Virginia Woolf

by Gillian Gill

  For, while Virginia was away being cared for by friends, her siblings were moving to their new home, and the efficient Vanessa was entrusted by her brothers with the job of emptying out the parental home in preparation for tenants. It was Vanessa who made the main decisions about what to take, what to store, what to give away, and what to throw out, and her charge would have extended to packing up the things her sister had left at Hyde Park Gate when she fell ill. Thus, it is interesting to find Vanessa Bell declaring in that very first extant letter, of October 25, 1904, that she was not at all sure it was a good idea to keep one’s letters.

  Vanessa was moved to write this because Frederic Maitland had undertaken the biography of their father, Leslie Stephen, and Virginia had been entrusted with the delicate task of reading her parents’ private papers and deciding what the biographer might see and what he might publish. As we have seen, Jack Hills, Stella’s widower, had been especially concerned that Maitland might delve into the issue of Laura, for whom he served as legal guardian, and, to Virginia’s indignation, he expressed doubt that Virginia was the proper person to represent the family’s interests. Vanessa, it seems, was somewhat of Jack Hills’s mind. She told Virginia, “I am glad that I shall never be celebrated enough to have my life written. There’s something horrible to me, which I expect the true literary mind does not feel any sympathy with, in any third person’s reading what was meant to be only between two. I shall burn all my letters someday.”

  Virginia, as Vanessa implies in her letter, saw the keeping of old correspondence differently. Already at age twenty-two, Woolf saw letters as vital historical documents and an important literary genre. At twenty-seven, as we shall see, Woolf would be busy writing a “biography” of her sister Vanessa based on the letters her father had put together when writing the Mausoleum Book. All her life, Virginia Woolf searched the familial past, reading old documents, stirring up memories, reminiscing with her younger brother, Adrian, who also found comfort in the old days. She wrote sketches of the past, memories of Hyde Park Gate, and in her novels she offers versions of family members—her parents in To the Lighthouse, Stella in The Years, and Thoby in Jacob’s Room. In 1941, in what proved to be the last months of her life, she was still drafting “A Sketch of the Past,” and the letters she and Vanessa had exchanged between 1897 and 1904 would have been of immense value to her. It is hard to imagine that, at the time of her father’s death, in February 1904, Virginia Woolf threw away or destroyed all of the letters Vanessa had written her.

  But, as she confessed in that first precious letter we have, Vanessa Stephen was not a literary scholar, and old letters seemed to her more dangerous than precious. As she set about the enormous task of clearing out the contents of 22 Hyde Park Gate, it is not hard to imagine Vanessa coming upon her letters to her sister, and her sister’s to her, and deciding that certain family matters were best kept from prying eyes. When, her job well done, Vanessa Stephen locked the front door of Hyde Park Gate and walked away, she intended to put the past behind her. In the years ahead, as we shall see, she will systematically edit old Kensington friends and relatives out of her world. By the 1930s, as her son Quentin Bell once observed with amusement, if she picked up the phone and heard the voice of her oldest brother, now Sir George Duckworth, she pretended to be the maid.

  She and her older sisters, Stella and Laura, and to a lesser degree, her younger sister, Virginia, had all been subjected to forms of abuse that Vanessa Stephen was determined to put out of mind and off the record. In this determination to shut away, close off, and deny events of a sexually subversive nature, Vanessa Bell, often heralded as an avatar of female sexual liberation, was in fact much closer to her Victorian father, who saw it as his duty to wipe all stain from the public image of his biographical subjects, than to her uninhibited modernist sister Virginia.

  Part IV

  Old Bloomsbury

  11

  From Cambridge to Bloomsbury

  BLOOMSBURY IS a small district close to everything in central London, home to upmarket offices, institutions of higher learning, and medical facilities, and characterized by its squares, with their delightful little fenced-in, tree-shaded gardens. Today the area is peppered by blue National Trust plaques informing the alert tourist that Roger Fry had his Omega Workshops here, and Lytton Strachey a pied-à-terre just around the corner from his beloved British Museum. In the center of Tavistock Square is a portrait bust of Virginia Woolf. Today Bloomsbury is very select—though not, as I discovered in 2017, rock-on ritzy like Hyde Park Gate—but in the summer of 1904, when Vanessa Bell moved herself and her siblings there, Bloomsbury was shabby and a tad bohemian, though not actually scabrous, like Paddington. The Stephen children’s new address at 46 Gordon Square made their Belgravia and Kensington acquaintances shudder, but for Vanessa, that was no small part of its attraction. She was closing the door on her old Kensington life, and if the Maxses and the Ritchies and the Booths now hesitated to visit the Stephens, tant mieux! After her celebratory visit to Paris following her father’s death, in February 1904, Vanessa Stephen was becoming decidedly Francophile.

