Virginia Woolf

by Gillian Gill

  Her letters show that, by the time Virginia Woolf was in her late teens, she was an isolated and largely silent autodidact, excluded from participation in the communal aspects of learning, thinking, and writing. She was at ease only within the circle of family and in the company of young women who, to a greater or lesser extent, suffered from the same limitations she did. At twenty-two, Virginia Stephen was intellectually primed to start on the career of a professional writer, but she could not. Her father—deaf, depressed, dependent, cancer-ridden—blocked her path.

  Only after Leslie Stephen died, in 1904, and she had recovered from the double psychic shock of missing him terribly and remembering how she had wished him dead, could Virginia Stephen spread her wings and start to soar. Beginning with modest contributions to the women’s section of a religious periodical, she quickly moved on to the Times Literary Supplement, a rare achievement for a woman of her generation. By 1910 her reviews and essays were earning her enough to pay off her doctor’s bills and acquire not just a room but a vacation home of her own in the Sussex countryside.

  Virginia Woolf was eager to compete in the literary marketplace of her time and ready to be judged by its standards. In this she was like her contemporaries Vita Sackville-West, Rebecca West, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Katherine Mansfield. These writers, whose names clearly marked them as female, nonetheless did not relish the label “feminist.” What made Virginia Woolf different, what makes her relevant today, is that she not only saw but also pointed out, publicly, and in print, that whatever you did, it always mattered if you were marked as female or male. Gender was one part of life’s grand equation, Woolf argued, and if there was no female Shakespeare or Dante or Goethe, this was because the literary game, like all of society’s games, had been rigged. To use a contemporary metaphor, the rules had been set by Team M to ensure the victory of Team M, the referee and linesmen all sported the phallic insignia, so what wonder if Team W rarely scored a goal, much less a win?

  From the beginning of her professional career, Virginia Woolf took that hackneyed phrase “Cherchez la femme” as a reading mantra in the review and essay assignments she accepted. This, not her encyclopedic knowledge of English literature and her familiarity with French and ancient Greek, set her apart from her fellow reviewers. To take one famous example from the first volume of The Common Reader, in her essay “The Pastons and Chaucer” Woolf singles out the letters written by the mother of the family, Margaret Paston. Yes, Woolf tells her readers, this woman’s letters are tedious and repetitive, even more so, perhaps, than those of her husband and sons, but they matter because Margaret’s is one of the rare instances of a woman’s voice coming down to us from the fifteenth century. At that time, very few women could read, much less write; books were precious possessions to be locked away, and literary models for women were almost unknown.

  In another essay, Woolf celebrated Jane Austen as that rare woman who had been accepted into the canon of English literature. By the age of fifteen, Woolf points out, Austen was already writing not for her family and schoolroom friends but “for everybody, for nobody, for our age, for her own, in other words, even at that early age, Jane Austen was writing.” Woolf mourns Jane Austen, dead at forty-two when she was just becoming a literary presence, her letters ceremonially burned by her sister to preserve her respectability. In another essay, this time on George Eliot, simply by judicious quotation Woolf suggests how much the savagely rapid decline in that great woman novelist’s reputation after her death was due not just to her sex but to her physical appearance. In the eyes of male critics, the woman Mary Ann Evans was too plain for “George Eliot,” the pen name she chose, to be part of the Great Tradition of English fiction.

  When Virginia Woolf wrote things like that, Leonard Woolf, her husband and partner at the Hogarth Press, published them without enthusiasm. Her intimate friend Vita Sackville-West and her sister Vanessa Bell, who agreed about little else but who both felt threatened in their precarious versions of unconventionality, thought she was losing her mind—again! When Woolf’s feminist call to arms first appeared in the tense interim between two world wars, people were busy debating the rise of fascism and the appeal of Stalinist Russia, and Woolf’s arguments fell largely on deaf ears. For some twenty-five years after her death, Virginia Woolf did not have a big voice in the cultural conversation.

  But all that changed with the rise of the new feminism. In the 1960s, my generation rediscovered Virginia Woolf, and her two short polemical essays A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1931) became inspirational texts. Women teaching women’s history and feminist theory in the new women’s studies departments found in Virginia Woolf a writer who two generations earlier had analyzed, clearly and elegantly, what was confusing and unfair about our lives. We applied what she had said about the barriers facing an imagined English writer called Judith Shakespeare and saw how much greater the barriers were for would-be painters and sculptors and composers and dramatists and film directors born female.

  As Woolf had shone light on Sappho, on Margaret Cavendish, and on Aphra Behn, we took Scheherezade as our founding mother, savored the writing of Lady Murasaki and the nameless woman author of The Pillow Book, and rediscovered the artists Artemisia Gentileschi, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, and Rosa Bonheur. The idea of a woman needing a room of her own became an article of faith, and today almost any issue of the New York Times Book Review—to name just one major publication—that touches on the question of women and writing contains some reference to or quotation from Virginia Woolf.

