by Gillian Gill
Louise DeSalvo has a very dark reading of Jack Hills and his pursuit of Stella Duckworth. DeSalvo sees Hills as another version of the Victorian sadistic misogynist and reports that Violet Dickinson told Vanessa Bell that Stella’s death was caused by her bridegroom’s persistent and feral lovemaking on their honeymoon. I feel that DeSalvo is overstating her case here. Violet Dickinson was a close friend of the family at this time, but how she could have known what happened between Stella and Jack in Italy is unclear.
After the Hillses returned home, Virginia became increasingly nervous, irritable, scared. After happening to see several road accidents on nearby Kensington High Street, she refused to go out of the house: Woolf would re-create this feeling of irrational fear in her character Rhoda in The Waves. At the same time, Virginia resented the attention Stella was getting from family and friends and referred to Stella once in her diary as a fat cow who could bounce out of bed if and when she chose. If this seems unjust and harsh, let us keep in mind that the news of Stella’s pregnancy would have been kept from the younger girls, increasing Virginia’s confusion and distress.
Any resentment Virginia may have felt toward Stella was quick to pass. Stella was her surrogate mother, and, when Virginia came down with a bad cold, she was allowed to sleep in Stella’s dressing room. Late at night, when Stella was seized by the agonizing pain that signaled the end of her illness and her life, George Duckworth had to carry the sleeping Virginia out of number 24 and along the street.
In the years to come, Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa would both agonize over the events of Stella’s illness. How could such a happy, healthy young woman have been allowed to die? Based on the confused medical reports, a modern diagnosis might be that Stella Duckworth Hills was having recurring attacks of appendicitis. It is possible that Stella was pregnant when she returned from Italy or became pregnant soon after. With pus leaking into her abdomen, Stella was fighting off one round of infection after another, so her health would decline and then improve for no reason clear to medical science at the time. Her pregnancy complicated everything, and the best her eminent physicians could do was offer enemas and opiates and express cautious optimism.
When the appendix burst, there was nothing to be done. Confronted with a dying woman in agony, implored by her family to do something, anything, the doctors agreed to operate, but it was pointless. On July 19, 1897, Stella Duckworth Hills died of septicemia, much as her father had done twenty-six years earlier. Can one wonder that Virginia Woolf thought doctors usually did more harm than good?
After Stella died, Virginia had a major mental breakdown, making several suicide attempts. The shock and sorrow of losing both her mother and her sister in two years had upset her fragile mental equilibrium, but terror of an uncertain future also played its part in her collapse. A hypersensitive girl with a brilliant mind, teetering on the edge of adulthood, Virginia was appalled by the lessons on womanhood she had received from the two dead women.
In the eyes of their family and of society at large, both Julia and Stella were exemplary women who died young—forty-nine and twenty-eight—each after shedding her life blood on the altar of family. Did this mean that, to be a woman, one must give up the self and sacrifice to others one’s own ideas, dreams, ambitions, and desires?
Virginia Stephen and her sister Vanessa adored their mother and loved their sister Stella very much. But they did not wish to be like them. In the future, each sister, in interactive but competitive ways, would set out to become a new kind of woman. For the time being, however, they had to put their longing for independence and their creative dreams on hold as their father made his long, agonizing journey into death.
10
A Close Conspiracy
FOR VIRGINIA and Vanessa Stephen, the death of their mother had been a tragedy, but Stella was there to take up the care of the household and Father and Laura, and they moved on. They were young. Vanessa turned eighteen, glided through ballrooms in satin and long, white gloves, much admired and with at least one young man—George Booth, the highly eligible son of old family friends—reportedly ready to go down on his knees, ring in hand. In the age of Victoria, death—women dying in childbirth, infants succumbing to diphtheria, young adults struck down by tuberculosis—paid regular visits to every family, so the Stephen sisters, though immensely sad because their mother had died, did not feel themselves singled out by fate. But when Stella Duckworth Hills died, unremarkable misfortune turned to silent disaster for her younger sisters.
