Virginia Woolf

I

IN HER CHILDHOOD Virginia Woolf was a keen hunter of butterflies and moths. With her brothers and sister she would smear tree trunks with treacle to attract and capture the insects, and then pin their lifelike corpses to cork boards, their wings outspread. It was an interest that persisted into her adult life, and when she discovered that I too was a bug hunter, she insisted that we go hunting together in the fields around Long Barn, our house in Kent, two miles from Knole, my mother’s birthplace. I was nine years old.

One summer’s afternoon when we were sweeping the tall grass with our nets and catching nothing, she suddenly paused, leaning on her bamboo cane as a savage might lean on his assegai, and said to me: What’s it like to be a child? I, taken aback, replied, Well, Virginia, you know what it’s like. You’ve been a child yourself. I don’t know what it’s like to be you, because I’ve never been grown-up. It was the only occasion when I got the better of her, dialectically.

I believe that her motive was to gather copy for her portrait of James in To the Lighthouse, which she was writing at the time, and James was about my own age. She told me that it was not much use thinking back into her own childhood, because little girls are different from little boys. But were you happy as a child? I asked.

I forget what she replied, but now I think I know the answer, since her childhood and youth have been more amply recorded than almost any other. It was not so much unhappy as troubled. Her mother died when she was thirteen, and her half sister when she was fifteen. At twenty-two she lost her father, and two years later her brother Thoby. Another half sister was mentally deranged. Virginia herself, while still quite young, suffered from periods of acute depression and even insanity. She was sexually abused by her half brothers when she was too young to understand what was happening. It was a string of calamities that could have resulted in a youth that was deeply disturbed. But she was courageous, resilient and enterprising. As her early letters and diaries reveal more convincingly than her later recollections, she developed normally enough, and although she was indifferent to social success, she had a gift for friendship, and very early in her life, an impulse to turn every experience into words. It was on the same occasion as our butterfly hunt that she said to me, Nothing has really happened until it has been described. So you must write many letters to your family and friends, and keep a diary. Pain was relieved, and pleasure doubled, by recording it.

Virginia was born in London on January 25, 1882, the third child of Leslie and Julia Stephen. For both her parents it was a second marriage, and each partner inherited, from the other, children born of the first. It is simpler to describe their complex genealogy by a diagram, to which I have added in brackets their ages in 1895, the year when Julia died:

Laura was the mentally unbalanced child, who was treated by her father with scant affection, and after Julia’s death was placed by him in a mental home where she lived until she died at the age of seventy-five. Leslie’s first wife, a daughter of William Thackeray, the novelist, and Julia’s first husband, Herbert Duckworth, a handsome barrister, can have meant little to Virginia apart from the tragedy of their early deaths and the progeny of cousins, chiefly Fishers and Vaughans, which they generated. It was a large family group, from which different members entered Virginia’s life with varying degrees of intimacy and persistence. Emma and Madge Vaughan (the original of Sally in Mrs. Dalloway) were among her earliest friends, but they were not to last long in her affections.

The people who mattered most in her childhood were her parents, her sister Vanessa and her elder brother Thoby. Julia was the daughter of John Jackson, who spent much of his career as a doctor in Calcutta, and Maria Pattle. Like her mother, Julia was one of the most beautiful women of her age.

In her youth she posed for Watts, Burne-Jones, and her aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, the photographer, who has left an image of her that is distinctly pre-Raphaelite, often tragic in countenance, and like Virginia, always beautiful but never pretty. What strikes one most about these portraits is the serenity of her gaze, as if life was a constant test of character which she would survive triumphantly, but this impression may be due to the immobility needed for early photography: one cannot hold a smile longer than an instant without it appearing false. In To the Lighthouse, where Mrs. Ramsay is a close portrait of Julia, Virginia shows us another side of her mother’s character—swift, decisive, impatient of stupidity, quick-tempered but incapable of unkindness. In a memoir dated 1907 she wrote of her parents, Beautiful often, even to our eyes, were their gestures, their glances of pure and unutterable delight in each other. Leslie revered Julia, and she controlled him by her submissiveness. In a sense she was the stronger character of the two, quietly dominating. But Leslie was no weakling. Born the son of Sir James Stephen, a senior civil servant and then a professor of history, he developed from a shy boy into a man who could be formidable, and as a mountaineer, tough. He was ordained a clergyman in his youth but lost his faith and left Cambridge for London, where he earned his living as a literary and political journalist, and became a leading intellectual, the originator and first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography, a friend of Meredith, Henry James, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold and George Eliot. Virginia’s childhood was therefore comfortably upper middle class and intellectually stimulating. They lived in a respectable Kensington cul-de-sac, 22 Hyde Park Gate, where seven servants ran the house under Julia’s direction. The weekly journal Hyde Park Gate News that Virginia and Vanessa began in 1891 and sustained for four years portrays a lively, talented, funny family, in which tensions were cushioned by mutual affection. The older members supported the younger, and the younger amused their elders. Virginia’s talent for fiction developed early. When she was only six or seven, she wrote to her mother (the letter first surfaced in Joanne Trautmann Banks’s Congenial Spirits):

Virginia Woolf in 1902, when she was twenty. A studio photograph by George Beresford. Like her mother, Julia Stephen, Virginia was always beautiful, but never pretty.

