by Gillian Gill
In the Mausoleum Book, Leslie Stephen claims he was happy that his mother-in-law spent more and more time in his house as she grew older and more infirm, and that he loved and esteemed her. That he was happier with Maria in the house may be believed. With her mother just upstairs, Julia now had almost no reason to go away, so Leslie saw more of his wife. That he appreciated Maria Jackson I doubt. Leslie Stephen had little use for women in general, often upsetting his wife and daughters by his rude remarks about female visitors, and Maria Jackson was the kind of idle, decorative woman he despised. When once for Christmas Maria gave him a volume of poems by Coventry Patmore, her dear friend and favorite poet, Leslie sent the book back to her. He preferred stronger literary meat, he told his mother-in-law.
Such flashes of open conflict in the household may have been rare. Maria was bedridden, and on those occasions when she spent time with the family in the reception rooms, she was no doubt charming and eager to keep the peace. By the testimony of Anne Thackeray Ritchie, who took refuge with the Jacksons in Brighton after Leslie Stephen turned her out of the house at the time of her marriage, Maria was a gracious, restful presence, and excellent company in the great Pattle tradition. All the same, the fact that Mrs. Jackson was installed in the bedroom right next to Julia and Leslie’s bedroom and his dressing room cannot have been entirely comfortable for the married pair, and of course her care put a strain on the whole household. With three flights of stairs for her maid to negotiate, carrying brass cans of hot water, full commode pans, and trays of tempting little delicacies, Mrs. Jackson made a lot more work for the staff, and thus for the mistress of the house. Julia Stephen had now to divide herself between two people, each of them accustomed to being the principal focus of her love and care. The strain can be read in the photographs taken of her at the time. It is not, I think, incidental that Laura Makepeace Stephen was sent away from Hyde Park Gate for good at about the time that Maria Jackson moved in.
Virginia Woolf has nothing very nice to say about her maternal grandmother. Biographers like Hermione Lee, who have taken a look at the trove of Maria Jackson’s letters that Julia Stephen left at her death, have painted a rather damning portrait of Maria, and one that it has pleased me so far to echo. It would be easy to argue that Julia Stephen was the victim not only of a tyrant husband but of a parasite mother, but it would also be wrong, at least in part. According to Leslie Stephen in the Mausoleum Book, Julia and Maria enjoyed each other, and were happier together than apart: “I do not think that either of them [Maria and Julia] ever said a word which could give pain to the other. They relied continually upon one another—I have never seen nor can I imagine the relation between mother and daughter more beautiful and perfect. Our ‘darling of darlings’ loved her mother so well that it might seem as if they had been alone together in the world.”
It is honorable in Leslie Stephen to write this, and I think we should take his testimony at face value. He had seen these women together ever since Julia was a teenager and knew them as well as anyone. No man wished more than he to be first in his wife’s affections, yearned to become himself the person who never gave her pain, to be with her as if they were alone on earth.
Maria Jackson, age seventy-four, died in 1892. Following her mother’s death, as we saw in Chapter 3, Julia Stephen was so prostrated with grief that she and Leslie went to live for six or eight weeks in a little house at Chenies in Buckinghamshire, loaned to them by Julia’s cousin the Duchess of Bedford. As usual, the Pattle women rallied round one another in times of trouble, and Leslie and Julia could both be away since by this time Stella Duckworth, age thirteen, was considered old enough to manage the house and take care of her younger half-siblings.
Given his wife’s frequent long absences, the grumpiness for which Leslie Stephen is legendary becomes more understandable and even forgivable. Leslie came, as I have noted, from a family in which the father’s needs and desires came first, and he lived in a society that believed this to be right and proper. Leslie adored Julia, he wanted her in his bed, and with each year he came to rely on her more and more. When she was not at home he missed her atrociously, and this made him angry, resentful, and truculent.