The teenage Virginia Stephen, who was finding a refuge in ancient Greek literature, came to see her life as a mixture of Sophoclean tragedy and Gothic horror. “I do not want to go into my room at Hyde Park Gate,” Virginia Woolf wrote in 1940, “I shrink from the years 1897–1904, the seven unhappy years. Not many lives were tortured and fretted and made numb with non-being as ours [hers and Vanessa’s] were then.”
That she was writing this in Sussex, as German bombers passed overhead on their way to London and she and Leonard made plans to commit suicide in the event of a Nazi invasion, was not incidental. That the fragmentary and incomplete and astoundingly beautiful and sad piece that would be called “A Sketch of the Past” was one of the last things she wrote is not incidental. The horror of war and the imminence of death by her own hand brought Virginia Woolf back in thought and memory to when she and her sister suddenly found themselves “fully exposed” at one and the same time to “the full blast of that strange character,” their father, and to the smothering, sentimental, eroticized control of their older half-brother, George Duckworth.
When they were girls, Vanessa had dared to aspire to be a painter, Virginia to be a writer, but as they came into adulthood, both felt their ambitions smothered in the cradle like bastard children. The Victorian rituals and paraphernalia of mourning—the letters of condolence on notepaper edged in black, the wardrobe changes from black grosgrain to gray linen to white dimity—came to seem a mockery to them. To survive, Vanessa and Virginia formed a “close conspiracy,” “a little sensitive center of acute life, of instantaneous sympathy, in the great echoing shell of Hyde Park Gate” (“A Sketch of the Past,” page 143; further pages from this work are cited in the following sections).
Virginia cried out for mothering, and though older family friends like Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Violet Dickinson, and Beatrice Thynne did their best to give it, most of Virginia’s mothering came from Vanessa. It was Vanessa, a strong, loving, reliable presence to whom nothing need be explained, who formed the center of Virginia’s emotional matrix. Before sexologists like Havelock Ellis identified lesbianism as a feature on the social landscape, Englishwomen circa 1900 still quite unselfconsciously kissed and clung to one another, but the Stephen sisters were unusually demonstrative in their affection. Well into her twenties, Virginia had a way of sitting on Vanessa’s knee and demanding to be petted as if she was five years old. “Sometimes,” remarks Nigel Nicolson, a family friend and the coeditor of Woolf’s letters, “Virginia loved her [Vanessa] almost to the point of thought incest.”
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In the initial months after Stella’s death, the grief of her sisters, along with their rage and bewilderment at the way she had been allowed to die, had to be suppressed, diverted, deferred. In the eyes of the world the feelings of Vanessa and Virginia seemed inconsequential in comparison to those of the bereaved males—the two widowers, Leslie and Jack, and Stella’s brothers, George and Gerald—and each young woman reacted to the trauma of loss in ways that would set a pattern for their lives.
Virginia, “a porous vessel afloat in sensation, a sensitive plate exposed to invisible rays” as she later remembered herself, became delusory, refused to eat, and tried to kill herself. Virginia Woolf, we can now confidently assert, was afflicted by a severe and incurable mood disorder, and grief could, as her later life would show, be a trigger for it. Dr. Savage and the other medical experts consulted at that time were not using the word “mad” for Virginia, but, following the d
efinitive consignment of her older sister Laura Stephen to an asylum, it hung in the air.
Virginia’s breakdown was a dramatic expression of her grief and brought her the care and attention she craved. As a child Virginia had been a nervy, nerdy, will-o’-the-wisp of a child, yet sturdy and energetic, good at stump cricket, handy with a fishing rod. She read constantly and had lightning bolts of brilliance. One summer, when the pilchards finally crowded into the harbor at St. Ives, she wrote an account of the event and submitted it to the local paper. She did not score her first publication, but her brother Thoby, always so silent and hard to impress, told Nessa, who told Virginia, that he thought Virginia “might be a bit of a genius” (page 130). When she felt ignored or wronged, the girl Virginia would erupt into wild, vitriolic speech, her face turning bright red.
If Vanessa began in the family as “the Saint” or “Maria,” Virginia was “the Goat” or “Billy,” ready to kick you when you least expected it, or the monkey or “the apes,” a mischievous simian collective, full of tricks, ready to bite. But after her breakdown of 1897–98, Virginia came to seem fragile, unreliable, and dependent. For the rest of her life Woolf would fight to establish herself as a caring subject, not just an object of care.
