Virginia Woolf

by Gillian Gill

  Her husband’s death had destroyed a happiness that Julia Duckworth had assumed to be her inheritance. It changed her understanding of life and her place in the world, and in this change, a perverse, masochistic form of egotism played its part along with grief and loss. This egotism would have a profound effect upon her daughters, on Stella in particular. God had played a cruel trick upon Julia, and she was sure that she had not deserved it. Ergo, as she firmly and irrevocably decided, there was no God, there was no heaven, there was no salvation, there was no joy. There was only affection, only duty, only self-sacrifice, only pain. Julia Duckworth told her suitor Leslie that for her the world after Herbert’s death was forever “clothed in drab . . . shrouded in a crape veil.” She lived her words.

  Proximity, as we have seen, was perhaps the first thing that permitted the relationship between Leslie and Julia to grow into friendship, then marriage. Anne and Minny Thackeray had known Julia Jackson as a teenage girl. When Herbert died, Anny came to Julia with sympathy and support. After Minny died, Julia reached out to Anny in turn and supported her in her grief. The Thackeray sisters, who had been so happy with their father in Kensington, had inherited from their grandmother an income property in the new development at Hyde Park Gate. Thus it seemed only natural for Anne, her brother-in-law, Leslie, and little Laura to move to Hyde Park Gate and be close to Julia.

  The development of the relationship between Leslie and Julia hinged on the assumption that they were both grieving inconsolably for a spouse who had been suddenly and unmercifully taken from them at a moment of supreme happiness. For Leslie, this was a half-truth. Julia had always been his ideal woman. Minny Thackeray—as her husband saw her—was a dear little thing in her way, but a mere child and certainly not a great beauty. Minny had in a sense been a stopgap until Leslie could explore real, passionate conjugal love with Julia Jackson. And though he certainly did not say this to Julia, Leslie Stephen, as we have seen, had never had much use for Herbert Duckworth and was eager to show her what marriage to a real man could bring.

  When Julia finally agreed to marry him, Leslie knew that he was not Julia’s ideal man. He knew it was pity rather than love that conquered her resistance to his repeated proposals. He also knew that Julia was making, in the eyes of her family and friends and no doubt in her own, a big sacrifice in marrying him. Julia Cameron wrote to her “cherished” niece Julia: “I have so long felt that Leslie was your fate . . . I felt of him ‘the shadow sits and waits for her’ . . . I felt that sitting ever close to you—tall, wrapt in gloom, companionless and silent, he would make an appeal to you which would be powerful because of the vastness of his intellect.” Anne Thackeray Ritchie also saw the marriage as a sacrifice on Julia’s part. “My hope is for Leslie and Julia’s happiness and sweet Memekins’ [that is, Laura’s]. I think it is very noble and generous of Julia to give up her liberty and her prestige [Thackeray Ritchie’s emphasis] and her money and everything to comfort and cheer up Leslie.”

  ❧

  To say that the family Virginia Woolf was born into was complicated is an understatement. If we strip away the Victoriana—the black-and-gold wood paneling, the crimson velvet curtains blocking the light, the servants bustling up out of the gas-lit sub-basement with silver tea sets and down again with full chamber pots—we find a very twenty-first-century family.

  First, we have Leslie and Julia, two busy, well-to-do people who own a house in town and rent a holiday home by the sea and can afford seven live-in servants, plus additional help with the laundry and the garden, but still feel poor in comparison to relatives and friends. Each partner has been married before, and they carry heavy emotional baggage as well as four children, George, Stella, and Gerald Duckworth and Laura Stephen, into the marriage. When four more children arrive in rapid succession, things get really stressful. The Stephen and Duckworth children have little in common, but they all live in the same house, and the nuclear family of ten is framed in a huge extended family of bosomy aunties, booming uncles, and creepy cousins, to say nothing of a mother-in-law who is always demanding attention, whether in person or via the mail, which is delivered several times a day.