  As Woolf’s essays and novels entered the new feminist canon, superbly edited collections of Woolf’s diaries and letters also started to appear, and we discovered the woman behind the text. We found that, in equal partnership with her husband, Woolf not only chose and edited books for her private publishing company, the Hogarth Press, but in the early years got her fingers inky from setting type and gluey from attaching book covers made of wallpaper. From Woolf’s letters and diary, we were able to follow from day to day how she mixed work and fun, town and country, solitude and society, men and women. We could follow her as she chronicled, documented, analyzed, criticized, and shaped the famous Bloomsbury group in her dual capacity as founding member and permanent outsider. We could watch her painfully striving to define a core self that was both/and, not either/or, female and male, straight and queer, sensual and pure, proudly independent and happily partnered.

  And then there was the fact that, in a diary she carefully designed to hone her craft and record her world, Woolf never says that each morning she woke up to see if she was sane or mad. Would this be the day when once again she dropped off the edge of reason and crashed into the suicidal abyss where loved ones became demons and death was the only escape?

  Madness is knit into the fabric of Virginia Woolf’s greatness. From the age of thirteen, she suffered from a severe mental illness that was misunderstood by her doctors and exacerbated by the medical treatments they offered. But, and this is the key point, Woolf refused to define herself as a patient, much less a victim. She worked, she produced, she had fun, she found happiness. “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” urged the poet Robert Herrick, and Woolf did, and when they pricked her fingers, she licked off the blood and picked some more.

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  Given the societal constraints she lived under and the chronic mental illness that afflicted her, how did Adeline Virginia Stephen become the great writer Virginia Woolf? Part of the answer, I shall argue in this book, is that Woolf from earliest childhood had known powerful women and had reason to believe she could have power in her turn. Such a belief, in her generation and in ours, has a power of its own.

  A rare combination of hyper-receptivity and icy critique, Woolf got her sense of female greatness from her books and from her family. She descended from a line of affluent, ambitious, enterprising women, and stories about them were passed along the generations. Different female definitions of success came down to the young Virg
inia Stephen as she heard about women like Thérèse Blin de Grincourt de l’Etang, her Franco-Bengali great-great-grandmother, or Adeline de l’Etang Pattle, her Anglo-Indian great-grandmother, or her mother’s cousin Lady Isabella Somerset. Most important of all, Woolf knew, or knew of, two women who, despite everything her mother taught her, had managed to succeed as professional artists as well as wives—Julia Margaret Cameron and Anne Thackeray Ritchie.

  The acclaimed Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, née Pattle, was Julia Stephen’s aunt and namesake, and the young Woolf could get a sense of her great-aunt’s artistic achievement because some of Cameron’s exquisite portraits of Woolf’s mother as a young woman were hung in her Kensington home. That those photographs made their mark is attested by the fact that they would find a place of honor in the various houses Virginia and her sister Vanessa later occupied in Bloomsbury. Julia Cameron, unlike several of her sisters, died before her great-niece Virginia was born, but in 1926 the Hogarth Press issued a volume of Cameron’s photographs, with a brilliant and affectionate essay on Cameron herself by Virginia. And Cameron, in all her exuberant, eccentric creativity, was in a sense reincarnate for the young Virginia Stephen in the person of her adoptive aunt Anne Thackeray Ritchie.

  Anne Thackeray Ritchie, a successful novelist, memoirist, and literary historian, was an occasional but important presence in Stephen family life. The older daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray, Anne was born into the upper reaches of the Anglo-Indian community that had resettled in the south of England in the mid-nineteenth century. As a young woman she became a denizen of what Woolf liked to call Pattledom—the company of writers, painters, scientists, politicians, and industrialists that the Pattle sisters (among them Julia Cameron and Woolf’s maternal grandmother, Maria Pattle Jackson) gathered around them.

  Into the damp, narrow house where Virginia Woolf grew up, Anne Thackeray Ritchie brought a breath of air scented with frangipani, sandalwood, and cardamom, the air of India once breathed by Julia Margaret Cameron and her Pattle sisters. Julia Stephen, Virginia’s mother, had savored that scent as a girl, but by the time Virginia was born, Julia found it too painful to talk about her ancestral Eden, with its nabobs and its artists. This is where Aunt Anny stepped in.

  Like Thackeray Ritchie, Virginia would be not only a writer but a loving and loyal wife, a trusted family member, and a gifted social connector at the heart of England’s cultural world. Like Thackeray Ritchie, Woolf would write essays and reviews that delved deep into the work of women writers of the past, even as she connected to creative, unconventional women in the present, such as the writer Vita Sackville-West, the composer Ethel Smyth, and the theater director Edy Craig. Unlike Thackeray Ritchie, who lost her beloved sister, Minny, at age thirty, Virginia always had Vanessa, and as writer and painter the Stephen sisters cross-pollinated throughout their lives. And if Thackeray Ritchie was a mere echo of the Great Tradition of English fiction, Virginia Woolf, with her novels Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, became part of it.

