by Gillian Gill
These postcards had been sent to Clive under the cover of an envelope by a good friend signing himself “Gerry.” This, I managed to work out, was the diplomat Gerald Wellesley, then “our man in Buenos Aires,” and, as he makes clear, an appreciative patron of Miss Kitty Beldan, the waning star of an Argentine brothel. Kitty, one gathers from Gerry’s comments on the back of the postcards, had been brought into the oldest profession at a very young age and intended her small daughter Dulcie to follow in her footsteps. Gerry regretfully reports to Clive that Kitty has just embarked with a touring company in order to give maximum exposure to her fetching little Dulcie. “There is a considerable demand for a child her age among the Elder Statesmen,” Gerry chortles to Clive.
Gerald Wellesley was one of Clive Bell’s most prestigious friends. Wikipedia tells us he had a distinguished diplomatic career, served creditably as an officer in World War II (nicknamed, according to Wikipedia, “the Iron Duchess” by his men), and, following the deaths in close succession of his brother and his childless nephew in the early 1940s, became 7th Duke of Wellington, Prince of Waterloo, Duke of Ciudad Rodrigo.
How seriously you take the future duke’s choice of postcards for his friend Clive’s collection or his written remarks praising the charms of “Mademoiselle Dulcie” will depend on your view of how private morality maps onto public probity and how pornography maps onto sexual practice. To me, small-child pornography, all by itself, is an abomination, and to sit in the Wren Library at my alma mater, Cambridge University, and be suddenly confronted with proof that Clive Bell and Gerald Wellesley found sex between a man and a child at the very least a titillating joke was a shock. Another apparently innocuous and unwritten postcard sent to Bell for his collection, showing a bowler-hatted man in close-up against a street scene, with a couple of young girls and their attendant, suddenly took on a new meaning.
Virginia Woolf loved children, cared about them, saw, with a clarity rare in her generation, how often both boys and girls were seen as sexual objects and abused. She always distrusted and disliked Clive Bell, and it was not by chance that it was to Clive Bell, already notorious in Bloomsbury circles for his “poppets,” that she wrote the following. “Yes, I saw Christabel [Aberconway] and she was a good deal perplexed about a matter of conscience. That is to say she was kissed last June on the top of a Welsh hill by Canon Bowlby [who] has just been acquitted of improperly behaving to schoolgirls in a train. ‘Now what is my duty’, says Christa. ‘Ought I to have given evidence of his behavior to me? Because not a soul in England will believe those wretched little girls.’”
I owe Virginia Woolf an incalculable debt. Over my long lifetime, she has taught me many things. I thought I knew her work well. But when, in the final days of writing this book, I came upon the letter I have just quoted, I was so surprised, I wept. What she said was so relevant to our world today.
She and Christabel Aberconway were right. We must in conscience listen to what wretched little girls and wretched little boys have to say.
Acknowledgments
I could not have written this book without the support of three key people—my husband, Stuart Esten; my agent, Jill Kneerim; and my editor, Deanne Urmy. Stuart is my tech guru as well as my loving partner, there every day to haul me out of some word-processing ditch I have fallen into. Jill Kneerim is my savviest critic and most ardent promoter. Our friendship is one of the pleasures of my life. My thanks also to Lucy Cleland, Jill’s associate at Kneerim and Williams, whose enthusiasm for the book and breadth of information have been invaluable. Deanne Urmy has the uncanny knack of knowing where you are going as a writer before you know yourself. She has guided me with rare critical acumen and ready sympathy, and the shape the book has taken owes much to her vision.
Deanne has been supported by a superb team at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, notably Jennifer Freilach who shepherded the book expertly through production. Jenny Xu and Leah Petrakis both did sterling work on my behalf, especially during my arduous pursuit of permission to use images and quotations. Copyeditor Susanna Brougham brought to my book the precision, the breadth of culture, and the sympathetic involvement that every writer dreams of. Finally, I was the beneficiary of the laserlike focus of proofreader Ellen Fast.
