by Gillian Gill
Vanessa Stephen’s problems were far less serious than those of Pappenheim or Bauer, but she too was a hysteric, according to both the old “womb sickness” concept and the new Freudian theory. Her sudden collapse in the Peloponnese expressed both a helplessness she could not put into words and repressed sexual desire. Vanessa was facing a crucial life decision—whether or not to enter into marriage with Clive Bell—and for the first time in her life she felt unable to move forward. Struck down by an intestinal infection, and unconsciously taking on the role of invalid she had seen her sisters Stella and Virginia play, she could not get out of bed.
If one takes on the role of the Freudian analyst Vanessa Bell never consulted, one might conclude that the issue that preoccupied Vanessa Stephen in the summer of 1906 was whether to marry and take up a woman’s traditional role or use her modest inheritance to pursue a career as an artist and remain single, like her friends Margery and Violet. One might advance further the idea that the abuse Vanessa had suffered at the hands of George Duckworth and the sting of having her proposed marriage to Jack Hills forbidden on the grounds of incest had made her wary of sex and unpersuaded that marriage was always in a woman’s best interests.
As a sharply observant teenager, Vanessa Stephen had watched the way her mother and older sister Stella had lived and died. Leslie Stephen had burdened his darling Julia with four more children in quick succession and worn her down with his gloom and his unending demands. And he had then latched like an incubus onto Stella. Once her father was dead, Vanessa could at last act on the basis of her own needs and desires, and act she did. She took her Stephen brothers and sister abroad together for the first time and then moved them to unfashionable Bloomsbury, where she could color her walls green or tangerine, have friends in until three in the morning, and paint all the way through teatime if she liked. She was independent, with no one to wave an account book in her face and scream that chicken cost ten pence more a pound than mutton. She was free. Why would she want to tie herself to a husband?
But by the time Vanessa arrived in Olympia, she was no longer convinced that she had done the right thing in refusing Bell or sure of what she wanted. Her insides churned, and Greece turned out to be not nearly as nice as France or Italy. The buildings were shacks or piles of old stones, the people ragged, the beds full of fleas. As for the whole “Et in Arcadia ego” idea that her Hellenophile siblings kept rabbiting on about—well, classical literature was not Vanessa’s thing, and landscape was not her genre. Nymphs and shepherds cavorting amid temple ruins under a radiant blue sky were so very G. F. Watts—her parents’ favorite painter, but now in the twentieth century, Vanessa was happy to observe, thrown onto the aesthetic scrapheap.
Her beloved and deeply mourned sister Stella had once gone abroad on her honeymoon, fallen ill, and been rushed home. Now Vanessa was abroad and ill. Perhaps she had appendicitis like Stella. Perhaps she too was doomed to die young—who knew? But as she lay in bed, Vanessa found herself remembering Stella’s shining joy after Jack Hills proposed for the third time and she allowed herself to accept. Stella had found the courage to reach out to happiness for herself, and in the year before her marriage, nothing, not even her stepfather’s grotesque jealousy, had clouded Stella’s radiance.
Now Vanessa was the same age Stella had been when she died, and she too was feeling the need to make her own choices, yield to her own desires, and tend to her own happiness. Hers was a sensual nature, and, as she would later confide in a letter, she had felt obscure sexual impulses as long as she could remember. Her recent tours of the big European museums had shown her that sexual desire and the female body were inseparable from great art. Perhaps, to be an artist, what Vanessa needed was knowledge of the male body and of her own.
And so, once comfortably installed in her own bed, petted and fussed over, Vanessa wrote to Clive Bell in the Highlands, urging him to return. And when he came into the room, there she was, propped up on the pillows, modestly décolleté, her forearms bare, reaching out her hand to him, tears in her huge dark eyes, a red rose tucked behind her ear.