  To say that Julia Stephen had her hands full is an understatement. No sooner has she married Leslie Stephen than she is pregnant, and when Vanessa, her fourth child, is born, she is past denying how painful and debilitating childbearing is. Over the next four years, three more children arrive, each, as everyone could see, a drain on Julia’s physical reserves. All the same, Julia’s biggest worry is not her seven children, plus Laura, but her husband, the big baby who will never grow up and go away.

  The saintliness of Julia was in ratio to Leslie’s orneriness, for even in an era when wives were expected to sacrifice themselves to the comfort of their husbands, Julia Stephen’s friends and relatives considered her husband to be exceptionally difficult. In The Voyage Out, with her characters Ridley and Helen Ambrose, Virginia Woolf makes the first of her fictional attempts to evoke what her parents’ marriage was like. Helen starts the novel in grief. For a period of months if not years, she is leaving behind her two small children, whom she adores—especially the little boy—and giving them into the care of an evangelical nanny she does not trust. Given her domestic cares and responsibilities, why, we might ask, is Helen Ambrose setting out for South America? Well, we gather as the novel progresses, Helen’s scholar husband, Ridley, is overworked, needs a holiday, fancies a season in a relative’s hacienda in South America, and could not possibly survive such a trip without his wife.

  In the early pages of the book, we find Ridley, on the first day away at sea, entering the cabin study dedicated to his personal use and suddenly reduced to a trembling heap of anxiety and resentment. The table is wobbly, the chair the wrong height, and the door leaky. Helen shoos Ridley out, organizes a new chair and table from the crew, and gets down on her hands and knees with a hammer and a piece of thick cloth to make a doorstopper, so her husband’s feet don’t feel the cold sea air. Smiling, all right in his world, Ridley Ambrose once again becomes absorbed in the preparation of a new edition of the Greek poet Pindar, which, the reader cannot help feeling, the world could probably manage without. At the end of the novel, when his niece Rachel is dying upstairs, all Ridley can do for his frantic and exhausted wife is to drive her and everyone else in the house mad by muttering poetry and singing ballads. Leslie Stephen memorized yards of poetry as a boy and was famous among family and friends, especially as he aged and grew deaf, for reciting aloud and humming old tunes under his breath.

  In The Voyage Out, the exertions of Helen Ambrose to serve her husband when on vacation give us an inkling of the complex household machinery Julia Stephen set up at 22 Hyde Park Gate. Each morning, water must be carried upstairs to fill the hip bath in the master’s dressing room, as he cannot be expected to compete with other members of the family for the single bathroom. (The Stephens were not, I suspect, a particularly fragrant bunch, Leslie apart.) After breakfast, Leslie Stephen retired to his fifth-floor aerie to labor on his dictionary and scholarly books. Heavy volumes crashing to the floor are a sign the master is at work, so quiet must reign throughout the rest of the busy household. One of the maids must go up regularly and, without making a sound, empty his study chamber pot, since descending to one of the three lavatories on the lower floors would break his chain of thought. Meals carefully planned by the mistress to please the master’s palate and promote his digestion must be served precisely on time.

  Such material demands were taxing, but Julia was a highly efficient household manager, so she coped. Far more wearing to Mrs. Stephen, if not to the second parlor maid (remember that gas-lit sub-basement where the staff of seven live-in servants moldered?), was Mr. Stephen’s incurable angst. Was he not just a third-class mind? Did any of the coming young men like Maitland really admire him? Would all of his work be forgotten within a year of his death? Only Julia could combat these night terrors, but when at last Leslie fell asleep, she often lay awake, racked with
fatigue and anxiety.

  And then there was sex, a word not uttered, a subject not raised in the Stephen home or addressed at all in the Dictionary of National Biography. Sex is also an issue that Virginia Woolf—so quick with off-color gossip in her letters and so slow to feel desire in her life—skates circles around in her many accounts of her parents’ marriage. Trampling down shopworn Victorian shibboleths was one thing. Imagining her father and mother in bed, copulating, quite another.

