by Gillian Gill
For me and many other readers, To the Lighthouse is Woolf’s greatest work, a landmark in English literature, but for all Woolf’s genius, she could not quite release Angel Julia from a house that became a mausoleum. I for one still find it hard to like and relate to Virginia Woolf’s mother the way I do, for example, to her great-aunt Julia Cameron or her adoptive aunt Anne Thackeray Ritchie. They were two stalwart and unrepentant Victorians, yet somehow it is Julia Stephen, a younger woman possessed of such beauty and charm, who personifies the stereotypic Victorian values. She is the Angel/Demon against which Virginia Woolf, Bloomsbury, and much of modern culture found it necessary to rebel.
9
Stella Duckworth Hills
LAURA MAKEPEACE Stephen managed to survive asylum living for fifty years, but Virginia Woolf’s other half-sister, Stella Duckworth, was dead at twenty-eight. Most of what we know of Stella comes from the autobiographical pieces that Virginia Woolf wrote long after Stella’s death—“Reminiscences” of 1904–5, written for the Memoir Club, and the incomplete “A Sketch of the Past” of 1939–41. As Woolf remembered it, the key to Stella’s life and character was the relationship she had with her mother. Stella and Julia, Woolf tells us, were inextricably bound together in a web of love and dependence and sacrifice. Woolf wrote her memoir essays under a powerful compulsion to record and to honor the lives of the mother and sister she had loved so much and lost so early. But the examples of Julia Stephen and Stella Duckworth also led Woolf to consider the question of what is lost and what gained when women reflexively put the wishes and needs of others before their own.
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Stella Duckworth was weaned earlier than her two brothers, and she was only one year old when her father died, too young to have any memories of him. Then, for about seven years, she lived by the side of a mother who, as we saw in the previous chapter, had been plunged into a pit of grief and despair. As Woolf reconstructs her older sister’s life as a child, Stella lived “in the shade of [her mother’s] widowhood; saw that beautiful crape-veiled figure daily; and perhaps took then the ply that was so marked—that attitude of devotion, almost canine in its touching adoration, to her mother; that passive, suffering affection; and also that complete unquestioning dependence.”
Julia decided early that her daughter Stella was slow, and as an adult, Stella would laughingly tell friends that she was very stupid because she had had rheumatic fever as a child. However, the belief that Stella was of low intelligence—not totally unrelated to the belief that Laura Stephen was an insane moron—was reinforced when her mother married the fiercely competitive scholar Leslie Stephen. Julia herself, who had an excellent mind though she had never gone to school, found an education in her second marriage and rose triumphantly to the challenge of becoming not only the wife but the intellectual companion of a very erudite man. But things did not go so well for Stella. As Woolf testifies in “Reminiscences,” the cult of books and learning that Leslie and Julia created in their Kensington home and that she herself fitted into so well had crippled Stella. Unlike her brothers, who were no brighter yet moved smoothly through Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, for Stella there was no escape. Stella, Woolf says, “was not clever, she seldom read a book; and this fact had I think an immense influence upon her life. She exaggerated her deficiency, and, living in close companionship with her mother, was always contrasting their differences, and imposing on herself an inferiority which led her from the first to live in her mother’s shade. [Julia] was . . . ruthless in her ways, and quite indifferent, if she saw good, to any amount of personal suffering.”
Here, Virginia Woolf as an adult clearly sees what she had not seen as a child—that their mother had made Stella suffer and had been self-righteously indifferent to the pain she was causing. Virginia had inherited their mother’s quick wit and acerbic tongue and feels obligated in conscience to make an act of contrition to the long-dead sister who had not.