On my two research trips to England, in 2015 and 2017, I emerged from my cocoon and reveled in the active assistance and enthusiastic support of my network of relatives and friends in England. My brother-in-law Adrian Gill and his wife, Kim, providentially live in Sussex, near Virginia Woolf’s beloved South Downs, and they not only put me up but drove me expertly to Monk’s House and Charleston. The Cliftonville home of my brother Harry Scobie and his wife, Sue, also proved superbly placed. While staying with the Scobies, piloted by Harry, I was able to explore Henry James’s house in Rye, Ellen Terry and Edy Craig’s home in Smallhythe, and Vita Sackville-West’s homes at Knole and Sissinghurst. In London, I made forays into Bloomsbury and Kensington from the home of my friend Elizabeth Blunt, who cooked me delicious dinners and gave invaluable information on bus routes. In Cambridge, I stayed with my old friends Stella and Alan Weeds, and Alan, a fellow and former bursar of Trinity College, used his clout, at very short notice, to get me into the archive of both Trinity and King’s College. My thanks to all these relatives and friends for organizing my visits and taking such great care of me.
As a writer, I am never lonely, with endless books to read and the internet to offer instant answers. As a woman, I am neither alone nor lonely as I am lucky enough to be surrounded by family and friends. My children, Christopher and Catherine Gill, my daughter-in-law, Jennifer Litzow Gill, and my son-in-law, Tobias McElheny, all live within a twenty-mile radius of me. Of my seven grandchildren, Bronwyn Mako Wada Gill has strayed as far as Worcester, Massachusetts, but the other six—Fiona Amane Wada Gill, Delia Kotone Wada Gill, Eyob Gill, Kalkidan Gill, James McElheny, and Susannah McElheny—are all in the Boston area and likely to remain so for a while. My coeval boosters—my sister-in-law Linda Crosskey and her husband, John Crosskey, along with Fran and Kenneth McElheny and Joan and Merv Litzow (whom Ken memorably named “the Outlaws”) cheer me on and offer bibliographic suggestions.
Writing in 2019 I feel the need to end this list of debts by saying how happy and privileged I am to be an American.
In the United States, everyone I meet recognizes me as British because of my accent, while in the United Kingdom, people have long identified me as an American. That sense of deracination used to bother me. How weird is it to be asked which part of the United States you come from when you are back on a visit to your Welsh hometown, admiring the ducks on a small lake about a mile from where you were born? But today I take pride in floating somewhere mid-Atlantic, neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring, as the old British saying goes. Despite my funny accent, I can be 100 percent American without losing my membership in a thriving, achieving, contributing international tribe that stretches from Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands to Japan, Ethiopia, and Australia. I and mine are swirling around in the melting pot, doing what we can to keep the United States of America great.
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Bell, Quentin—Virginia Woolf, 2 vols. (1972)
———. Charleston: A Bloomsbury House and Garden (with Angelica Bell Garnett and Henrietta Garnett) (1987)
———. Bloomsbury Recalled (1995)
Bell, Quentin, and Angelica Garnett—Vanessa Bell’s Family Album, with an introduction by Quentin Bell (1981)
Bell, Vanessa—Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, ed. Regina Marler (1998)
Black, Ros—A
Talent for Humanity: The Life and Work of Lady Henry Somerset (2010)
Bussy, Dorothy Strachey—Olivia (1949)
Butler, Samuel—The Way of All Flesh (1912)
Cameron, Julia Margaret—Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women, with Introductions by Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry (1926/1973)
Carrington, (Dora)—Carrington: Letters and Extracts from Her Diaries, ed. David Garnett (1970)
Dalrymple, William—White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (2002)
DeSalvo, Louise—Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Abuse on Her Life and Work (1989)
Dunn, Jane—A Very Close Conspiracy: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf (1990)
Forster, E. M.—The Longest Journey (1907)
———. Maurice (1913–14/1971)
———. A Passage to India (1924)
———. Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (1934)
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Garnett, David—Lady into Fox (1922)
———. Aspects of Love (1955/1990)
Garnett, Henrietta—Family Skeleton (1987)
———. Anny: A Life of Anne Thackeray Ritchie (2005)
———. Wives and Stunners: The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Muses (2012)
Gérin, Winifred—Anne Thackeray Ritchie (1981)
Glendinning, Victoria—Vita: A Biography of Vita Sackville-West (1973)
———. Leonard Woolf: A Biography (2006)
Goldhill, Simon—A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion, and the Bensons in Victorian England (2016)
Holroyd, Michael—Lytton Strachey and the Bloomsbury Group: His Work, Their Influence (1967)
———. Lytton Strachey: The New Biography (1994)
———. A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Their Remarkable Families (2008)