  Yet, for Julia Stephen, a woman who managed to produce seven children by two husbands in less than ten years, and died worn out at forty-nine, sex was like the elephant in the room, heard, felt, smelled, but never alluded to. Leslie Stephen was a tall, strong, healthy man who came from a lineage of passionate males, a man who blossomed in the company of young, beautiful women and could be outrageously rude to old, ugly ones, a man who ventured for the first and only time into a theater to ogle Lillie Langtry. Leslie had desired Julia ever since she was a teenager, and finding her at last in his bed must have been an immense pleasure. Julia, for her part, no doubt found that sexual intercourse was a sure way to calm her husband and get him off to sleep. And then, what better way can a woman find to bolster a man’s self-esteem and allay his morbid anxieties about status and legacy than to present him with four healthy, beautiful, bright children (so different from poor Laura!), two strapping boys and two beautiful girls?

  Julia was thirty-two when she married Leslie Stephen. Many women in their thirties and forties are at the height of their sexual responsiveness, and Julia had lived without sexual intimacy for nine years. Perhaps she was just as eager as her husband for the pleasure and release of tension that sex can afford. Woolf’s portrait of her parents as the Ambroses in The Voyage Out and the Ramsays in To the Lighthouse hint at a happy sexual relationship as well as an intellectual companionship between Leslie and Julia. Maybe they had a lovely time in bed. We shall never know. What we do know, in the absence of Bloomsbury-style conjugal confessions, is that Julia’s pattern of behavior in her second marriage was very different from that of her first.

  According to the letters she kept and that Leslie Stephen found after her death, Julia’s three-year marriage to Herbert Duckworth was one long honeymoon. Friends and family remarked that, even when pregnant or nursing, Julia Duckworth clung tight to her barrister husband, going on the legal circuit with him when she could, pining for him when he was away. Her mother and sisters, who had been hitherto the focus of her love and attention, had to defer to a husband’s superior claims. In her second marriage, however, especially during the first ten or so years, Julia ran her life in a very different way. It was now Julia who was often away from home on extended visits, and her husband’s wants and needs, along with those of her children, were not infrequently subordinated to those of her extended family or even her friends.

  Now, let it be noted up front that Julia Stephen was not leaving her family for pleasure—not, for example, to go to a spa for health reasons in what amounted to a vacation, as her mother had often done without raising any eyebrows. No, Julia Stephen left home on errands of mercy to attend people she loved who were in pain and threatened with death, and in a period when hospitals were for the indigent and private institutions were for the mad, no one questioned her doing so. Sick people with means in the last decades of the nineteenth century remained in their homes, received house calls from their physicians, and were nursed by their female relatives, with the variously useful help of paid attendants. (Remember Sarah Gamp, the drunken, thieving bed nurse in Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit?)

  In a household afflicted with sickness, no one could turn chaos into order quicker than Julia Stephen. If needed, she was ready to do the ugly, disgusting jobs—holding the chamber pot, mopping up the vomit, stripping the soiled sheets, changing the dressing—that today, if we are lucky and affluent, we mostly delegate to professionals. And when practical help was of no avail, Julia Stephen would sit next to a dying man, hold his hand, and keep back her tears until the body was washed and decent enough for inspection and the time for lamentation had come. She did this many times, and in my book that makes her a heroine. Perhaps it makes her a saint in yours, though “saint” was a word rarely uttered without irony in the Stephen house.

  In 1883, Julia Stephen’s friends and relatives persuaded her to publish a little pamphlet called Notes from Sickrooms, in which she advised other women on how to properly care for their ailing loved ones. Julia’s advice is practical and uncomplicated, yet following it was labor-intensive. Sick people require perfect quiet and neatness, she wrote, an unlimited supply of clean laundry, tempting and nutritious food, and a perfectly smooth bottom sheet. Crumbs are always finding their way into the bed, observes Mrs. Leslie Stephen, and even the tiniest crumb will cause discomfort and distress. Above all, the nurse must carefully observe her patient to ensure that his needs are met, with consideration for his particular wishes, tastes, and habits.

  From what Julia Stephen does not say in her Notes from Sickrooms, she neither believed in miracles nor placed much faith in doctors and medical science. Doctors, after all, had been powerless to help Herbert Duckworth and Minny Thackeray Stephen. Like Florence Nightingale, whose best-selling Notes on Nursing she had read, Julia knew that even the most devoted and attentive care was not always enough and that a home nurse must be prepared for the job of providing strong and loving support to her patient in the last days and hours of life.

