those chill early pages when the hero will neither do nor say anything ‘characteristic’. For some reason we are told little of Mrs Willatt, daughter of Mr Josiah Bond, a respected linendraper, who, at a later date seems to have bought ‘a place’. She died when her only daughter was sixteen; there were two sons, Frederic, who died before his sister, and William, the solicitor, who survived her. It is perhaps worth while to say these things, although they are ugly and no one will remember them, because they help us somehow to believe in the otherwise visionary youth of our heroine. When Miss Linsett is forced to talk of her and not of her uncles, this is the result. ‘Frances, thus, at the age of sixteen, was left without a mother’s care. We can imagine how the lonely girl, for even the loving companionship of father and brothers could not fill that place [but we know nothing about Mrs Willatt] sought for consolation in solitude, and, wandering among the heaths and dunes where the castles of an earlier age are left to crumble into ruins, &c &c.’ Mr William Willatt’s contribution to his sister’s biography is surely more to the purpose. ‘My sister was a shy awkward girl, much given to “mooning.” It was a standing joke in the family that she had once walked into the pigsty, mistaking it for the wash house, and had not discovered her whereabouts until Grunter (the old black sow) ate her book out of her hands. With reference to her studious habits, I should say that these were always very marked.... I may mention the fact that any act of disobedience was most effectually punished by the confiscation of her bedroom candle, by the light of which it was her habit to read in bed. I well remember, as a small boy, the look of my sister’s figure as she leant out of bed, book in hand, so as to get the benefit of the chink of light which came through the door from the other room where our nurse was sewing. In this way she read the whole of Bright’s history of the Church, always a favourite book with her. I am afraid that we did not always treat her studies with respect.... She was not generally considered handsome, although she had (at the date of which I speak) a nearly perfect arm.’ With respect to this last remark, an important one, we can consult the likeness which some local artist made of Miss Willatt at the age of seventeen. It needs no insight to affirm that it is not a face that would have found favour in the Pembroke Town Hall in 1840. A heavy plait of hair, (which the artist has made to shine) coils round the brow; she has large eyes, but they are slightly prominent; the lips are full, without being sensuous; the one feature which, when comparing her face with the faces of her friends, generally gave her courage, is the nose; perhaps someone had said in her hearing that it was a fine nose — a bold nose for a woman to have; at any rate her portraits, with one exception, are in profile.
We can imagine (to steal Miss Linsett’s useful phrase) that this ‘shy awkward girl much given to mooning’ who walked in to pigsties, and read history instead of fiction, did not enjoy her first ball. Her brother’s words evidently sum up what was in the air as they drove home. She found some angle in the g
reat ball room where she could half hide her large figure, and there she waited to be asked to dance. She fixed her eyes upon the festoons which draped the city arms and tried to fancy that she sat on a rock with the bees humming round her; she bethought her how no one in that room perhaps knew as well as she did what was meant by the Oath of Uniformity; then she thought how in sixty years, or less perhaps, the worm would feed upon them all; then she wondered whether somehow before that day, every man now dancing there would not have reason to respect her. She wrote to Miss Ellen Buckle, to whom all her early letters are addressed, that ‘disappointment is mixed with our pleasures, wisely enough, so that we may not forget &c &c.’ And yet, it is likely that among all that company who danced in the Town Hall and are now fed on by the worm, Miss Willatt would have been the best to talk to, even if one did not wish to dance with her. Her face is heavy, but it is intelligent.
