Virginia Woolf

by Gillian Gill

  There is a definite irony in this considerable legacy. There is nothing in the record to suggest that Laura’s sisters and brothers had ever shown any love, sympathy, or even pity for her. Vanessa, who was nine or ten when Laura left the family, certainly remembered her but firmly put those memories away. Virginia, some three years younger than Vanessa, did volunteer some memories to the Memoir Club in the 1920s. Describing the house at 22 Hyde Park Gate where she had been born and spent her first twenty-three years, Woolf recalls that it accommodated not one household but three, for besides the three Duckworths and the six Stephens, “there was Thackeray’s grand-daughter, a vacant-eyed girl whose idiocy was becoming daily more obvious, who could hardly read, who would throw scissors into the fire, who was tongue-tied and stammered and yet had to appear at the table with the rest of us.”

  Virginia Woolf was famous for her frankness, her willingness to put the unspeakable into words, but she cannot bring herself to say “my half-sister Laura Stephen.” Did she herself see the throwing of scissors, or is she merely using for narrative effect details picked up from her parents’ letters or passed on by her older siblings and half-siblings? The phrase “Thackeray’s grand-daughter” makes of Laura Stephen not a tragically handicapped human being but a kind of cruel joke played by fate on an illustrious writer, and one that another illustrious writer can best appreciate.

  Woolf’s remark about there being three households at Hyde Park Gate indicates that, by the time she was getting to know her Kensington world, Laura was hidden away. During the holidays in St. Ives, however, in a smaller, more horizontal house with open doors and windows, things were different. Laura was taken along to Cornwall, or sent by train on what was a complicated journey requiring several changes of train and platform. One summer, Laura got off the train at the wrong place but managed to negotiate her way to St. Ives. This incident again suggests that Laura’s mental incapacity and inability to communicate were exaggerated.

  For years, Laura was certainly there at Talland House, hovering at the edge of the family cricket game, sitting on the family’s little private beach, playing in the sand as she had done once long ago with her mother at Freshwater, singing perhaps in a little moment of pleasure, casting a shadow even when people did their best to ignore her. In all the evocations of the summers at St. Ives that Virginia Woolf wrote in her fiction and in her autobiographical essays, she never mentions Laura. Her presence would destroy the remembered magic of Talland House, so it is edited out.

  But it is easier to excise a person from a memoir than from memory. Virginia Woolf was an exceptionally observant, sensitive, and articulate child and she certainly saw, heard, and took note of the fate of her half-sister. When Laura disappeared from the family, Virginia was perhaps ten. Who knows exactly what she was told, but as she grew up some news of her sister would surely have come her way after different family members returned from their visits to the mental institution. At fifteen, blindsided by the deaths of her mother and her sister Stella, Virginia had a bout of suicidal madness, and thereafter she lived with the nightmare that she herself might be condemned to live with mad people or die in a madhouse like cousin Jem. The mere sight of “idiots” caused her to feel repugnance and panic. Had she ever gone to the asylum at Edgehill or Southgate with her mother or her father or her sister Stella, Virginia might have looked into Laura’s face and seen a likeness—the long, thin figure, the Stephen nose, their father’s nose, her nose. She did not go.

  ❧

  One of Leslie Stephen’s last memories of his first wife, Minny, was of her sitting in a sunny Alpine meadow and playing happily with “Memee.” This name touchingly combines “me,” “Mummy,” and m’aimer, and Laura probably coined it for herself.

  Love is often not enough in life, and Minny might not have been able to save her daughter from what society termed “insanity,” but there can be no doubt that, had Minny lived, Laura would have continued to know love. Minny’s father, William Makepeace Thackeray, had been unable to save his wife from her madness, but Isabella Thackeray lived out her long life in her own home with responsible caregivers, and when she was dying, her daughter Anny was by her side, holding her hand. Julia Stephen was there too, united in female love and friendship. Minny Thackeray Stephen, counseled by her sister, would have tried to find a similarly humane solution for her daughter, and we know that Minny was a woman with a strong will, a good mind, and ample means.