❧
Meanwhile, Thoby Stephen, one floor below, was suffering something much worse than a malaria attack. Both he and Violet Dickinson, it turned out, had been infected with typhoid somewhere between Athens and Istanbul. To the London doctors of 1906, the symptoms of typhoid were indistinguishable from those of other tropical diseases—until the later stages, at which point diagnosis became irrelevant and prayer was medicine’s best option. Slowly, agonizingly, the tall, robust Thoby gave ground to the Salmonella typhi bacterium, even as reassuring bulletins were issued by eminent physicians who expressed confidence that even if, regrettably, it was typhoid, such a healthy young man must surely recover.
But Thoby Stephen was born in an age before antibiotics, and like Prince Albert forty years earlier, he proved to be one of the unlucky 25 percent of patients for whom untreated typhoid proved fatal. In such cases, fever, sore throat, cough, and diarrhea give way to delirium, to a violent restlessness that defies opiates, and at last to intestinal hemorrhage. In desperation, Thoby Stephen’s doctors put their exhausted, emaciated patient through a surgical procedure to “sew up the ulcer to prevent the pus from leaking . . . a serious risk,” as Virginia reported to Clive Bell, but on November 20, 1906, Thoby Stephen died. Two days later, Vanessa Stephen and Clive Bell announced their engagement.
In the days after her older brother’s death, Virginia, racked with sorrow but refusing to give way, subjected herself to a peculiarly literary form of torture. Since Violet Dickinson had typhoid too and was fighting for her life, Virginia was advised that Violet must not know that Thoby had succumbed to the disease. For almost a month, Virginia sent off cheerful bulletins to her old friend, detailing the stages in Thoby’s supposed recovery. These letters make for very creepy reading today. Miss Dickinson discovered the deception only when she was well enough to pick up a newspaper and find a reference to Thoby’s death.
Virginia Woolf managed to overcome the sorrow and stress of her brother’s death by keeping him alive, not just for Violet in the weeks just after his death, but for herself and the world, in perpetuity. She never forgot Thoby and recast him in her own version of a famous literary trope—the heroic, almost godlike beloved, killed in the flower of youth. In Jacob’s Room, she mourned and celebrated her brother as Catullus did for his brother in “Ave atque vale,” as Montaigne did for his friend La Boétie in “On Friendship,” Shelley for Keats in “Adonais,” and Tennyson for Hallam in In Memoriam. Through her art Virginia Woolf was able to weather a fourth family bereavement, changed, seasoned, but stronger.
Vanessa’s reaction to Thoby’s death could not have been more different, and it is at this point that the paths of the two sisters begin to diverge. Vanessa had not mourned the father she had grown to hate. Now she refused to mourn the brother she had loved very much—or at least she put her loss aside to mourn in secret and at leisure, away from prying eyes. As small children, Vanessa and Thoby had been knit exceptionally tight. When she was nine, Vanessa wept when Thoby was sent away to school, and for a time she took Jacko, her brother’s favorite toy monkey, to bed with her. But that was then, and Clive was now. Among other lessons, Hyde Park Gate had taught Vanessa that buckets of tears and yards of black bombazine do not bring the dead back, so mourning was one of the conventional hypocrisies Vanessa Bell had left behind in Kensington. Clive declared his adoration of her and suddenly it was obvious that she adored him too. When Clive proposed again, only a day or so after his return to London, Vanessa accepted. She was ecstatically happy and made no attempt to hide it.
Overnight, or so it seemed, Vanessa and Clive became completely wrapped up in each other. A strong current of as-yet-unfulfilled desire ran between them, and they found themselves engaged in an endless and fascinating conversation à deux that even the first visit to his dispiriting family could not spoil. When her brother George Duckworth, oozing old-Etonian charm, negotiated a marriage s
ettlement with Clive’s colliery-owner father that was notably generous toward his beloved Vanessa and any eventual children of the match, Vanessa’s joy was complete, her future suddenly secure. She wrote to her cousin Madge Vaughan, “I do feel that Thoby’s life was not wasted. He was so splendidly happy, in these last two years especially . . . that sorrow does seem selfish and out of place . . . I as yet can hardly understand anything but the fact that I am happier than I ever thought people could be, and it goes on getting better every day.”