This impression is on the whole borne out by her letters, it is now ten o’clock, and I have come up to bed; but I shall write to you first.... It has been a heavy but I trust not an unprofitable day.... Ah, my dearest friend, for you are dearest, how should I bear the secrets of my soul and the weight of what the poet calls this “unintelligible world” without you to impart them to?’ One must brush aside a great deal of tarnished compliment, and then one gets a little further into Miss Willatt’s mind. Until she was eighteen or so she had not realised that she had any relationship to the world; with self-consciousness came the need of settling the matter, and, consequently, a terrible depression. Without more knowledge than Miss Willatt gives us, we can only guess how she came by her conceptions of human nature and right and wrong. From histories she got a general notion of pride, avarice and bigotry; in the Waverley novels she read about love. These ideas vaguely troubled her. Lent religious works by Miss Buckle, she learnt, with relief, how one may escape the world, and at the same time earn everlasting joy. There was never to be a greater saint than she was, by the simple device of saying, before she spoke or acted, is this right? The world then was very hideous, for the uglier she found it the more virtuous she became. ‘Death was in that house, and Hell yawned before it,’ she wrote, having passed, one evening, a room with crimson windows and heard the voices of dancers within; but the sensations with which she wrote were not entirely painful. Nevertheless her seriousness only half protected her, and left space for innumerable torments. ‘Am I the only blot upon the face of nature?’ she asked in May, 1841. ‘The birds are carolling outside my windows, the very insects are putting off the winter’s dross.’ She alone was ‘heavy as unleavened bread’. A terrible self-consciousness possessed her, and she writes to Miss Buckle as though she watched her shadow trembling over the entire world, beneath the critical eyes of the angels. It was humped and crooked and swollen with evil, and it taxed the powers of both the young women to put it straight. ‘What would I not give to help you?’ writes Miss Buckle. Our difficulty as we read now is to understand what their aim was; for it is clear that they imagined a state in which the soul lay tranquil and in bliss, and that if one could reach it one was perfect. Was it beauty that they were feeling for? As, at present, neither of them had any interest except in virtue, it is possible that aesthetic pleasure disguised had part in their religion. When they lay in these trances they were at any rate out of their surroundings. But the only pleasure that they allowed themselves to feel was the pleasure of submission.
Here, unfortunately, we come to an abyss. Ellen Buckle, as was likely, for she was less disgusted with the world than her friend and more capable of shifting her burdens on to human shoulders, married an engineer by whom her doubts were set at rest for ever. At the same time Frances had a strange experience of her own, which is concealed by Miss Linsett, in the most provoking manner conceivable, in the following passage. ‘No one who has read the book (Life’s Crucifix) can doubt that the heart which conceived the sorrows of Ethel Eden in her unhappy attachment had felt some of the pangs so feelingly described itself-, so much we may say, more we may not.’ The most interesting event in Miss Willatt’s life, owing to the nervous prudery and the dreary literary conventions of her friend, is thus a blank. Naturally, one believes that she loved, hoped and saw her hopes extinguished, but what happened and what she felt we must guess. Her letters at this time are incurably dull, but that is partly because the word love and whole passages polluted by it, have shrunk into asterisks. There is no more talk of unworthiness and ‘O might I find a retreat from the world I would then consider myself blessed’; death disappears altogether; she seems to have entered upon the second stage of her development, when, theories absorbed or brushed aside, she sought only to preserve herself. Her father’s death, in 1855, is made to end a chapter, and her removal to London, where she kept house for her brothers in a Bloomsbury Square begins the next one.
At this point we can no longer disregard what has been hinted several times; it is clear that one must abandon Miss Linsett altogether, or take the greatest liberties with her text. What with ‘a short sketch of the history of Bloomsbury may not be amiss,’ accounts of charitable societies and their heroes, a chapter upon Royal visits to the hospital, praise of Florence Nightingale in the Crimea, we see only a wax work as it were of Miss Willatt preserved under glass. One is just on the point of shutting up the book for ever, when a reflection bids one pause; the whole affair is, after all, extraordinarily odd. It seems incredible that human beings should think that these things are true of each other, and if not[,] that they should take the trouble to say them. ‘She was justly esteemed for her benevolence, and her strict uprightness of character, which however never brought upon her the reproach of hardness of heart.... She was fond of children animals and the spring, and Wordsworth was among her ‘bedside poets’... Although she felt his (her father’s) death with the tenderness of a devoted daughter, she did not give way to useless and therefore selfish repining.... The poor, it might be said, took the place to her of her own children.’ To pick out such phrases is an easy way of satirising them, but the steady drone of the book in which they are imbedded makes satire an afterthought; it is the fact that Miss Linsett believed these things and not the absurdity of them that dismays one. She believed at any rate that one should admire such virtues and attribute them to one’s friends both for their sake and for one’s own; to read her therefore is to leave the world in daylight, and to enter a closed room, hung with claret coloured plush, and illustrated with texts. It would be interesting to discover what prompted this curious view of human life, but it is hard enough to rid Miss Willatt of her friend’s disguises without enquiring where she found them. Happily there are signs that Miss Willatt was not what she seemed. They creep out in the notes, in her letters, and most clearly in her portraits. The sight of that large selfish face, with the capable forehead and the surly but intelligent eyes, discredits all the platitudes on the opposite page; she looks quite capable of having deceived Miss Linsett.