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Lehmann, John—Thrown to the Woolfs (1978)
Levy, Paul—G. E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles (1981)
———. “The Painter and the Novelist,” New York Review of Books, May 11, 2017
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Nicolson, Nigel—Portrait of a Marriage (1973)
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———. Thackeray: The Age of Wisdom, 1847–1863 (1958)
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———. Five Old Friends (1875)
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———. A Book of Sibyls: Miss Barbauld, Mrs. Opie, Miss Austen (1883/Kindle)
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———. The Edwardians (1930)
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———. Vanessa Bell (1983)
———. Duncan Grant (1997)
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———. Sir Leslie Stephen’s Mausoleum Book, ed. Alan Bell (1896/1977)
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Thackeray, William Makepeace—Vanity Fair (1848)
———. Pendennis (1850)
Tomalin, Claire—The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (1990)
Trefusis, Violet—Echo (1931)
———. Broderie anglaise (1935)
———. Violet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska and John Phillips (1991)
Turnbaugh, Douglas Blair—Duncan Grant and the Bloomsbury Group (1987)
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Woolf, Leonard—The Village in the Jungle (1913)
———. The Wise Virgins (1914/2017)
———. Sowing (1960)
———. Growing (1961)
———. Beginning Again (1963)
———. Downhill All the Way (1967)
Woolf, Virginia—The Voyage Out (1915)
———. Night and Day (1919)
———. Jacob’s Room (1922)
———. The Common Reader, 2 vols. (1922 and 1932)
———. Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
———. To the Lighthouse (1927)
———. Orlando (1928)
———. A Room of One’s Own (1929)
———. The Waves (1932)
———. Flush (1933)
———. “Freshwater, a Comedy” (1935)
———. The Years (1937)
———. Three Guineas (1938)
———. Roger Fry: A Biography (1939)
———. Between the Acts (1941)
———. The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, ed. Leonard Woolf (1942)
———. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5 vols., ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (1977–1984)
———. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols., ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (1977–1979)
———. Virginia Woolf: Women and Writing, ed. Michèle Barrett (1979)
———. Virginia Woolf: Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (1985)
———. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols., ed. Andrew McNeillie and Stuart N. Clarke (1986–2010)
———. Virginia Woolf, a Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897–1909, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (1990)
———. Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches, ed. David Bradshaw, with a foreword by Doris Lessing (2005)
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Notes
Introduction
Despite the best efforts: In the United States a key example in twentieth-century literary history of the denigration of the Victorian woman writer is Harriet Beecher Stowe. Even Rodgers and Hammerstein with The King and I could not persuade Americans that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was not only a civil rights milestone that could leap international boundaries but a great read. Virginia Woolf wrote review essays on Christina Rosset
ti’s poetry and on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s great poem Aurora Leigh, both of them included in Michèle Barrett’s invaluable collection Virginia Woolf: Women and Writing (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979).
“noble character than learn”: Noel Annan, in the 1984 revised version of his 1951 biography Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian (New York: Random House), p. 119. The courtship correspondence of Leslie and Julia Stephen is now held in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.
fiercely anti-feminist: Ibid., p. 110. Both Leslie and Julia Stephen were against giving women the right to vote. In 1889, Julia Stephen, along with her social reformer friend Octavia Hill and the future Fabian Beatrice Potter (later Webb) signed An Appeal Against Female Suffrage.
Beatrice Potter changed her political views when she married Sidney Webb. Prominent in the Fabian Society and the new political ranks of the Labour Party during World War I, the Webbs became close allies of Leonard Woolf.
“I don’t know if I ever”: Mary Kingsley, quoted by Woolf in Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1938), p. 4.
“It is a voracious receptacle”: Ibid. The “Arthur” to whom Woolf refers is Arthur Pendennis, the eponymous hero of a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray.
Virginia Woolf’s education: The same argument has been made for Agatha Christie, who, though born eighteen years after Woolf, was also self-educated. Christie’s crippling shyness was partly the result of her having been designated as too dumb, in both senses of the word, to benefit from formal education. She had an exaggerated respect for Oxford-educated men like her second husband, Max Mallowan. See my book Agatha Christie: The Woman and Her Mysteries (New York: The Free Press, 1990).