  Since Julia Stephen did not believe that when you died, you went on to a new and better world, unlike Nightingale in the nineteenth century or Mother Theresa in the twentieth, she was unwilling to offer the dying the consoling prospect of heaven and a reunion with the beloved dead. But to those who said that only the religious woman can be entrusted with the care of the dying, Julia Stephen’s response was that, on the contrary, since this is the only life we have, helping to ease pain and make life’s end as smooth as possible was a woman’s supreme duty. This was Julia’s credo and she lived by it.

  The list of the many people she nursed and who, quite literally in some cases, died in her arms, is long. There was her father-in-law, Mr. Duckworth, and her beloved uncle Thoby Prinsep. He had been almost blind and an invalid for many years when he entered his final illness, and he died soon after the Stephens were married. Julia looked after him on his deathbed, keeping his cane as a memento. Soon after, pregnant with Vanessa, she was back on the Isle of Wight, taking care of her aunt Sarah Pattle Prinsep, who did not survive Uncle Thoby very long.

  Next on Julia’s list was her sister Adeline, who suffered not only from an incurable disease but from the indifference of her self-involved phony of a husband, Henry Halford Vaughan. In 1881, Adeline died in hideous pain, and it was Julia, not her husband, who was by her side at the end. Julia reported the death in an agonized letter to Leslie. Julia and Adeline had been deeply attached, and Adeline, as she saw death coming, must have begged Julia to do what she could for her children, living in an isolated spot under the care of the oldest girl. Certainly, over the next years Julia found it necessary to return to Pembrokeshire in West Wales (not an easy journey from Kensington) to the house of a man who had treated her sister abominably so as to do what she could for Adeline’s children.

  Then in 1883 Julia left four-year-old Vanessa, three-year-old Thoby, two-year-old Virginia, and baby Adrian, only three months old and hitherto breastfed, at home so that she could be at the deathbed of her friend Susan Lushington. When Anny Thackeray Ritchie sat beside the bed of her dying mother in 1894, Julia Stephen managed to arrive in time to give help and observe the death, sitting in the background, silent, calm, observant, ready.

  But the person to whom Julia gave the most care and attention and time by far was her mother. Like not a few women of means in her day, Maria Jackson enjoyed ill health for much of her life. Her pain was real, and increasingly so, but it also allowed her to be where she liked, avoid many things she found disagreeable, and continue to be the most elegant and
well-rested of the famous Pattle sisters. Care for their ailing mother first devolved upon the two oldest Jackson daughters, for whom Maria showed a marked preference, and after Adeline married at eighteen and Mary wed soon after, the health of Mrs. Jackson took a turn for the worse. She suffered from “rheumatism,” was in constant pain, found movement difficult, and traveled about to spas in England and on the Continent in search of health. With Adeline and Mary fully occupied with demanding husbands and a growing pack of small children, Maria now relied on her remaining daughter, and Julia, then in her late teens, rose to the challenge, becoming the favorite daughter in return. One of the miracles that Herbert Duckworth managed to perform was to replace his mother-in-law as the chief focus of Julia’s affection and keep Maria at arm’s length. But after Herbert’s death, Maria Jackson and Julia Duckworth returned to what we might now diagnose as their old codependency.

  At some point in her forties or early fifties, Maria Jackson had a bad bout of rheumatic fever, and from that point became a complete invalid, unable to get out of bed without support or do anything for herself. She and her husband took a house in Brighton, but they spent a good deal of time with their daughters, especially Julia. In 1887, John Jackson finally met an illness he could not lick, and despite the best nursing care his daughter Julia could give, he died, at age eighty-three. This was when Maria Jackson took up permanent residence with the Stephen family at 22 Hyde Park Gate. There she lived for four or five years, immaculately groomed, an immobile scented idol regarded with wonder but little affection by her four youngest grandchildren, who resented almost as much as their father the love and attention their mother showered upon this tedious old woman.