When her father died (she had always disliked him) her spirits rose, and she determined to find scope for the ‘great powers of which I am conscious’ in London. Living in a poor neighbourhood, the obvious profession for a woman in those days was to do good; and Miss Willatt devoted herself at first with exemplary vigour. Because she was unmarried she set herself to represent the unsentimental side of the community; if other women brought children into the world, she would do something for their health. She was in the habit of checking her spiritual progress, and casting up her accounts in the blank pages at the end of her diary, where one notes one’s weight, and height and the number of one’s watch; and she has often to rebuke her ‘unstable spirit that is always seeking to distract me, and asking Whither?’ Perhaps therefore she was not so well content with her philanthropy as Miss Linsett would have us believe. ‘Do I know what happiness is?’ she asks in 1859, with rare candour, and answers after thinking it over, ‘No.’ To imagine her then, as the sleek sober woman that her friend paints her, doing good wearily but with steadfast faith, is quite untru
e; on the contrary she was a restless and discontented woman, who sought her own happiness rather than other people’s. It was then that she bethought her of literature, taking the pen in hand, at the age of thirty-six, more to justify her complicated spiritual state than to say what must be said. It is clear that her state was complicated, even if we hesitate, remote as we are, to define it. She found at any rate that she had ‘no vocation’ for philanthropy, and told the Rev. R. S. Rogers so in an interview ‘that was painful and agitating to us both’ on February the 14th 1856. But, in owning that, she admitted that she was without many virtues, and it was necessary to prove, to herself at least, that she had others. After all, merely to sit with your eyes open fills the brain, and perhaps in emptying it, one may come across something illuminating. George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë between them must share the parentage of many novels at this period, for they disclosed the secret that the precious stuff of which books are made lies all about one, in drawing-rooms and kitchens where women live, and accumulates with every tick of the clock.
Miss Willatt adopted the theory that no training is necessary, but thought it indecent to describe what she had seen, so that instead of a portrait of her brothers (and one had led a very queer life) or a memory of her father (for which we should have been grateful) she invented Arabian lovers and set them on the banks of the Orinoco. She made them live in an ideal community, for she enjoyed framing laws, and the scenery was tropical, because one gets one’s effects quicker there than in England. She could write pages about ‘mountains that looked like ramparts of cloud, save for the deep blue ravines that cleft their sides, and the diamond cascades that went leaping and flashing, now golden, now purple, as they entered the shade of the pine forests and passed out into the sun, to lose themselves in a myriad of streams upon the flower enamelled pasturage at their base.’ But when she had to face her lovers, and the talk of the women in the tents at sundown when the goats came in to be milked, and the wisdom of ‘that sage old man who had witnessed too many births and deaths to rejoice at the one or lament at the other’ then she stammered and blushed perceptibly. She could not say ‘I love you,’ but used ‘thee’ and ‘thou,’ which, with their indirectness, seemed to hint that she was not committing herself. The same self-consciousness made it impossible for her to think herself the Arab or his bride, or any one indeed except the portentous voice that linked the dialogues, and explained how the same temptations assail us under the tropical stars and beneath the umbrageous elms of England.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 263