If we parse the available information on the household at 22 Hyde Park Gate, it becomes clear that it was Stephen family dynamics, not some nineteenth-century version of the IQ test, that kept the label of stupidity pinned on Stella’s back for so long. None of the Duckworths were exactly known for intellect and scholarship—not Herbert, if what Leslie portrays is to be believed, and certainly not Herbert’s sister, the rich, splendidly preserved, and confidently mindless Aunt Minna Duckworth. Gerald Duckworth founded a successful publishing house, so presumably had a head for business to go with his inherited money. But Gerald’s older brother, George, according to Virginia Woolf’s cutting account in “A Sketch of the Past,” was exceptionally dim, a Wodehousian figure, flunking every exam he took and getting jobs in the political establishment solely on the basis of connections.
For Leslie Stephen, almost no one was clever enough, and he and Julia passed their low assessment of Stella’s intellectual capacities on to their Stephen children. As long as their mother lived, Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, and Adrian all learned from their parents to look down their long Stephen noses at Stella, and the fact that Stella was routinely charged with unpleasant tasks, such as taking them to the dentist, did not advance her in their estimation. The young Stephens were addicted to toffees, bull’s-eyes, and jam roly-polies, and their teeth rotted out fast. When, after an excruciating session of drilling without anesthesia at their exclusive London dentist’s office, they were treated by their older sister to ice cream out of her own pocket, they were mollified but not exactly grateful. As children will, they had figured out that Stella, like all the Duckworths, was rather rich, so it seemed to them only fair that she should share a bit of her ample pocket money.
Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, and Adrian loved to give one another weird nicknames—Virginia was “the Goat,” Vanessa “the Saint,” Adrian “the Wombat.” Stella was “the Old Cow,” a nickname assumed to be affectionate but surely hurtful.
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When her mother remarried and began to produce a crop of smart, funny, entertaining babies, the pall of gloom under which Stella Duckworth had grown up lifted, but a heavy burden of domestic responsibilities quickly fell on her shoulders. Stella was only ten years older than her oldest Stephen sibling, Vanessa, but Stella was the oldest child at home, and by her mid-teens she was being left in charge of the big household for weeks on end. The evidence points to the fact that it was Stella who allowed Julia Stephen to build her reputation as the perfect nurse, Stella who burnished Julia’s halo as the Angel of Mercy.
Julia Stephen, as we have seen, was accustomed at a moment’s notice to fly forth to tend the sick and dying—in West Wales this month or the Isle of Wight the next. Julia had put a superb domestic machine in place and, as she saw it, all her teenage daughter had to do was keep it oiled and running. In Julia’s absence, Stella would do her best, and if that was not very good, since she was supposedly not very bright, everyone in the family, from the little scrubber in the scullery to the baby in the nursery, could look forward to Julia coming back and picking up the pieces. And indeed, once the star returned, Stella the understudy retired backstage and took up the tedious things that always needed doing in a large family—darning, piecing the sheets, sorting the linen closet, settling the tradesmen’s bills, replying to the letters that flew in each week from the horde of relatives. Reading may not have been Stella Duckworth’s favorite pastime, but given her domestic duties, can we wonder that she rarely opened a book?
For all this hard work and heavy responsibility, Stella received little gratitude and less praise. Leslie was fond of his stepdaughter and could see how hard she tried, but it was his wife who fulfilled all of Leslie’s most urgent and intimate needs, and if Julia was away and things at home did not quite run with the beautiful precision he could expect from his wife, Leslie felt entitled to complain. As for Julia, she was never quick to praise, and when she came back home, no doubt physically weary and emotionally drained from her sickbed ministrations, she would fall upon Stella, counting up all the things the girl had d
one wrong and wondering why someone whom she had taken such pains to train could be so inept. It was easy for Julia Stephen to convince herself that she was not only offering her eldest daughter a model of female philanthropy but also preparing her for her future as a wife and mother. Once, when Leslie saw Stella weeping and ventured to suggest to his wife that she had been unduly harsh on the girl, Julia was taken aback. “I ask of my daughter no more than I ask of myself,” said Julia, a stereotypically Victorian reply that is not endearing.