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  Behind every great woman we can name is a long line of able, energetic, talented women for whom greatness was not an option. For most of history and still today in many parts of the world, the names and achievements of these outstanding women die with them. In this book we see Virginia Woolf as a gleaming link in “a chain of women who, whether willingly or not, had learnt certain traits, certain attitudes from one another through the years,” as her niece Angelica Garnett put it. Because of her fame, because of her achievement, Woolf is that rare woman who allows the women who went before her and stood about her to enter the historical record.

  Legacy and inheritance—the passing on of cultural and financial assets as well as physiological traits from one generation to another—will be a central theme in this book. As a student of the female condition living in the first half of the twentieth century, Woolf was aware that in traditional societies around the world, women had been able to pass to their daughters little more than their given names and their social traditions. It took centuries for Western civilization even to accept that the ovum played an equal role with the sperm, that the womb was more than an inert medium in which the sperm-generated homunculus could develop. Well into the nineteenth century, a woman’s property, inherited and earned, became the property of her husband when she married. Even in Woolf’s generation, women’s earning power was still under severe legal and economic constraints. Given this grim financial reality, as Woolf famously proclaims in A Room of One’s Own, even a small inheritance—say, five hundred pounds a year, in 1920s English pounds—could make the difference between success and failure, fulfillment and frustration. A small inheritance could buy a woman the independence, the freedom of movement, and the opportunities for personal development that free men of all classes have traditionally enjoyed.

  As we shall see, the women in Woolf’s family line, starting with Woolf’s great-great-grandmother Thérèse de l’Etang, born in the eighteenth century, and on to her Garnett great-nieces, born in the twentieth, had the lucky combination of talent and money. These were unusually beautiful, stylish, energetic, enterprising women, and, almost despite their male partners, they reliably passed these traits down to their daughters and their nieces, along with their names—Julia, Adeline, Virginia. Woolf’s women, like Woolf herself, were fortunate enough to inherit the financial resources that enabled them to thrive and make their mark in the cultural ledger.

  Each of the women we will meet in this book is a window onto Virginia Woolf’s landscape. Her ancestors Thérèse and Adeline are small windows thick with bull’s-eyes. Her surrogate aunt Anny Thackeray Ritchie is a high casement opened wide to the winds. One half-sister, Stella Duckworth, has panes blurred with tears; the other half-sister, Laura Stephen, is a basement window largely bricked up. Her mother, Julia, and her sister, Vanessa, are tall French doors giving onto the garden and thence out to the Cornish sea and the South Downs of Sussex, where Woolf summered and pleasured, read and wrote. Each of these women bequeathed something to Virginia Woolf. To her abiding sorrow, Woolf had no children of the body, but she passed that legacy on to the children and grandchildren of her mind—to us.

  By looking at Woolf’s womenfolk I hope we will better see our own, biological or chosen. Some we have known. Some we seem to have forgotten. Some, out of the blue, emerge from a diary or a little packet of letters hidden in a suitcase. Some are encoded in our genome. All do something to make us what we are. Following in Woolf’s footsteps, using all our modern sources of information, we can go looking for them.

  Part I

  The Pattle Legacy

  From Calcutta to Kensington to Dimbola

  Virginia Woolf’s Maternal Lineage

  Five generations of women in the family of Virginia Woolf

  1

  Virginia Woolf’s Indian Ancestresses—Thérèse de l’Etang and Adeline Pattle

  A TRADITION in the family of Virginia Woolf had it that the aristocratic beauty of the women on her mother’s side could be traced back to her great-great-grandmother Thérèse Blin de Grincourt. She was a late-eighteenth-century heiress who married the Chevalier Ambroise-Pierre-Antoine de l’Etang. That Virginia Woolf had a touch of the French aristocracy is one of the little themes that come up in her own letters and in those of her sister Vanessa Bell. To her composer friend Ethel Smyth, for example, Woolf wrote, “If you want to know where I get my (ahem!) charm, read Herbert Fisher’s [her politician first cousin’s] autobiography. Marie Antoinette loved my ancestor; hence he was exiled; hence the Pattles, the barrel that burst and finally Virginia.” We shall be finding out about that barrel later in this chapter.

  A few stories about her great-great-grandparents Thérèse and Antoine de l’Etang came down to Virginia Woolf, wrapped in gossamer and giving off a faint but intoxicating scent of palaces—the apple blossom and lavender of Marie Antoinette’s Petit Trianon, the jasmine and frangipani of the Nawab of Oudh’s palace at Lucknow. Thus, in he
r introductory essay to the Hogarth Press’s volume of the photographs of her great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron—one of Thérèse de l’Etang’s granddaughters—Virginia Woolf wrote, “Antoine de l’Etang was one of Marie Antoinette’s pages, who had been with the Queen in prison till her death and was only saved by his own youth from the guillotine. With his wife, who had been one of the Queen’s ladies, he was exiled to India and it is at Ghazipur, with the miniature that Marie Antoinette gave him laid upon his breast, that he lies buried.”

  Note how, in this version, perhaps recounted to Virginia by her mother, Julia Jackson Stephen, or her maternal grandmother, Maria Pattle Jackson, the beautiful ancestress is a French aristocrat whom misfortune brings to India.