Virginia Woolf's Women

by Vanessa Curtis

  The same series of photographs contains a sequence entitled ‘Mrs Herbert Duckworth’. Here, Cameron introduces Julia in her guise as a newly married woman and wife of a successful barrister. Gone are the untamed locks and defiant expression; in their place are serenity, beautiful clothes and elegantly tied-back hair. But the same self-assuredness and poise shine through. Before the death of Herbert stripped her of her spirit, optimism and confidence, Julia Stephen appeared, in her aunt’s photographs, to be ready and able to take on the world.

  Tragically, in 1872 this picture-book dream was to be shattered. Herbert Duckworth died an unexpected and undignified death as he stretched up to pick a fig and instead burst an abscess. Julia was left a widow, pregnant and with two tiny children already. Although Cameron’s next photograph of her niece is entitled ‘A Beautiful Vision’, it should perhaps have been called ‘A Mournful Vision’ instead. The ghostly sitter is white-faced, dressed in the widow’s black mourning garments with a white cap and simple collar. The most striking and disturbing difference between this photograph of Cameron’s niece and the earlier set is in Julia’s eyes. Her pupils are dilated, her face stiff and withdrawn, her whole expression shrieks not of confidence, but of the futility of her life. Where once was reflected love and hope, now shows only a weary resignation to fate. Never again, after this photograph, did any portraits of Julia reflect much other than severity and ill health at worst, impassivity and acceptance at best. Although she learned to love her second husband and new family, the power and confidence of those early pictures was never again to be captured on film. The death of Herbert literally drained away her colour, her faith, her confidence and her place in life.

  One of the last pictures that Cameron was to take of Julia, in 1874, is titled ‘She Walks in Beauty’. It is hard to see the beauty in Julia’s features: she is wearing a fancy gold chain and striking a defiant pose, but her face is a blurred white oval under the severe black hat, her hands appear skeletal as they poke from black-frilled sleeves, her features are hard, drawn and she looks remote. At this time in her life, Julia was lying, prostrate with grief, full-length along the top of Herbert Duckworth’s grave. Her three children, George, Gerald and Stella, were to grow up in the shadow of a distant and melancholy mother. All three of them suffered as a result, and all three had their childhood cruelly curtailed short as they struggled to support and comfort the heartbroken Julia. Stella, as the only girl, learned from the age of five to be as devoted and selfless to her mother as Julia had always been with Maria. A pattern of behaviour was being established in 1874, a pattern that was to pass down the female line of the family and manifest itself, often with harrowing results, in its most famous member – Virginia Woolf.

  After Herbert’s death, Julia Duckworth continued to do only two things – to spend time with her needy mother, and to devote herself to good causes, visiting the sick and miserable. This was a self-imposed duty that she was to maintain for the rest of her life; it now formed some kind of effective barrier against the pain she suffered inside. For eight years she mourned Herbert relentlessly, telling her anxious relatives that she only wished to die. She moved to 13 Hyde Park Gate (now No. 22), where her next-door neighbour was Leslie Stephen, also in anguished mourning for his first wife, Minny Thackeray, who had left him with a sickly, backward daughter, called Laura. Julia was familiar with Leslie’s writing and had been friends with him for some time, providing invaluable support throughout Minny’s illness and death. This was a role that suited well her own gloomy temperament and newly resolved devotion to soothe the troubles of others.

  Although both Julia and Leslie were grieving and, therefore, in a state of considerable sorrow, Leslie, unlike Julia, had not resigned himself to a lifetime of futility. He carried inside him a glimmer of hope, and it resurfaced at the beginning of 1877 with the shocking realization that he was in love with Julia. It was not set to be the jolliest of romances, however, as Leslie knew from the start. ‘Julia was that strange solemn music to which my whole nature seemed to be set’, he reflected after her death. He confided his feelings to his new love, but she merely patted his shoulder and told him she would prefer to conserve their friendship. A year of this friendship followed, during which time their letters became more intimate, but Julia still expressed unwillingness to commit to a new, shared life. Early in 1878, however, as the couple sat by the fire at Julia’s house, she suddenly looked up and agreed to become his wife. The marriage took place at Kensington Church in the High Street on 26 March 1878, and Leslie, with his little daughter Laura, moved into No. 13 to join Julia and her three children.

  Eventually Julia, loved and worshipped by her new husband, came to regain something of the confidence and humour that she thought she would never possess again. Although she neglected to take much heed of her own happiness, Julia learned to live through Leslie, her mother and her children, as well as by acting as a friend, confidante and matchmaker to the many young couples who visited Hyde Park Gate. The three Duckworth children were gradually forced to accommodate four new half-brothers and sisters in the already crowded household. The first of these, Vanessa, was born on 30 May 1879 (sharing a birth date with Stella Duckworth). Julian Thoby followed in 1880, Adeline Virginia in 1882, and Julia’s special favourite, Adrian Leslie, in 1883. During this year, Smith Elder & Co. published Julia’s essays on how to nurse the sick and dying. The pieces illustrate Julia at her most practical, as she advises banishing boring visitors from the bedside of her patients and debates, with considerable wit (albeit with the excessively pernickety attentions of the Victorian matriarch), on the evils of crumbs in the bed sheets.