Since Julia had so little time, she had Stella teach the smaller children their first lessons, and it did not take long for the Stephen children to notice that Stella was hardly more advanced in her studies than they were. Thoby was easily bored and dismissive of authority, but by the age of six he was in school, so it was Virginia, who loved to read and soaked up information fast, who most resented the times when her parents were too busy to attend to her and deputed Stella to supervise her work. In “A Sketch of the Past” Virginia Woolf remembers how she used her precocious reading ability to engage the attention of her parents, especially her father; she quickly observed that she had something in common with him. “How proud, priggishly, I was, if he gave his little amused snort when he found me reading some book that no child could understand. I was a snob, no doubt, and read partly to make him think me a very clever little brat.”
Vanessa was much less judgmental than Thoby and Virginia. From the age of three, as the oldest Stephen, Vanessa had found herself holding the baby and spooning mush into the toddler, so it was no stretch to put herself in Stella’s shoes as the Stephens’ version of Cinderella. Vanessa, like Thoby, was not that interested in schoolwork, but unlike Stella, she had her own claim to excellence, and one that both her parents encouraged in a girl. If Virginia was soon cast as the clever sister in the family, Vanessa was the artistic one, and she slowly developed a close bond with her older sister in part because Stella was the first to encourage her to develop her talent as an artist.
Like most affluent young girls, Stella had been taught a little music and art, and Julia had her teach her younger siblings to play the piano and draw. All four Stephens would become dedicated music lovers in adulthood, but as children, only Adrian showed either taste or talent for the piano. With her elementary drawing lessons, however, informed by the marvelous how-to-draw books written by the Stephen family friend John Ruskin, Stella struck gold. Thoby, like his father as a boy, loved to draw. As an adult, Thoby Stephen would illustrate his letters with remarkable little line drawings of people he met and creatures from the natural world, especially his beloved birds. As for Vanessa, when she was perhaps six Stella gave her a set of colored chalks. This was not an expensive gift, but once offered the means to experiment with color, Vanessa became totally absorbed and mysteriously happy. Vanessa Bell’s fame as a painter is rooted in her use of color, and, as she would later recall, the chalks offered a life-changing experience. Stella had seen something in her and thought about how she could help.
Quiet, placid, useful, sitting in the background or to the side, Stella was always on hand, a constant feature on the landscape of Stephen family life, but more, indeed, like a cow than a traveler or even a shepherd. That Stella might be an independent being, with ideas and wishes of her own, apparently did not occur to her mother or anyone else at Hyde Park Gate. From girlhood Julia had dedicated herself unstintingly to her mother, Maria Jackson. She expected comparable devotion from Stella, and more indeed, since the demands on her, as a mother of eight, all living in the same house, were so much greater. As for Stella’s having a will of her own, Julia did not tolerate willfulness in any of her girls. And Stella accepted Julia’s harshness as the price to be paid for Julia’s love and society. Knowing herself to be indispensable, even if no one ever said so, she was content to be her mother’s assistant at home and backup when Julia was away.
Having an adult sister had very real advantages for Vanessa and Virginia. Stella spared them many of the burdens of home life, so they had time to read and write, draw and paint. At the same time, as they grew older, they could see that Julia and Stella had a symbiotic relationship that excluded them, and this they grew to resent. Vanessa and Virginia found themselves set outside the dominant household pairings of Julia/Leslie, Julia/Maria, and Julia/Stella, and, separated from their brothers by schooling, they were thrown back upon each other for company, understanding, and support. As young girls, they created a dyad of their own, a fierce, intimate, protective alliance that, given the paucity of parental attention, could turn at any moment into competition and rivalry.
As Virginia Woolf looked back on her childhood in “A Sketch of the Past,” she remembered feeling a subtle detachment in Stella that was a barrier to intimacy. Every morning until lunch, every evening from teatime on, Stella was reliably there at Hyde Park Gate, busy, kind, and generous with time and money, and yet maintaining a psychological distance. This combination of surface obedience and inner reserve set Stella apart from her highly articulate and often rambunctious younger siblings. It allowed them to dismiss her as all Duckworth and no Pattle.