  The plan to move to Bloomsbury and rent out 22 Hyde Park Gate had been set in motion in the period 1903–4, as Leslie Stephen’s life was obviously coming to an end. Gerald Duckworth, long eager to have a bachelor flat of his own, was fully behind the move, and George had to give up his plan to move in with his younger siblings when he became engaged to Lady Margaret Herbert. The loss of George was not mourned by any of the Stephens, but it tightened the finances of the move. Luckily some Pattle descendant in the family diaspora proved willing to pay several hundred pounds for the Stephens’ portrait of their great-aunt Virginia Somers, which helped with the refurbishing, and Vanessa was already envisaging a lighter, sparer look for her living space. Vanessa, Thoby, and Adrian adored their new home and at once found themselves caught up in a happy whirl of social events. Their marvelous cook from Hyde Park Gate, Mrs. Sophie Farrell, and Maud (no surname available), her friend the parlor maid, had moved with the Stephens from Hyde Park Gate, so they were well looked after at home, and in the evenings they joyously got all gussied up and went to parties. Thoby was observed, to the surprise of Vanessa, enthusiastically waltzing one young lady after another around a ballroom.

  Virginia had been involved in the house hunting, but the death of their father, though long anticipated, was harder for her than for the other three Stephens. For some months, she was carried along, spending some chilly, somber weeks in Pembrokeshire and then whisked off to France by Vanessa. Leslie Stephen had been too parsimonious to finance trips to the Continent for his children, even his sons, so Vanessa, who had gone abroad twice with George, was determined to give her siblings a taste of Parisian living. Virginia had seemed to enjoy herself while she was away, but, as she was to discover in the years ahead, hectic activity, especially paired with emotional distress, was a reliable trigger for her mental disorder. When she got back to Kensington, it hit her hard that she was losing her childhood home, with all its memories, that Father was at last irrevocably dead, that she missed him and yet was horribly glad he was gone. Virginia was once again, as after the deaths of her mother and her sister Stella, beset by hallucinatory voices, refused to eat, could not sleep, tried to kill herself, and came once again under the care of Dr. Savage.

  On Savage’s advice, Vanessa kept her sister out of London for some four months, and Virginia was shuttled about the countryside to live in the homes of protective and watchful friends—Violet Dickinson in Welwyn, Aunt Caroline Stephen in Cambridge, Madge Symonds Vaughan in Giggleswick, Yorkshire. Virginia was grateful for the kindness of friends, but as her mania receded, she felt bored and unsettled, and food and sleep remained a problem. “Oh how thankful I shall be to be my own mistress and throw their silly medications down the slop pail!” Woolf wrote to Violet Dickinson. “I never shall believe, or have believed, anything any doctor says—I learnt their utter helplessness when Father was ill. They can guess
at what’s the matter but they can’t put it right.” She resented being excluded from the new post-Kensington world, and found attempts to negotiate with Vanessa frustrating. “Nessa contrived to say that it didn’t much matter to anyone, her included, I suppose,” wrote Virginia to Violet from her aunt’s home in Cambridge, “whether I was here or in London, which made me angry, but then she has a genius for stating unpleasant truths in her matter-of-fact voice.”

  Given permission at last to go home, Virginia Woolf at first reveled in the simple pleasures of being alone in her own room for hours at a time and allowed to explore London with no one but her dog. She kept very busy at her standup desk, as she was now determined to make her way in the world of publishing, and her friends Violet Dickinson and Nelly (Lady Robert) Cecil were eager to use their influence on her behalf. Beginning with reviews and little sketches and essays for a women’s religious periodical called the Guardian, Woolf graduated with remarkable speed to writing regular if anonymous pieces for that august periodical the Times Literary Supplement. Within a year, modest checks for three guineas and five pounds began landing on her doormat, harbingers of better commissions to come and a welcome addition to the income of a woman with some hefty medical bills who needed to come up with her share of the rent and expenses at Gordon Square. Little by little, Virginia felt better able to go out in the evenings for small parties, enjoyed meeting up with old friends, and began to feel at ease in the new social circle her siblings had developed. Very soon the high point in her week became her brother Thoby’s “at homes” on Thursday evenings.