Leslie’s ability to rule in his own home was made more difficult, a little paradoxically, because he was so often there. He did go into central London on dictionary business, and he managed to get away from time to time, especially when depression and overwork brought him close to a breakdown. In the early years of their marriage, with Julia’s smiling approval, he went on strenuous walking holidays with friends, like the one in Cornwall during which he saw Talland House and impetuously decided to buy the lease on it. Once he took a longish trip to the United States and reconnected with old friends like Oliver Wendell Holmes. However, unlike his lawyer-professor brother-in-law Henry Vaughan, or his other brother-in-law Herbert Fisher, aide and adviser to the Prince of Wales, Leslie Stephen did most of his work in his fifth-floor attic study at 22 Hyde Park Gate, and when he was there Julia felt able to leave. Leslie could protest, he could groan, he could lament, he could write long letters telling Julia all the home news and begging her to come back soon because the children were sick again and he missed her so dreadfully, but he somehow could not produce the inner bull elephant seal and fire off a telegram: “Come Home At Once, Your Husband.”
Passionately in love, dazzled by his wife’s beauty, and not a little in awe of her lofty social connections, Leslie Stephen could not find it in his heart or in his code of ethics to exercise the power over his wife granted him by English law. Thus, part of the complex dynamic in the Stephen marriage was Leslie’s seesawing between unreasonable demands and abject apologies. “I’m not as bad a husband as Carlyle, am I? Tell me I’m not!” can be paraphrased as the refrain in many of his letters to his absent wife. But then she came home and he often ran cantankerous, penny-pinching Carlyle a close second in the parlor while exerting his conjugal rights in the bedroom, as Carlyle did not.
Leslie could not change. He could not help himself. He had to punish Julia—because she had been so very happy with Herbert Duckworth, because she was so very attached to those rather tiresome women, her mother and her sisters, because she found it so easy to live in harmony with her women relatives and friends, because she placed their needs ahead of his own. And Julia knew this, accepted it as a woman’s lot in life, got away from the stresses of home when she could, and grew thin and tense.
Given the emotional and practical complications her absences caused, it was surely not just a sense of duty that sent Julia Stephen away from home for lengthy visits, on top of the afternoons she dedicated to charitable activities when at home in both Kensington and St. Ives. If Julia had been asked, she would probably have said that it was not a question of making a hierarchy of love (I love my mother more than my husband and my little children) but of identifying need. Adeline and Maria needed her more; she was the best person to serve those needs. It was also a question of secular morality. To go to a house of pain and death was hard, it was exhausting and agonizing, but the burden was hers to bear as she chose. She had built a household machine that could function in her absence. Leslie and the babies would miss her, but they would manage.
Julia Stephen’s nobility of soul stands the test of time since the evidence for it is so strong and was offered in many cases by people whose lives barely touched upon hers, people she had no obligation to notice, no need to help. She was a Samaritan, not a Pharisee, her goodness practical and hands-on, not ideological and abstract. If a poor person needed a coat, she would make sure to find one and put it in a parcel. If a letter of support and friendship was needed, she wrote one by return mail. If a local family lost a breadwinner, she would be sure to hear of it and launch a relief fund. Her life philosophy of doing good in the world because good work is urgently needed, not because good work wins an eternal reward, is one to honor. Virginia Woolf—who for some years taught working-class women at night school, organized a Cooperative Society seminar ser
ies in her Richmond home, wrote endless letters about household help for her sister, and was very handy with brown paper and string—honored her mother’s code more, I think, than she is usually given credit for.
As we have seen, when she was a recently bereaved widow, Julia Duckworth longed for moments of solitude, of being left to herself. “I could never be alone,” she wrote to Leslie Stephen, “which sometimes was such torture.” Once she remarried, moments alone were even rarer and more precious. Thus, even if the tram she caught on Kensington High Road was cold, even if the platform at Paddington Station was rain-swept, and the railway compartment dirty, still she was alone, free to chat if she felt like it or read her book or think without interruption or comment. She was independent, she was anonymous, she was free. In her mother’s overstuffed house, in her sister’s ruined castle, she had a room to herself. When not busy with the invalid, she could retire at night to her bedroom, where there was no husband hungry for sex, no baby hungry for milk. Going off on an errand of mercy was not a rest, but it was a change, a kind of tonic, and one the Stephens’ strict code of ethics allowed Julia to take without guilt.