  When we compare the life of mad Isabella Thackeray to that of her supposedly mad granddaughter, and even to that of Virginia Woolf, it becomes all too apparent that, in the history of mental health, progress does not follow a simple upward curve, and care too often depends on the individual decisions and actions of family members.

  Part III

  The Angels of Hyde Park Gate

  8

  Julia Prinsep Jackson Duckworth Stephen

  Virginia Woolf became a novelist in part because, through imaginative projection and writerly craft, fiction enabled her to feel close to her dead mother. Sustained versions of Julia Stephen occur in The Voyage Out (1915), Jacob’s Room (1922), and To the Lighthouse (1927). Fragments of her pop up in other novels.

  Woolf had a kind of adoration for her mother, but as the sixth of Julia’s seven children, in a family where Father came first, Grandma a close second, and sons counted for more than daughters, Woolf did not know her mother in even the quotidian yet intense way that the lucky ones among us know our mothers.

  To be close to Mother, to hold her undivided attention, to feel an intimate bond with her, was something that Virginia and Vanessa Stephen did not have as children. It was something they yearned for, especially since they could see that each of their four brothers, in different ways and at different times, had it. The lack of that primal bond punched a hole in the emotional fabric of both sisters, and they suffered from it all their lives.

  Julia Stephen with Virginia. Of all the pictures in Leslie Stephen’s family album of Julia with her children as babies, this is by far the most beautiful. It is attributed to H. H. Cameron, possibly one of Julia Cameron’s sons.

  From toddlerhood, Virginia was an exceptionally quick, articulate, vivid, affectionate child. By roaring and wailing and climbing out onto window ledges, she did everything she could to attract attention, but in the big household at 22 Hyde Park Gate, she could never hold it for long. “Can I remember ever being alone with [my mother] for more than a few minutes?” Woolf later asked herself, and she was almost glad when she fell ill as a child, since then Julia would come to her bedside and take care of her. At other times there was always someone barging in to demand Julia’s immediate attention, and getting it—a sibling, a visitor, a supplicant, a servant, a dog, Father! Julia Stephen, Woolf tells us, “was living on such an extended surface that she had no time nor strength” for her daughters. The Stephen family snap of Julia and Leslie sitting side by side on the couch and reading intently, with little Virginia’s face peeping up behind them, is emblematic of the way Virginia interacted with her parents—with easy familiarity but largely unnoticed.

  Virginia peeps up from behind the sofa where her parents are reading.

  In her memoir essay “22 Hyde Park Gate,” Woolf refuses to blame her mother. She had worshiped her as a child, and, as an adult, she still adores her—so quick, so funny, so definite, so active, and so very beautiful. As Virginia remembered it, life with Mother, the first thirteen years of her life, had been happiness for everyone. It was a humdrum happiness, an organized and choreographed succession of events, which could be boring, like the daily winter walks in Kensington Gardens, painful, like the visits to the dentist, or joyful, like the annual transfer of the whole big clan to St. Ives in Cornwall for the summer, but always reliable. “What a jumble of things I can remember [of Mother],” writes Woolf, “but they are all of her in company; of her surrounded; of her generalized; dispersed; omnipresent, of her as the creator of that crowded, merry world which spun so gaily at the center of my chi
ldhood.”

  But then, quite suddenly in 1895, Julia Stephen died at the age of forty-nine, and of that merry world “nothing was left. In its place a dark cloud settled over us; we seemed to sit all together cooped up, solemn, unreal, under a haze of heavy emotion . . . a finger was laid on our lips.” For Virginia her mother’s death seemed the greatest tragedy imaginable. She was traumatized into silence and amnesia, her precious memories of her mother overlaid by the pious, black-edged version of Julia enshrined in the memorial volume her father put together for the edification of her and her siblings, which they would name the Mausoleum Book.

  It was not until 1909 that Woolf felt able to make her first attempt to free Julia Stephen from the textual mausoleum Leslie Stephen had constructed, and only with the publication of To the Lighthouse could Woolf finally lay her mother’s ghost. By this point, a fierce rejection of the Victorian past had swept over England, and in all too many ways Julia Stephen was the personification of Victorian values. By the late 1920s it was all too clear that, for a Virginia Woolf as we know her to come into existence, her mother had had to die young. Could anyone imagine Julia Stephen allowing a fortuneless Jew like Leonard Woolf to come within hailing distance of one of her daughters?