Mrs Prinsep says that she will only go in a slow train cos she says all the fast trains have accidents and she told us about an old man of 70 who got his legs caute in the weels of the train and the train began to go on and the old gentleman was draged along till the train caute fire and he called out for somebody to cut off his legs but nobody came he was burnt up. Goodbye. Your loving Virginia.

The legend that Leslie was cantankerous and indifferent to his children is not confirmed by the many references to them in his letters to Julia, now in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library. He called them his ragamice, and Virginia was Ginia: Kiss my ragamice and Ginia. There will be no more of that breed. Little Ginia is already an accomplished flirt. I said today that I must go down to my work. She nestled herself down on the sofa by me, squeezed her little self tightly up against me, and then gazed up with her bright eyes through her shock of hair and said, ‘Don’t go, papa.’ She looked full of mischief all the time. I never saw such a little rogue. My sweet little Ginia. I shall be glad to have her back. My love to all my pets, specially my Ginia. I have been thinking of her all day. Ginia tells me a story every night. And then this, when Virginia was eleven: Yesterday I discussed George III with her. She takes in a great deal, and will really be an author in time.

Their holidays were spent in Cornwall, at St. Ives, where Leslie rented Talland House for thirteen summers until Julia died. It was a curious choice for a man who was not naturally a beachcomber, and was careful with his money. Cornwall was distant from London, and the expense of transporting his large family and several servants was considerable. When they had recovered from the long journey, the children were very happy there, and Leslie showed his kindest side, relaxed and paternal. Two years before her death Virginia wrote, St. Ives gave me all the pure delight which is before my eyes, even at this moment. Every day brought an experience that, if not novel, was treated as a novelty—walking on the moors, swimming, boating, shopping, and playing games, indoor and out. A photograph taken in Cornwall when she was about six shows Virginia sturdy, tomboyish, concentrating on her role as wicket keeper while Adrian batted. Then an incident occurred that was to surface years later in one of her best-loved novels. She recorded it in Hyde Park Gate News: Master Adrian Stephen was much disappointed at not being allowed to go. It was the expedition to Godrevy lighthouse in St. Ives Bay.

When Julia died, life changed for all of them. They found no consolation in religion. Both Virginia’s parents were agnostic. Though their children had sponsors, none of them was baptized. Leslie was exhausted by his grief, and by the tide of relations who washed up at Hyde Park Gate to gratify their benevolence and overwhelm him with excessive sympathy. He would groan aloud at meals, and complain every week when Stella, who had taken on her mother’s role as housekeeper, presented the weekly bills for payment. He went through an extraordinary dramatisation of self-pity, Virginia wrote in recollection. He sank into his chair and sat with his head on his breast. At last, after glancing at a book, he would look up and say half-plaintively, ‘And what are you doing this afternoon, Ginny?’ Never have I felt such rage and frustration.

He was in danger of losing his children’s affection. They felt imprisoned by him. The boys would escape to school, but the girls were housebound. When Stella fell in love with Jack Hills, Leslie’s attitude was like that of Mr. Woodhouse in Emma, thinking only that he would be deprived of her company and help, and when she married, his only consolation was that they took a house across the street. When Stella died, probably of peritonitis, only three months after her wedding, he seemed not particularly to mind. His capacity for grief had been exhausted by Julia’s death, and Vanessa could take over the management of the house, which she did, dutifully and reluctantly.

In later life Virginia would sometimes complain that she was denied the education that was given automatically to boys, but her protests were not consistent nor wholly justified. Once, in middle age, she wrote to Vita Sackville-West, who had reproached her for her lack of jolly vulgarity, that she had had no chance to acquire it. Think how I was brought up! No school; mooning about alone among my father’s books; never any chance to pick up all that goes on in schools—throwing balls; ragging; slang; vulgarities; scenes; jealousies! But would she have become a different, more rounded person if she had experienced all this in company with schoolgirls instead of with her siblings? As for universities, she found academics limp and dull. Visiting Oxford in 1907, when she was twenty-five, she described its atmosphere as quite the chilliest and least human known to me. You see brains floating like so many sea-anemones, nor have they shape or colour, and two years later, after another visit, There were Regius Professors at dinner, and undergraduates who had won prizes without number and were consequently unable to talk. In the Oxford chapter of The Years she lampooned university life brilliantly. She would have been sucked dry by it. Nor was she denied tuition in her youth. Leslie gave her the run of his extensive library, talked to her about what she read, and encouraged her to write, and on those occasions she felt soothed, stimulated, full of love for this unworldly, distinguished, adorable man. He paid for her to take Greek lessons from Janet Case and Latin from Dr. George Warr (my beloved Warr). While Vanessa left daily for art college, Virginia remained alone at the top of the house, puzzling over Homer and Sophocles, line by line with a lexicon, naturally studious, and determined to be a writer.

She discovered for herself the pleasure of dipping deep into the treasury of the language to express her exact meaning, partly by writing essays and a diary, but mainly in the form of letters to her family and friends. Often she would write to her brother Thoby at school and later at Cambridge, and he, remarkably for a schoolboy, kept her letters, unlike those which she wrote to me when I was his age. She acquired a gift for self-mockery and the mocking of others, akin to the juvenile burlesques of Jane Austen, for she found disapproval more amusing than approval, but without malice. London, apart from Leslie’s tantrums, was fun; so was the country. On holiday in Huntingdonshire in 1899, she wrote to Emma Vaughan: "I shall think it a test of friends for