Virginia Woolf's Women

by Vanessa Curtis

  Julia, then, both in life and death, was directly responsible for many damaging, negative characteristics inherited by her daughter, but was she responsible for any positive aspects of Virginia’s womanhood? It seems that something of her tenacity and determination was passed down to Virginia, who was never afraid of hard work. Her capacity for friendship and humour must have come partly from Julia, who was much in demand as a confidante or adviser and who could be sharp and witty, and Virginia’s love of writing letters was inherited as much from Julia, who wrote to all sorts of people on a daily basis, as from Leslie, who was, after all, the official ‘man of letters’ and a far more obvious source of inspiration. Virginia’s fiction-writing ability was partly inherited from her mother, for Julia wrote amusing and colourful stories for children. Most useful of all, but often a considerable curse, was the passing down of Julia’s Victorian matriarchal manner. Virginia admitted that this inherited way of behaving could be very useful, because she enjoyed knowing how to act socially and how to recreate the dignified, comforting rituals of afternoon tea and polite conversation, but this became a useful mantle for her to hide behind when necessary. It was what made the ‘Angel in the House’ such a difficult phantom to kill, for it represented Virginia’s less attractive qualities of suppression, deceit, self-deprecation, guilt and superficiality.

  These private demons that Virginia battled with made it impossible for her to behave confidently with the staff that she employed in her own houses. Although she had indeed inherited Julia’s perfect tea-table manners, she was not good at playing the distant, haughty matriarch that Julia had been successful at portraying. Whilst this ability was passed down to Vanessa Bell, who managed to hire and fire staff without letting her emotions become apparent, Virginia suffered stress at the hands of Lottie and Nellie, her staff at Hogarth House in Richmond. She allowed them to resign when they felt like it, and then accepted them back when they regretted their hastiness. Going through agonies as she wrote and rewrote her novels, Virginia’s state of mind was not always strong enough to make firm decisions concerning her staff, and lack of confidence in herself also made it difficult for maids to respect her as an employer. Even though she was Leonard Woolf’s equal partner at the Hogarth Press for many years, Virginia preferred to leave the role of employer, and its responsibilities to her husband. Only one servant, Sophie Farrell, a stalwart of the original Stephen household, who went on to work for George Duckworth in her later years, continued to treat ‘Miss Ginia’ with any real respect, and her condolence letter to Vanessa after Virginia’s death is one of the most moving of such letters that Vanessa received.

  So Julia Stephen, the first significant woman in Virginia’s life and the most powerful and influential ‘Angel’ that she was ever to know, provided the foundation upon which all of Virginia’s future relationships were to be based. Whether these relationships were beneficial or otherwise, the fact remained that the traits Virginia inherited from Julia were never to leave her.

  Whilst Julia did at least love her husband, Leslie Stephen, for their seventeen years of marriage and in that sense provided a positive early role model of heterosexual love for Virginia to witness, Woolf’s shadowy half-sister Stella Duckworth’s miserable death left Virginia with a deep mistrust of male-female relationships. Although when Stella was alive, Virginia had genuinely loved this surrogate mother figure with ‘chivalrous devotion’, she was forced to witness the effect of a healthy sexual appetite on her glowing half-sister when Stella returned, broken and dying, from her honeymoon. This brutally shocking transformation was profoundly disturbing to Virginia and played havoc with her development as a woman; it would seem that from the very moment of Stella’s death onwards, Virginia viewed relationships between men and women with suspicion and some fear. She remained able to flirt, but the type of very physical flirtation that she used to her advantage with Leslie was never to manifest itself in quite such a confident way again. Although her later friendship with Violet Dickinson was often physical, taking the form of ‘pettings’, it was tinged with an unhealthy paranoia, an obsessive need for reassurance, and strong feelings of desperation that were quite unlike the natural, innocent flirtations of childhood.