  Those “Thursdays” are what Virginia Woolf, in a paper she delivered to the Memoir Club in late 1921 or early 1922, calls “Old Bloomsbury.” It was, as she records, in the months between early 1905 and summer 1906 that the Bloomsbury group first emerged—so let us now figuratively hop on the tube as far as St. Pancras Station and catch the train for the short ride to Cambridge. The Bloomsbury group, everyone agrees, came out of Cambridge.

  With three exceptions, all the foundational members of the Bloomsbury group—Thoby and Adrian Stephen, Lytton and James Strachey, Maynard Keynes, Clive Bell, Desmond MacCarthy, Leonard Woolf, and Saxon Sydney-Turner, plus the ancillary members Roger Fry, E. M. Forster (known as Morgan), Harry Norton, Gerald Shove, and Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson—were undergraduates at Cambridge University. The three main members of the Bloomsbury group who could not put B.A. M.A. (Cantab) after their names were Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, two painters dedicated to their art who did not give a toss for Cambridge, and Virginia Woolf, who certainly did.

  A number of the Cambridge men (Fry, Lowes Dickinson, MacCarthy, Forster, Lytton Strachey, Sydney-Turner, Woolf, Keynes, James Strachey, Norton, Shove, in order of election) were Angels, that is to say members of the Cambridge Conversazione Society, and this turned out to be highly relevant to the evolution of the Bloomsbury group. Small, self-selecting, highly secretive, and disproportionately influential, the Society, as it was known to its members, had its own customs and its own jargon. Its undergraduate members were known as Apostles because only twelve could be members at any one time. Those being considered for membership in the Society were referred to as embryos. Apostles, once they graduated, became Angels. Deeply immersed in philosophy and lovers of Plato, the members of the Society dubbed themselves “real” and dismissed everyone else as merely “phenomenal.”

  The moral philosophy and code of conduct that would distinguish the Bloomsbury group has often been traced back to a single paragraph in Principia Ethica, the early masterwork of the Apostle G. E. Moore:

  By far the most valuable things which we can know or can imagine are certain states of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects . . . That it is only for the sake of these things—in order that as much as possible of them may at some time exist—that any one can be justified in performing any public or private duty; that they are the raison d’être of virtue; that . . . they form the rational ultimate end of human action and the sole criterion of social progress; these appear to be truths which have been generally overlooked.

  Convinced that Moore had provided them with a philosophical basis for their personal conduct, Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes, as both Apostles and Angels, were influential in transforming the Society from a place where homosexuality flourished unobserved to a place where homosexuality was zealously canvassed and actively practiced. These two men subsequently became leaders of the Bloomsbury group, and Virginia Woolf, in her 1921–22 account of the group between 1904 and 1914, states unselfconsciously and with complete accuracy that “Old Bloomsbury” was obsessed with “buggery”—this being the group’s preferred term for homosexual acts.

  ❧

  The Cambridge of the Bloomsbury group was the construct of a specific period and a specific caste. Let us think of it for the time being as “Cambridge” in quotation marks, a group of elite young men that came into full flower in the early nineteenth century. This “Cambridge” had only a name in common with the small, nondescript town in the fens, and it was only one small but defining part of Cambridge University. In the years when the seeds of Bloomsbury were germinating, the colleges that composed Cambridge University had an unofficial hierarchy. Trinity and King’s were at the top and Downing and Selwyn somewhere at the bottom, with all the others (St. John’s, Clare, Queens’, Christ’s, St. Catharine’s, Jesus, Pembroke, Emmanuel, Peterhouse, Magdalene, Fitzwilliam, Corpus Christi, and Trinity Hall) jostling for their places in the middle. “Cambridge” was, almost to a man, Trinity and King’s.