Vanessa meanwhile seemed calm and stalwart. She shouldered the triple burden of Father, household, and Virginia without fuss, and sealed tight the coffer of her own grief. Refusing to delve into emotion when she felt most injured or to dwell on the past, she moved through the unhappy present with a silent, steely determination to have her way as soon as she could. In comparison to her younger sister, Vanessa Stephen appeared to come through the double tragedies of her family unscathed, but the suppression of emotion came at a great psychic cost, twisting her nature in ways that, as we shall see, would shape the course of her life and the nature of her relationships with those she loved most.
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On the surface, life in the household of Leslie Stephen between 1897 and 1904 was humdrum, ritualized, conventional, often pleasant. As the sizable pack of letters to friends from this period attest, Vanessa and Virginia led a life of devoted usefulness and steady activity. They had been given “the rule of the house,” and with all three older brothers in residence (Adrian was now at Cambridge University), they were responsible for supplying their men with good food, clean laundry, starched collars, and lavender-scented sheets.
One of the innovations that occurred after Stella’s death was that Vanessa and Virginia, who had hitherto shared a bedroom, were given two separate bedsitting rooms on the fourth floor by George, who decorated the rooms at his own expense. During their free hours, between ten and one, Vanessa went off to the Royal Academy of Art to lose herself blissfully in problems of line and perspective, while Virginia went up to read and write in her diary and notebook and work on her Greek. After lunch, the Stephen women were permitted to receive visitors or put on their hats and gloves and go out to do errands—as long as one of them at least was home sharp at 4:30, to superintend the preparations of Father’s tea. Then, presiding over the tea urn, they would take on the society manners they had learned from their mother and keep the conversational ball rolling smoothly, despite Leslie’s pathetic requests to know what people were saying and his belligerent comments when the responses were shouted down his ear trumpet.
In the summer months, daily life was more varied and healthy, with opportunities for long walks and rides on horseback or bicycle and the simple pleasures, like butterfly hunting and wildflower collecting, that Virginia associated with the happy past at Talland House, in Mother’s day. But beneath the surface, beneath what Virginia Woolf calls the “cotton wool” of unthinking, unreal “normal” life, a cauldron of bitterness, frustration, and fury seethed in silence in the hearts of two young women of exceptional talent and energy coming into adulthood.
The Leslie Stephen family had always been a microcosm of the general patriarchy in which men came first, as of right. With both Julia and Stella gone, Vanessa and Virginia now had to cater to and cope with their father’s blind egotism, insatiable neediness, and cataclysmic rages. As Woolf reconstructs it, Leslie Stephen had been given to sudden eruptions of uncontrollable fury even as a boy. His mother tolerated them because his health was delicate. Subsequently, Leslie’s two wives smoothed his feathers, deferred to him, bolstered him, allowed him to “say exactly what he thought, however inconvenient, and do exactly what he liked” (page 110). As Virginia Woolf writes, “it never struck my father, I believe, that there was any harm in being ill to live with” (page 109).
Between them, Minny and Julia had managed to turn a solitary, awkward bachelor, happiest when pitted against the elements on an Alpine crag, into an acceptably social being, taciturn and abrupt but willing to go out to parties in full evening dress, his beautiful wife on his arm, happy to be at the head of a big silver-laden dinner table at home, carving the roast for the assembly of friends, chatting amiably to the charming young lady strategically placed on his right. In the adoring warmth of the domestic setting his wives afforded him, Leslie Stephen had no need to rage. He felt like what he longed above all to be—a genius like Milton or Lord Byron or his father-in-law Thackeray, since to a genius all is permitted. This is the Leslie Stephen that Virginia Woolf so brilliantly portrays as Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse.
But after Julia died, Leslie stopped going out, stopped traveling, stopped taking his great “tramps,” became immured in his deafness, and found in neither of his remaining daughters the mirror of adoration to which he was habituated and addicted. Her father was, Woolf analyzes, “a man in prison, isolated. He had so ignored, so disguised his own feelings that he had no idea of what he was; and no idea of what other people were” (page 146).