For twenty-five years after she was numbed by Herbert Duckworth’s death, Julia soldiered on. After eight years of widowhood, she agreed to embrace the solemn pleasures offered by a second marriage to a ravaged and worthy man she knew depended like a child on her love and support and whom she loved and esteemed but did not desire. She felt simple joys—the beautiful baby on her knee, a boat ride out into St. Ives Harbour with the older children, a perfectly conceived dinner party like the one with the boeuf en daube that Virginia Woolf stages for Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse.
That Julia Stephen was a woman of beauty and charm is something we take largely on trust. In the snapshots taken of her during her second marriage, we see a painfully thin woman with haunted eyes and a big nose, severely dressed and coiffed, more hag than goddess. Posed, as she often is, next to her daughters, the contrast is painful to see.
She looks sixty, not forty, to our modern eyes. People who knew Mrs. Stephen remembered how, when she believed herself unobserved, Julia looked sad. The camera goes further than mere sadness, capturing images of a woman etiolating from stress and overwork. The things for which Julia was famous with family and friends—the speed, grace, and economy of her movements, the bite and ebullience of her conversation, her intoxicating laugh—could not be captured by black-and-white still photography.
Julia Stephen with her oldest daughter, Stella Duckworth
“Mesmerizing” is a word that was often applied to Julia, and one of her achievements was to take a leaf out of her aunt Julia’s Pattle playbook and project an image of elegance and distinction that did not rely on fashion. Julia Stephen, according to her daughter Virginia, would clap an old deerstalker hat on her head before haring down the lawn to scoop up a perplexed young male visitor and immediately cast him under her spell. Wrapping her old gray cloak about her as she hurried to the Kensington High bus stop, she somehow, according to the grieving testimony given after her death, managed to strike mail carriers, porters, and painters alike as a perfect lady. When dining out, Julia would put on her evening dress, choose a set of jewelry with the help of her admiring daughters, and sally forth to charm the company, raising her arms and shaking her bracelets in a gesture all her friends loved.
Let us praise Julia Stephen for managing somehow to be beautiful even (to use her own words) when clothed in perpetual drab and shrouded in a crape veil. And if she put on a show of her own devising, why should that be held against her? When Mahatma Gandhi returned a celebrity to chilly England dressed in his homespun loincloth and shawl, was he aware of the effect he was making? Of course. Those who do good in the world need to develop their own stagecraft, their own iconography, and they are entitled to the satisfactions of virtue.
Did Julia Stephen see herself as a saint? No—she was far too busy to even contemplate the idea, and she tells us so in the very first paragraph of Notes from Sick Rooms:
I have often wondered why it is considered a proof of virtue in anyone to become a nurse. The ordinary relations between the sick and the well are far easier and pleasanter than between the well and the well . . . Illness has, or ought to have, much of the leveling power of death. We forget, or at all events cease to dwell on, the unfavourable sides to a character when death has claimed its owner, and in illness we can afford to ignore the details which in health make familiar intercourse difficult. [my emphasis]
It is there. The acerbity, the psychological acuity, the refusal of conventional pieties, the easy style—some of the very things for which Virginia Woolf will become famous.
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The way that Julia Stephen managed to make self-sacrifice alluring and charity work glamorous was remarkable, but it posed an existential problem for all three of her daughters. Stella, as we shall see in the next chapter, sank deep into the domestic altruism and public philanthropy her mother advocated, and she was exploited, not prized, for doing so. Vanessa, taking the opposite tack, took strength from her talents and ambitions as a painter, practicing overt obedience and inner resistance. As for Virginia, she came in midlife to see her mother, or the pious, saintly mother Leslie Stephen had pressed upon her in the Mausoleum Book, as perhaps the greatest threat to her existence as a writer.