  As the mother of a daughter and an admirer of Virginia Woolf, I confess I find it hard to forgive Julia Stephen for failing to see anything special in this daughter. Why could the woman not give up a couple of her paupers and neglect a few of her invalids and offer this marvelous child the attention and focused affection she craved and needed and deserved? But there are two sides to every mother-daughter dyad, and before we choose sides, it behooves us to dive deeper into the short and complicated life of Julia Prinsep Jackson Duckworth Stephen. We owe it to the woman who shaped the young Virginia so powerfully to gather the known facts and piece together a story that is neither the Golden Legend of her biographer husband nor the modernist refractions of her novelist daughter. If we start at the beginning—in Pattledom, where Woolf’s parents played out the first act of the complex drama of their lives—perhaps we can understand if not forgive.

  ❧

  For the teenage girl Julia Jackson, Pattledom, the vibrant social group that gathered around her Pattle aunts Sarah Prinsep and Julia Cameron, had been home as long as she could remember. The first glimpses that the thirty-year-old struggling journalist Leslie Stephen had of Julia were around 1864 when he came as an occasional, unimportant visitor to the Prinseps in Kensington and the Camerons on the Isle of Wight.

  Among the seven Pattle sisters, Julia’s mother, Maria, was considered by many to be second in beauty only to her younger sister Virginia, Countess Somers, but Maria did not soar into the peerage. Instead she married John Jackson, a doctor in the medical branch of the East India Company in Bengal. According to Lady Strachey, Lytton’s mother, who had known all the Pattles back in their India days, John Jackson was a handsome and engaging man, so perhaps Maria married for love. But this was a period when doctors were more like barbers than lawyers in status; they entered private homes by the tradesman’s entrance, and Jackson was poorly remunerated. In their early years of marriage the Jacksons lived in Calcutta (Kolkata), where Maria had been born and where her sisters were already queens of society. It was there that she and John Jackson had three daughters, Adeline, Mary, and Julia.

  When the two older Jackson girls were old enough, they went to England to live with their Pattle aunts. Sending small children back “home” from India for their safety was not uncommon at that time, but when, claiming ill health, Mrs. Jackson left India with her toddler daughter Julia, never to return, she was doing something a little bold and unusual. She was striking out on her own to a new continent and a new culture, as her grandmother Thérèse de l’Etang and her mother, Adeline Pattle, had done before her, and thereby making the key decision that her three daughters should all be English, not Anglo-Indian. Her inherited share of the Pattle estate made Maria financially independent of her husband, and with the help of her more affluent older sisters, she was able to set up her own household in the south of England.

  Life on two continents may have flouted the conventions a little, but it seems to have suited the Jacksons. According to the sparse information we have on him, Dr. Jackson found his medical practice and research in infectious disease absorbing, and he proved remarkably resistant to the infections that killed off so many Europeans every year in India. When Jackson was offered the paid leave due him, he declined to leave Bengal and rejoin his wife and daughters in England for even a few months. Virginia Woolf and Quentin Bell would have liked their ancestor much more if he had had a local concubine or some servant boys to fill in for an absent wife, but Jackson was reportedly a very religious man, and family documents give no hint of scandal. Certainly, when at last Dr. Jackson retired from the Indian army medical corps and returned to England, he lived in amity with his wife in rented homes, most latterly in salubrious Brighton. Maria, though ailing and immobile, was a charming hostess and managed to compete a little with her sisters Sarah and Julia by welcoming guests like Anne Thackeray and attracting her own small circle of devotees. As we shall see, the rising poet Coventry Patmore was foremost among the young men who gathered around Maria Jackson.

  By the time of Dr. Jackson’s return to family life, his older daughters were on the edge of matrimony, and the youngest Jackson girl, Julia, had no memory at all of her father. Julia had come to regard her uncle Henry Thoby Prinsep as father in all but name and would remain deeply attached to him all her life. When she and Leslie Stephen had their first son, he was named Julian Thoby Stephen, and always known as Thoby. After Julia’s death, her uncle Thoby Prinsep’s cane was found in its usual place, next to her bedside.