As the immediate family hurtled headlong toward the wedding, Vanessa remained officially an invalid, and she delegated to her sister the task of informing people of her engagement. On November 24, for example, Virginia wrote to Madge Vaughan, “Dearest Madge, Nessa wants me to tell you that she is engaged to marry Mr. Clive Bell. It happened 2 days ago; he was a great friend of Thoby’s and Adrian’s at College—and we have seen a great deal of him. She is wonderfully happy and it is beautiful to see her. Yr loving AVS [Adeline Virginia Stephen].”
On December 17, writing again to cousin Madge, who had looked after her during her recent illness and was evidently fearing a relapse, Virginia wrote that she was well and moving on with her life. She had decided that she and Adrian must have their own separate establishment, perhaps ten minutes away from that of the Bells. “That does not mean that I expect to quarrel. I like him [Clive] very much—and you know what Nessa is—but the only chance is for us to start fresh again. They must have their lives, if we are to get any good from it—and I mean to.” Virginia says that Clive’s family has been most kind to her sister, that Clive makes Vanessa happy and she herself likes him: “He is clever and cultivated—more taste, I think, than genius; but he has the gift of making other people shine.”
On December 18, in her second letter to Violet Dickinson after Violet learned of Thoby’s death, Virginia strikes the same note. “Nessa became engaged 2 days after Thoby died; but she was really engaged I think the moment she saw Clive (as I call him!) . . . She went through those days in a kind of dream. I feel perfectly happy about her. He is very considerate and unselfish, and he is really interesting and clever besides. You know what she has in her, and all that seems now called out. She is a splendid creature—it seems so right and natural that she should marry Clive.”
Madge Vaughan was a cousin by marriage and part of the family network, and Violet was something of a gossip, so there is a guarded, protective tone to these letters. Virginia’s job was to keep at bay all potential criticism of Vanessa as unfeeling and to write in Vanessa’s place, with the implication that Vanessa is still recovering from her own serious illness. But by the end of December, holed up for a miserably cold Christmas with her brother Adrian in a rented house in the New Forest and anticipating a visit to Clive’s family at the New Year, which she rightly feared would be a nightmare, Virginia had a violent headache (headaches were the regular precursor to her breakdowns) and let the protective mask slip for her dearest friend Violet.
Violet had apparently been sending on friends’ praise for the sweet, calm, and rational way Virginia has dealt with the tumultuous events of the past three months. Virginia responds bitterly: “I shall want all my sweetness to gild Vanessa’s happiness. It does seem strange and intolerable sometimes. When I think of father and Thoby and then see that funny little creature [that is, Clive Bell] twitching his pink skin and jerking out his little spasm of laughter I wonder what odd freak there is in Nessa’s eyesight. But I don’t say this, and I won’t say it, except to you.”
On February 7, 1907, seven weeks after Thoby’s death, Vanessa and Clive were married. On the strength of the twenty thousand pounds (almost a million, in today’s pounds) that Clive received as his wedding present from his father, the happy couple decamped for a long, rapturous honeymoon, first in Pembrokeshire and then in Italy.
On the day of the wedding, stuck at Paddington Station after missing the train to Wales, Vanessa wrote a letter to Virginia, whom she had left barely an hour before. For her happiness to be complete, Vanessa needed Virginia, if not in person then at least by mail, and she was confident that in her new life she would always have both her sister and her husband. These letters between the sisters from early 1907, like the Kensington letters, have disappeared.
13
The Great Betrayal
In early February 1907, Clive and Vanessa were married at the St. Pancras town hall in the presence of a handful of friends and family that included George Duckworth and Virginia and Adrian Stephen. Still eager to show his love for Vanessa, George loaned the bridal couple his limousine for their getaway, but his chauffeur got lost in plebeian Paddington, and they missed their train to Pembroke.
Whether out of respect for the dead or out of embarrassment that a wedding should follow so quickly on a funeral, most people found out about the Bell nuptials only after they were over. This was the cause of much bad feeling, and, in a pattern that would harden over the years, Vanessa’s response was to progressively sever ties with her extended family and with old friends of her parents. By 1908 Sir Richmond Ritchie, Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s husband, was cutting the Bells at the opera in retaliation for the Bells’ rudeness.