  By the time she embarked on her first ‘serious’ flirtation with a man, Clive Bell, Virginia had perfected the art of flirting at a distance: she relied on her pen, rather than her body, to achieve the desired effect. The crush that she had on Clive was an intellectual one; at least it was on her side (Clive, always alive to the attractions of the opposite sex, longed to kiss his beautiful sister-in-law). Virginia certainly enjoyed the thrill of luring him to her side with witty, intimate letters, but on ensnaring him thus, the sexual side of Virginia, which still recalled what had happened to Stella, would sink down to a safe, untouchable place, while the side of Virginia that loved flattery, reassurance and pleasurable analysis of her early efforts at fiction, rose up and begged further indulgence. Flirting, to Virginia, was a necessary skill to possess if she were to gain the sort of reassurance she needed; it was rarely intended as the precursor to sexual gratification and therefore she was often shocked by its inevitable consequence – a bitter and frustrated recipient who required more than this teasing, unconsummated flirtation. All in all, the death of Stella Duckworth left Virginia with an extremely negative view of heterosexuality.

  After the deaths of Julia and Stella, two women continued to have great influence on the young Virginia Stephen. The first, who was always to be the recipient of Virginia’s love, adoration and passion, was her sister Vanessa. Flung together after Julia and Stella’s terrible deaths, the sisters confided only in each other, unable to express emotion in front of the grieving Leslie Stephen. Vanessa eventually instigated the controversial but necessary move from Leslie’s cluttered, stuffy Victorian house at Hyde Park Gate to the bare, white-walled Edwardian rooms of Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. Virginia was rarely away from her sister’s side until Vanessa accepted Clive Bell’s offer of marriage in 1906, and even then the sisters wrote to each other with intimacy and affection, often on a daily basis, for the rest of their lives.

  Incredibly, Virginia’s period of obsession with her sister’s husband, Clive, did nothing to lessen the love between herself and Vanessa. The adored elder sister, Vanessa, brought Virginia’s loving nature to the foreground. Other than Leonard, Vanessa was the person whom Virginia loved and needed most. ‘Nessa’ was always on hand to reassure and to protect, and to sort out domestic problems and read the long, intimate letters that her sister would write to her. She also encouraged many of Virginia’s most attractive qualities: playfulness, humour, loyalty, solidarity and, particularly in the early days, romantic passion. However, Vanessa also contributed greatly to Virginia’s insecurity. Vanessa was always the more womanly, more maternal, consistently even-tempered beauty who, at one time, had three men vying for her attentions. Next to this voluptuous sister, Virginia often felt awkward: too tall, too thin, somehow not a ‘real’ woman.

  Vanessa evoked both respect and jealousy in Virginia: the former for her strength of character (she refused, unlike Stella, to bow to Leslie’s incessant demands and complaints); the latter because of the innate femininity and ‘earth mother’ demeanour that saw her settled at Charleston with three children and the love of two men, Clive Bell and Duncan Grant. After conceiving a daughter, Angelica, with Grant, Vanessa Bell was rarely to experience sexual passion again, but in the early days of her marriage to Clive, she had boasted often of her achievements to Virginia, causing Virginia to contrast herself unfavourably with her gorgeous sister, who could attract the attentions of clever, personable and creative men.

  Although the competition between the sisters, as far as work was concerned, brought out Virginia’s determination to succeed by gaining fame and material success as opposed to Vanessa’s children and lovers, this arrangement began to go wrong as well, for Vanessa’s paintings started to attract attention. For the first time, Virginia’s propensity to jealousy bec
ame obvious in the many resentful retorts she spat out at her sister – she was supposed to be the only successful one, after all! Her jealousy was caused by insecurity and, despite their lifelong devotion, many small rifts grew up between the sisters. They were almost always resolved in the end, however, and if one wishes to see the loving, intimate side of Virginia Woolf, it is preserved for all to witness in the thousands of letters that she wrote to Vanessa. Despite sporadic bursts of jealousy and sisterly rivalry, the two women remained close for ever, and Virginia paid homage to her sister in several of her novels, most notably in the character of Katharine Hilbery in Night and Day (1919). On the day of Virginia’s death in 1941, the notes left on her desk were addressed only to Leonard and Vanessa – the two people who, in the end, had meant the most to her.