Leslie Stephen still had a small group of young acolytes who came at times to pay their respects and listen to his perorations, and to them he never showed any sign of temper—he was always mild-mannered if terse, self-deprecating, modest about his life’s achievements even when they were finally acknowledged with a knighthood. With his sons, especially Thoby, for whom he felt immense love and pride, Leslie tried out his old Trinity Hall boathouse manner, seeking manly fellowship and merry collegiality and finding forced smiles and grudging attention. To his sons Leslie Stephen seemed stuck in a remote past, more grandfather than father. Only with his daughters did Leslie feel able to express his sense of cosmic grievance, his bitter awareness of how far below genius he had fallen in his own estimation. Being with Father “was like being shut up with a wild beast,” Virginia Woolf writes, with herself “a nervous gibbering little monkey . . . mopping and mowing and leaping into dark corners and swinging in rapture across the cage,” and he “the pacing, dangerous, morose lion; a lion who was sulky and angry and injured; and then suddenly ferocious, and then very humble, and then majestic; and then lying dusty and fly-pestered in a corner of the cage” (page 116).
Virginia Stephen thought her father was a brute, but she also loved him, admiring the clarity of his thought, honoring his steady passion for the life of the mind, and seeing the pathos of his life. Silently, unapologetically, unreservedly, Vanessa hated the old man and wished for his death. In the two main partnerships of her post-Kensington life—with Clive Bell and Duncan Grant—Vanessa showed that she could tolerate almost anything in a man as long as he was not, in Woolf’s phrase, “ill to live with.”
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The problem of life with Father was, as the extant correspondence shows, one that could be shared with sympathetic women. To friends like Violet Dickinson and the Vaughan cousins, particularly after Leslie Stephen had his first operation for cancer, Virginia could write humorously that their household was constantly invaded by lachrymose old women. Aunts and cousins and elderly women friends came to sit and twitter unsought consolations as the sisters, grim-faced, poured tea and passed the mounds of cake and cucumber sandwiches ferried up on silver trays from the penumbral basement. But with Leslie deaf, absorbed in his books and his woes, and ind
ifferent to the family around him as long as his material needs were met, George Duckworth became the man of the house. “And so,” Woolf writes, “while father preserved the framework of 1860, George filled in the framework with all kinds of minutely teethed saws; and the machine into which our rebellious bodies were inserted in 1900 not only held us tight in its framework but bit into us with innumerable sharp teeth” (pages 131–32).
George’s social aspirations for himself and his family were the obvious part of the problem he posed to his sisters. George’s aim, Woolf sarcastically remarks, was to marry a woman with diamonds, employ a groom with shining buttons, and have entrée to court, and he appeared to have what it took to make a splendid marriage. He was, by his early thirties, private secretary to the rising politician Austen Chamberlain, was said to lead a blameless life (Jack Hills once assured Virginia Woolf that her brother George had been a virgin when he married), had more than a thousand a year in unearned income, and was unfailingly of service to women. George Duckworth was always ready to offer a hand out of the carriage, an umbrella in a surprise shower, or a carefully rehearsed compliment. He was handsome, six feet tall, with tightly curling black hair and the ears of a faun, and when he left for the office around 9:45 each day, he was immaculately turned out, from the top hat he shined up with the velvet cloth on the hall table to his “ribbed socks and perfectly polished little shoes.” “When Miss Willett of Brighton saw George Duckworth ‘throwing off his ulster’ in the middle of her drawing room,” records Virginia Woolf in her Memoir Club paper, “she was moved to write an Ode comparing him to the Hermes of Praxiteles—which my mother kept in her writing table drawer” (page 166).
But George had little piggy eyes and was, Virginia Woolf says, abnormally stupid, so perhaps he bored even the matrons and misses of Mayfair. Certainly, after several aristocratic young women had eluded his grasp, he seized with desperation on the need to take first Vanessa and then Virginia into society. Given the sad demise of his mother and his sister Stella, it was his, George Duckworth’s, duty in life to introduce the Stephen girls to some “nice” people, people far above the ugly old bluestockings like Mrs. Humphry Ward, the weedy academics like Fred Maitland, the fuddy-duddy writers like Henry James, and the has-been painters like William Holman Hunt who still collected around his stepfather in Kensington.