She said this most clearly and poignantly in a short essay called “Professions for Women,” which was published after her death. She opens by saying that her profession was writing, and that was a lucky thing since a writer can achieve a lot with a ream of paper and some pens, whereas an artist needs to hire models, and musicians need good instruments and a place to perform. But then Woolf recalls how, when she settled down to write reviews of male writers for publication, she would be “bothered” and “tormented” by a phantom figure she identified as “the Angel in the House”: “[The Angel] was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg, if there was a draught she sat in it. Above all—need I say it—she was pure.”
The phantom Angel whispers to Woolf that she should strive in her reviews to “flatter” and be “sympathetic and tender.” “‘Use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be Pure,’ said the Angel. And she made as if to guide my pen. I now record the one act for which I take some credit to myself . . . I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her . . . Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing.”
The Angel is quite clearly Woolf’s mother, Julia Stephen, and to second-wave feminists like me, that passage in “Professions for Women” was a revelation, a call to arms. To find fulfillment and achievement, to realize one’s destiny, one might need symbolically to wrestle with one’s mother, even kill her in a new version of the death of Laius at the hands of his son, Oedipus.
As Woolf indicates in her essay, the Angel in the House is a specific cultural reference to the codification of female perfection set forth in a long narrative poem by Coventry Patmore, which was first published in 1854. Patmore’s The Angel in the House is a paean to his ideal woman—an adoring wife and self-sacrificing mother, devoid of vanity and self-interest, striving tirelessly to serve the needs of her family, happy within the walls of her little domestic kingdom, bowing her head before blame and praise alike. Patmore’s Angel was Chaucer’s Patient Griselda Redux— but with a nice, grateful, admittedly exigent but certainly not sadistic Victorian spouse like . . . well . . . like Leslie Stephen. Patmore dedicated the poem to his first wife—who, unsurprisingly one cannot help but think, was deceased.
By the time Virginia Woolf and her sisters Stella and Vanessa were growing up in the last decades of the nineteenth century, Patmore’s poem had become a touchstone of the age. It was cited in rebuke of female subversives such as Florence
Nightingale’s marvelous aunt Julia Smith and Nightingale’s equally marvelous first cousin Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon. These women and their friends and colleagues financed, founded, and staffed the first women’s colleges, clamored for access to all the learned professions, agitated for a working wage for women in the labor force, demanded equal rights for women under the law, and pressed for the vote. These were the kind of women whom Julia Stephen disliked, denigrated, and opposed. These are the kind of women Woolf would honor and celebrate in great feminist essays such as A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas.
But in the Stephen household at Hyde Park Gate in Kensington, the Patmore poem was much more than a cultural icon for the age. Julia Stephen knew Coventry Patmore well. As we have seen, he was the favorite author of her mother, Maria Pattle Jackson. He was a frequent guest in the Jackson home. When Julia Jackson was a girl, Patmore was an author she was encouraged to read, a man she was encouraged to listen to, a man at hand to mold her at an impressionable age. Julia Stephen possessed a signed copy of The Angel in the House and she, even more than most women of her class and era, was indoctrinated with Patmore’s message. She quite consciously labored to be the Angel of 22 Hyde Park Gate, and perhaps Leslie Stephen is not wholly to be blamed for the fact that that is exactly the way he memorialized her for her children, and for posterity, in the Mausoleum Book.
Dissatisfied with her 1915 attempt to capture the lived reality of her parents’ marriage in her first novel, The Voyage Out, Woolf in 1926 began writing To the Lighthouse, and was astonished to find how easily and quickly the book came to her. In the later novel, Julia Stephen comes alive as Mrs. Ramsay, the epitome of loving and lovable female loveliness in an old deerstalker hat. After reading the novel in manuscript, Vanessa Bell wrote to Virginia: “It was like meeting her [their mother] again with oneself grown up and on equal terms.” Woolf herself said that, when To the Lighthouse was done, “I ceased to be obsessed with my mother. I no longer hear her voice. I do not see her.”