  Other than Vanessa, Virginia’s only real female friend during the early years of the twentieth century was Violet Dickinson, an acquaintance of Stella’s, who went on to offer Virginia emotional support through her early breakdowns and who was the object of the latter’s adolescent desire for several years. The intimacy and playfulness that Virginia displayed towards her sister was also carried on into her friendship with Violet Dickinson. Significantly, it was Violet who initiated Virginia’s first real career break as a book reviewer, and Violet who was the first strong role model, for she had not only travelled extensively, but also built a ‘house of her own’. However, something about Violet, twinned with the pain of Julia and Stella’s death, allowed Virginia’s petulant, insecure side to overtake her vastly more attractive, down-to-earth one. Virginia was overly passionate in her dealings with Violet, demanding, childlike, pleading, jealous, and unreasonable in her requests for petting and reassurances. Her desires often became irrational, insubstantial and melodramatic. She became cruel, eventually dumping the devoted Violet when newer, younger friends came on to the scene.

  Although Violet loved Virginia’s letters and fully supported her writing career, she must have secretly been hurt and disappointed at the behaviour of this needy young woman. She remained loyal to her friend, even though Virginia rarely demonstrated any great loyalty towards Violet. However, despite the appearance of some of Virginia’s less desirable qualities, the letters between herself and Violet do display much that is endearing or naïvely romantic.

  No such romance was apparent when Virginia first came into contact with Ottoline Morrell. Ottoline, a woman on the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group, eventually became a long-standing, although never intimate, friend of Virginia Woolf. The false, gushing tone that Virginia used in her early correspondence with Ottoline shows Woolf in an unattractive light, for despite her unkind remarks about Ottoline’s extravagance and her mockery of Ott’s desire to live and flourish amongst writers and artists, it was also these very qualities that attracted Virginia and other Bloomsbury members to the Morrells’ lavish country home, Garsington. There they would spend long weekends indulging in Ottoline’s over-generous hospitality and unashamedly taking all that she had to offer.

  Ottoline, one of the few women in Virginia’s circle who was totally heterosexual, both fascinated and disgusted Virginia, who was reluctantly attracted to Ottoline’s strangely flamboyant, seductive beauty. Despite finding Ottoline compelling to look at, Virginia constantly sneered at her lack of morals and inability to be a true artist. Effortlessly, perhaps even without realizing it, Virginia displayed one after another of her most unattractive characteristics: snobbery, envy, falseness, cruelty and fickleness. Never did Virginia seem less kind than when she was attacking poor Ottoline in her early letters.

  The very things that attracted Virginia to Ottoline – her opulence, unusual looks, aristocratic background and beautiful homes – also repelled her, and unfortunately Virginia lost no time in documenting her repulsion to other friends. The painfully shy, loving, insecure Virginia Stephen by this time had faded away – and into her place had jumped a sharp, posturing, cigarette-smoking intellectual who made the most of Ottoline’s hospitality whilst slating her in front of an admiring audience. The patient Ottoline had unleashed Woolf’s superficiality, arrogance, gossip and unreliability, quite unintentionally.

  Only much later on in this rather one-sided friendship did Virginia, with the hindsight brought about by age and the shared understanding of debilitating illness, relent in this behaviour and allow her finer qualities of kindness, patience and concern to shine through. Virginia only learned to appreciate her friend’s loyalty, suffering and the endless help she gave to others just before Ottoline’s death; even then, Woolf had little idea of just how much hurt she had caused her.

  This duplicity of feeling towards Ottoline later caused Virginia to question herself too, and for this reason the relationship, which only really settled into a genuine fondness in the 1930s, is an interesting one to analyse.

  Through Ottoline, Virginia became a friend of the contemporary woman writer, Katherine Mansfield. Katherine, along with Virginia’s sister Vanessa, was different from the other women in Virginia’s circle because she was not a traditionalist (despite their pioneering traits, most of the friends that Virginia had spent time with up until meeting Mansfield still retained their Victorian connection to the past). Katherine was the first true modernist that Virginia had known intimately, and she admired Katherine’s work immensely (with one or two well-documented exceptions).