  Leslie Stephen stood on the edge of the illustrious crowd of people gathered at Dimbola Lodge and at Little Holland House, and he was intimidated by the beauty of the Pattle women and the high social and intellectual caliber of the men they and their husbands attracted to their homes. When he first set eyes on Maria Pattle Jackson’s youngest daughter, Julia, Leslie Stephen thought she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, and he watched Julia from a cautious distance, observing the relationships she had with her parents and sisters. Some thirty years later, Leslie Stephen’s reactions to the Jackson family were still fresh in his mind, and he recorded them in the Mausoleum Book; his observations shed important light on the balance of parental power during the childhood of Virginia Woolf.

  Stephen observed that it pleased the titular and revered overlords of Pattledom, Henry Thoby Prinsep in Kensington and Charles Hay Cameron in Freshwater, to give their wives free rein. Prinsep was reserved and often ill. Cameron, a tall, strange old man, wrapped in shawls against the sea winds, hid as much as possible from his wife’s friends and her camera, and observed her wild extravagance and restless energy with wry amusement. Adoring their husbands, happy to pay obeisance to patriarchal power, and reveling in the affluence that India had afforded their families, Sarah Prinsep and Julia Cameron were free to do much as they liked, to entertain and be extremely decorative, to “drape and arrange, pull down and build up, and carry on life in a high-handed and adventurous way,” as Virginia Woolf would later put it. But what most struck contemporaries about the Pattle women was the intensity of their attachment to one another. The sisters indulged in a regular round of visits to one another’s homes, and when apart they were in daily communication by letter, or later, telegram. Even in an age when large Victorian families like those of Queen Victoria and Florence Nightingale hung together like small clans, the Pattles took sister-sister, mother-daughter, aunt-niece relationships to a new level.

  Looking back on Pattledom in 1895, Leslie Stephen remembered that one family member stood outside this charmed circle of husband worship and sisterly affection—Dr. John Jackson. The man was perfectly respectable, even jolly, and yet he sat in the wings, leaving the stage to his beautiful wife and daughters and largely ignored by his wife’s relatives and their frie
nds. Leslie Stephen noticed this because he stood outside as well. In Leslie Stephen’s words, written thirty years on, “Somehow Jackson did not seem to count—as fathers generally count in their families. Mrs Jackson was passionately devoted to her children and was, beyond all doubt, a thoroughly good wife. But I could not perceive that she was romantic as a wife. The old doctor was respected or esteemed rather than ardently loved—or so I fancied. And this was the more obvious because of the strength of the other family affections.”

  Stephen himself came from a family structured on almost biblical patriarchal lines, and he lived at a time when a man like his older brother, Sir Fitzjames Stephen, could create a panic over the boiled beef and carrots at lunchtime by simply raising an eyebrow. It is thus unsurprising that it struck Leslie Stephen as anomalous, even heretical, how little John Jackson “counted” with his wife and daughters, how little affection he inspired in the breasts of his extravagantly affectionate womenfolk. And it is not happenstance that this old memory came back strongly to Leslie in the agonizing months following Julia’s death.

  While explicitly eulogizing his dead wife’s manifold perfections for the benefit of her children, Leslie Stephen was implicitly probing the truth of their marriage. While asserting his scholarly expertise by collecting documents, putting dates and facts together, and refraining from conclusions, Leslie yet shows a dim and painful awareness that in fact he was to his own family what Jackson had been to his—indulged yet peripheral, almost superfluous. Julia had allowed Leslie the familial primacy he needed and demanded, but had it perhaps been merely an appearance of primacy? Was it possible that Julia’s “ardent love” had not been for him but for the women in her family and her woman friends? Was it even possible that his first wife, dear little Minny, who kept her sister by her side for seven years of their eight-year marriage and had a large circle of female friends, had done the same? Was there a pattern of female love and friendship here that a different biographer, a different memoirist, might uncover?