  I say “to a man” since, at least until the 1910s when the Newnhamites Katherine “Ka” Cox, Alix Sargant-Florence, Fredegond Fisher, Karin Costelloe, Frances Marshall, and the Olivier sisters, Bryn, Noël, Marjorie, and Daphne, clamored for membership, “Cambridge” was to all intents and purposes an exclusive men’s club. The (then two) women’s colleges, Newnham and Girton, stood outside the college hierarchy, a position symbolized by the long, hilly bicycle ride that separated the village of Girton from Cambridge. By 1882, Newnham and Girton students had been given leave to attend university classes and lectures and to sit the university Tripos examinations. They were not precisely Cambridge undergraduates, however, since it was not until 1947 that Cambridge University bestowed degrees upon women.

  The men of “Cambridge” distinguished themselves by looking for approval, status, and ideas not from their dons or their parents or society at large, but from one another. As Clive Bell would later write in his 1933 paper to the Memoir Club, “We were anarchical in our disrespect and in our skepticism; we had broken more successfully with the public school tradition; we were desperately serious about art and frivolous about almost everything else. We were not ashamed of being childish, of playing stump cricket, ping pong & racing pennies along the coping of Trinity Bridge; we were never boyish.”

  Most “Cambridge” men went in for classics and moral sciences, Triposes that did not require a man to get up in the morning, and it was a mark of intellectual superiority in them to leave university lectures and classes to the women. Girtonians and Newnhamites, it was darkly whispered at Trinity and King’s, had been known to lose sleep over exams and even typewrite their supervision essays.

  Enrolled in the shortest, least-demanding course of higher education known to the civilized world, the men of “Cambridge” were joyfully free to create a lifestyle and forge a philosophy. For as little as nine terms of only eight weeks each, plus a few weeks at the end of each year for exams and the big June festivities known as “May Balls,” a “Cambridge” man was free to do pretty much as he liked at any time of the day or night, in the company of men very like himself, who lived conveniently fifty paces across the courtyard or two flights down the staircase.

  To take examples from the members of the Bloomsbury group, Saxon Sydney-Turner might read Plato and Lucretius in the original as easily as you or I read our email. Harry Nor
ton might devote himself to higher mathematics while Roger Fry spent his days fossicking around between the chem lab and the Fitzwilliam Museum. Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf might gather around the charismatic young philosopher George Moore and argue the night away over what exactly was meant by the true or the good, and whether one could know if that chair there was, epistemologically speaking, really there. Thoby Stephen or Clive Bell might punt and picnic, row crew and ride to hounds, take long walks, eat a great many hot buttered muffins at teatime, get roaring drunk at night, leave his living room in a sordid mess of empty bottles and cigar butts, and retire to bed happy, knowing that, by the time he arose, his gyp would have cleaned it all up. In most cases, “Cambridge” men did some combination of all the above, but if Sydney-Turner, Fry, Norton, and Moore got scholarships and starred Firsts, they did not boast about them. If anything, the “intellectuals,” to use Clive Bell’s word, looked with envy at men like Bell and Stephen, who barely scraped a Third in Tripos exams but projected an image of easygoing, socially accomplished, outdoorsy virility.

  “Cambridge” around the turn of the twentieth century had a mythic status in the minds of upper-class Englishmen. It was alma mater (benevolent mother) to a young man who, at eight or seven or even six years of age, had been delivered by his treacherous biological mother into the hands of the prep-school matron, whose job it was to make sure the right starched collars got back to the right boy and to dollop out cod liver oil. “Cambridge” was a cozy womb where such a man felt nourished, comforted, protected, cherished. It was, memoirs of the period breathlessly concur, an intoxicating, life-changing, never-to-be-forgotten experience. It was as if, like the prisoners in Plato’s Republic, young men emerged in Cambridge, dazzled, from the dark cave of mere representation into the sunshine of reality—and if that comparison seems far-fetched, remember that “Cambridge” men were force-fed classical Greek and Latin from the age of six. In a social caste that tended to dismiss religious faith as old hat, “Cambridge” filled a deep spiritual need. As E. M. Forster put it, at Cambridge “body and spirit, reason and emotion, work and play, architecture and scenery, laughter and seriousness, life and art—these pairs which are elsewhere contrasted were there fused into one. People and books reinforced one another, intelligence joined hands with affection, speculation became a passion, and discussion was made profound by love.”