  The Hogarth Press published Katherine’s early story Prelude and the two writers met frequently at first, surprised at how similar their literary aims were. However, seriously ill and lonely, with an unreliable husband, Katherine became jealous of Virginia’s stable, happy marriage and writing success, and Virginia slated Katherine’s story ‘Bliss’, proclaiming it to be hard and cheap in style. In return for these less than positive reviews, Katherine wrote some coolly dismissive pieces of her own about Virginia’s novels, deeming them slow and old-fashioned. In this way rifts grew up between them.

  Katherine Mansfield, never averse to putting people down, was able to inspire pity and revulsion from Virginia. Their friendship, based not so much on reciprocal fondness as mutual ambition, encouraged Virginia’s protectiveness on occasion, but more often than not frustrated her. Katherine tended to maintain silent, prolonged absences in overseas countries, battling to save her health. Virginia’s reluctant fascination with the bisexual, enigmatic and terminally ill Katherine is evident in her diaries and letters. Unusually for Virginia, she became jealous of Katherine not personally, but professionally. Katherine evoked in Virginia a competitiveness, a rivalry based on the desire for literary success.

  By the time Katherine died in her early thirties, the two writers’ relationship had become distant and disillusioned, leaving Virginia with a sense of great regret and yet a certain relief as well. She believed, mistakenly, that the competition would now diminish, but Katherine continued after her death to capture the hearts and minds of the public with several volumes of posthumously issued journals and stories, and she haunted Virginia’s own thoughts and dreams for years to come, both as a literary rival and as a woman.

  Mansfield’s early death saddened Virginia greatly, but the subsequent reflections that Virginia wrote in her diary and used when thinking about Katherine’s life occasionally seem to have been used as a writing exercise rather than a genuine display of sentiment towards this woman, whom she was now to confess that she had felt fascination and some sort of love for. Biographers have hinted at a sexual attraction between the two writers and have analysed to great extent the references to lesbianism in their short stories, but Katherine appeared not to have physically attracted Virginia during her lifetime – the latter’s famous comment that Katherine smelt like a ‘civet cat’ seemingly giving weight to the fact. There is no doubt, however, that as a writer and modernist, Katherine Mansfield was the single woman contemporary able to present a serious threat to Virginia Woolf’s literary reputation.

  A woman acquainted with Ottoline and Katherine, the unusual Dora Carrington, tends to slip almost u
nnoticed through the hands of biographers, although there are several parallels to be drawn between herself and Virginia Woolf. Carrington was not considered to be a bona fide member of the Bloomsbury Group, but came to it by association with her soul mate and platonic partner, Lytton Strachey.

  Loving, bisexual, often insecure and depressed or tortured by her art and her life, Carrington was at first viewed with suspicion by Virginia who, still close to Lytton, was jealous of any female who might threaten their special friendship. Eventually this mistrust became a genuine fondness, although Carrington, naturally youthful and cherubic in appearance, made Virginia feel old and dowdy in comparison. Carrington was the one woman who consistently brought out most of Woolf’s positive qualities. Something about Carrington encouraged Virginia to react in a gentle, feminine way, at odds with her usual sharp or unforgiving analyses of people.

  Virginia demonstrated true affection for Carrington, and although they were never the closest of friends, an accepting affinity grew up between them based on shared artistic goals, love of the Sussex countryside and unconditional devotion to Lytton Strachey. With Carrington, Virginia’s teasing was not cruel, but laughingly inoffensive. It is only by studying Virginia’s behaviour towards Carrington that we ever witness how she could behave purely as a sympathetic woman friend, rather than as a writer, critic, cynic or snob. After Lytton’s death, rare, palpable warmth emanated from Virginia’s heartfelt letters to Carrington; warmth that did not need to rely on wit or cleverness, thus rarely seen in letters to the various other women in her life (although it can be seen clearly in letters written to Leonard, Jacques Raverat, Roger Fry and Lytton).