In several of her novels, Virginia Woolf sought to cross that remembered barrier to intimacy with Stella by creating older-sister characters and showing how a complex inner life can exist under a woman’s mask of sweetness, compliance, and service to family. With Eleanor Pargiter in The Years, for example, Woolf uses the freedom of fiction to throw aside the stereotype of the mean, frustrated old spinster and bestow on Eleanor the long, happy life that her sister Stella was denied. Well into her thirties, Miss Pargiter exists, it seems, merely to serve her father and numerous younger siblings. Her only outlet is her charity work in the slums every afternoon, and her endless committees. But Eleanor’s father finally dies, and she then has money of her own to swap the fusty, neglected family home for a modern flat and travel the world. Eleanor is a valiant volunteer to the end, but in the last scene of the novel we see her a sprightly seventy-year-old, attending a terrific party where she is surrounded by a lively band of affectionate young relatives. Eleanor Pargiter in The Years is a little eccentric, but she is not pathetic and she is not tragic. Unlike real-life Stella, fictional Eleanor does not marry, which may be sad, for she might have liked to, but she also does not run the risk of pregnancy. Fictional Eleanor is a happy, fulfilled single woman, and she does not die. I love the character of Eleanor Pargiter. She is one of the reasons why I think we need to take notice when, very quietly, Virginia Woolf does something revolutionary in fictional characterization.
It is tempting to follow Woolf’s lead and imagine a rich inner life for Stella Duckworth, but the sad truth is that we have too few documents to get us past the pictorial record of a beautiful, attentive, unsmiling girl seated to the side in the family album pictures. A few of Stella’s letters survive, along with a pocket diary in which, following her mother’s death, she frantically listed the tasks she needed to complete each day. Vanessa Bell read that diary in 1910 and remarked, in a letter to her sister Virginia, that she was surprised, given the extraordinary domestic burden that her older sister had strapped to her back, that Stella had lived to see her twenty-eighth birthday.
We can only guess what Stella Duckworth was thinking and feeling as she smilingly served tea while Leslie Stephen shouted and his lady visitors twittered into his ear trumpet. The impulse to write and record was not in Stella as it was in her younger sisters, and if Stella confided in her friends Susan Lushington and Lisa Stillman, they never came forward with memories and letters. This is an irreparable loss. Just think how flat and impoverished our understanding of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf as young women would be if friends like Margery Snowden, Violet Dickinson, and the Vaughan cousins had not lovingly kept their letters.
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When Stella Duckworth turned eighteen, she “came out,” in the parlance of the day, and her life was expected to change quite soon. As teenagers, young persons of independent means like Stella were carefully protected from
impecunious clergymen and lascivious dancing masters, but once they put their hair up and let their skirts down and had been painstakingly introduced to a selection of eligible young men, they were expected to marry. Late Victorians considered matrimony to be the sacred duty and personal mission of all young women, and a wealthy young woman came under special pressure to marry, since she was believed to need a husband who could manage her fortune and sire sons to inherit her money.
All went well at first. Stella was one of the most successful “young persons” of her year—charming, modest, and, unlike her little sister Virginia ten years later, far too nice and socially adept to make any young man on the dance floor feel stupid or ill-informed. Stella was also very beautiful—perhaps, the family album suggests, the most beautiful of Julia’s three much-admired daughters.
Decades after Stella’s death, Virginia Woolf remembered how exquisitely pale and prone to blush her sister had been—“a phantom loveliness.” Stella was also the daughter who most resembled her mother as a young woman—Leslie Stephen certainly thought so—and I find it interesting to conjecture how exactly that resemblance played out between the two women.
By the time Stella was twenty, Julia Stephen was looking much older than her years. In the family group photos taken in 1894 or 1895, Julia, forty-eight, looks older than her husband, Leslie, even though he was fourteen years her senior.