Virginia was both more conciliatory and affectionate, though she could do only so much to close the fault line between the old life and the new that her sister was opening. Thus, in July 1907, Virginia visited George Duckworth and his wife, Lady Margaret, and found it hard not to respond to their gestures of affection. “I see he [George] is much too hurt even to speak naturally of Nessa and Clive,” Virginia wrote to Violet Dickinson. “But what my position is among them I don’t know. I see what you call their kindness, and Margarets good feelings; and Georges odd relics of what was once affection—and then there is Nessa, like a wasteful child pulling the heads off flowers—beautiful as a goddess (at which you always smile) and Clive with his nice tastes, and kindness to me, and his slightness and acidity.”
On their return from their honeymoon, the Bells moved into 46 Gordon Square and engaged in a flurry of redecoration. While abroad they had spent freely on pottery and pictures, but they kept their London reception rooms fashionably sparse, and Clive was observed hiding a matchbook that clashed with the color scheme. Jumping back a generation from the red velvet gloom of Hyde Park Gate, we can date two features of the Bell decor to the Pattle era of Vanessa’s maternal grandmother and great-aunts. Vanessa hung Julia Cameron’s photographs on her pale-colored walls, where they would arouse the admiration of Roger Fry, and she draped the antique shawls the Pattle women had brought with them from India over the backs of her chairs.
After much tedious house hunting and contentious consultations with friends, Virginia and Adrian Stephen took up housekeeping just around the corner from the Bells, in an elegant but rundown house at 29 Fitzroy Square. The annual rent was 120 pounds, but since Adrian still had only his investment income to live on, brother and sister eventually found it advantageous to move again, to a four-story house in nearby Brunswick Square, where they had ample room for paying housemates. Adrian occupied a set of rooms on the second floor and Virginia on the third. Maynard Keynes and, for a time, Duncan Grant took the ground floor. In 1911 Leonard Woolf came home on leave at last from Sri Lanka and, undaunted by stairs, took on a small set of rooms at the very top of the house. Today National Trust markers alert us to the fact that Gordon Square, Fitzroy Square, and Brunswick Square constituted the tight little London center of the Bloomsbury group, with, at different times, Clive Bell, Vanessa Bell, Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry; Adrian Stephen and his wife, Karin; James Strachey and his wife, Alix; Dora Carrington, the artist who was Lytton’s companion; and the Woolfs all renting or subletting different properties as prime residences, pieds-à-terre, and studios.
As Leonard Woolf later recalled, the Stephen lodgers got an excellent deal. For eleven or twelve pounds a month they had room service and all the meals they were at home for. Sophie Farrell, the Stephen family cook,
along with her old friend Maud, had opted to move with “Miss Ginia” and Master Adrian rather than stay with the new Mrs. Bell. Sophie saw Virginia as a babe among wolves, and Virginia duly took Sophie along for practical advice when she went house hunting. Sophie was a first-class cook—I see the epic boeuf en daube that Mrs. Ramsay’s unnamed cook serves the guests in To the Lighthouse as one of Sophie’s recipes—so any deficiencies in the plumbing and heating chez Stephen were more than made up for by the food.
Virginia had been determined to keep a close eye on her surviving brother. She saw that Thoby’s death had hit Adrian harder than anyone else and that Adrian was even less able than Vanessa to express grief in words. According to their nephew Quentin Bell, who had ample opportunity to observe them both, Adrian and Virginia had a great deal in common and loved each other very much but were never able to articulate their feelings. Certainly, during the years 1907–12, when they lived together, the relationship between sister and brother was often stormy, and visitors gleefully pointed to stains on the dining room walls where Virginia had shied food at Adrian. Virginia wrote to friends lamenting that she could not be a brother to Adrian while privately wishing he would just get on with life. The best times for brother and sister came when reminiscing about the happy family days in Kensington when Mother was alive, something both loved to do all their lives, according to their nephew. Together they felt able to speak of Stella, whose name no one in the family had dared to mention in ten years.