  Leslie and Julia began their 17-year-long marriage at 22 Hyde Park Gate. The road had originally been a piece of wasteland, upon which resided one or two donkeys, until a schoolmaster, Joshua Flesher Hanson, bought it in 1833. Slowly a row of mansions was erected, some with Corinthian columns and Doric pillars, and they were occupied in the Stephens’ time by dukes, merchants, lawyers and famous names such as Charles Dickens and, later, Winston Churchill. The house was built in 1843 and before Leslie and Julia took it, it had belonged to a retired East India merchant named James Cowell. The surrounding parts of Kensington, in particular Melbury Road and Holland Park Road, were full of artists, many of them living in houses built to their own specifications. The Prinsep family, from which Julia was descended, leased Little Holland House and shared it with George Watts. He had come to stay for a week and ended up staying for thirty years.

  In Kensington High Street, Julia and her family would have been able to visit John Barker’s, a massive emporium rather like today’s Harrods, with a huge food hall, a drapery, bookshop, stationer, ironmongery and teashop. Barker’s rival was Pontings, a ‘fancy goods and silk business’ that was opened in 1873 and grew into a large department store selling glass and china on six floors, with one hundred live-in assistants. Other shops long since gone included the Aerated Bread Company (ABC), a teashop often mentioned in Virgina Stephen’s diaries, Dr Jaeger’s Sanitary Woollen System, Daniel Neal’s School Uniform Shop and Cramer’s Music Shop where Stella, the most musical of the family, would have purchased sheet music. In 1897 the busy High Street was festooned with flags and buntings on the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.

  Number 22 Hyde Park Gate still stands but it is now divided into flats. It is a tall, narrow, odd-shaped building (the top two floors and a large back dining-room extension were sketched quickly on the back of an envelope by Julia and then built to accommodate her growing family). With a tiny patch of garden at the back and no front garden to speak of, this house provided the Stephen children with a claustrophobic existence. At one point it contained eight children, three adults and several servants. There was little privacy either inside or outside the house; everybody down Hyde Park Gate knew the business of everybody living there, and the High Street was noisy and overcrowded with horses, hansom cabs and horse-drawn buses.

  The highlight of the children’s
year was the summer holiday to St Ives, Cornwall, where Leslie had taken the lease on Talland House from the Great Western Railway since 1882. Here, freed a little from the tight restraints of Victorian society and encouraged by the climate to swim, walk and catch moths, the children relaxed and witnessed Julia at her best as she sat on the front step and watched them play cricket, or enchanted her guests on the spacious lawn.

  Talland House, in a secluded setting on the north Cornish coast, overlooking Godrevy Lighthouse and the little town of St Ives, still stands today, a magical and evocative house where the Stephen family would have enjoyed the privacy of a large, sheltered garden (now much diminished in size and partly taken over by a car park). Early letters sent to Julia from Talland House find Leslie worrying (in his first letter of 4 June 1882) about the faulty boiler, which he is afraid will explode and cripple the Lobb family (who were being interviewed by Leslie as possible gardeners and cooks). He also reports that there were six beds on the first floor: in a nursery, main bedroom, dressing-room, smaller bedroom and two backrooms. He mentions that the path down to the beach is without steps, for the ‘babies’ to get down, and talks of the greenhouses. These were once magnificent, ornate glass and iron structures, full of peaches, nectarines and grapes, but sadly only the back walls now remain.

  During the 1880s, the little town of St Ives was noisy, smelly and wholly governed by the fishing industry. Entire families worked on the yellow sands, gutting and packing pilchards, and all of the old houses (many of which still survive today) had cramped living quarters over ground floors full of hanging, drying fish, with cats to catch the mice that ate the fishing nets. There was poor sanitation, inadequate gas lighting in the town, and a very high crime rate, but, removed from the poverty of the town, in an enviable setting high up on the cliff, Julia Stephen and her family enjoyed thirteen magical summers at St Ives.

  Occasionally Leslie visited Talland House alone, leaving Julia in London with his ‘ragamice’, as he affectionately referred to the children. His love for them pours out of every letter, especially towards Virginia, his self-confessed favourite: ‘Kiss my ragamice and Ginia. There will be no more of that breed’. As a small child, Virginia idolized her father, who had already predicted that by the time she turned ten years old she would become a writer, but she remained in awe of her mother. Julia’s time was spread insubstantially between eight children and her work for the poor, and unless one of the children was sick, it was difficult for any of them to spend more than a snatched moment alone with her.

  In 1892 Maria Jackson finally died after years of ill health. The blow to Julia was severe, for she had been in daily contact with her mother for forty-six years. The extant photographs from this period show her with sunken, hollow cheeks, greying hair and unforgiving eyes. Her health began to deteriorate as the effects of overwork, grief, motherhood and coping with Leslie’s demands all began to take their toll, and in 1894, the St Ives idyll had begun to come to an end. A huge hotel, The Porthminster, was erected just to the right of Talland House, and Julia dramatically declared her view of the bay to be ruined. The heartbroken Virginia reluctantly helped to draw a ‘lease for sale’ sign, but no buyer was found during that year. Then, in May 1895, the pattern of winters in Kensington and summer holidays in St Ives, set since 1882, finally drew to a terrible close. After a bout of rheumatic fever that started innocently enough with a sore throat, Julia Stephen ‘sank like an exhausted swimmer’ and died on 5 May at the age of forty-nine, plunging the family into a prolonged bout of mourning, described by Virginia when she wrote A Sketch of the Past, as an ‘oriental gloom’.

  It took Virginia many years to come to terms both with the life and death of her mother. She did not begin to achieve this fully until she penned her elegiac To The Lighthouse (1927), drawing in detail on reminiscences of the Stephen family holidays at Talland House (although the book is ostensibly set in the Hebrides). Movingly, unflinchingly and in a way that touched her brother Adrian and sister Vanessa to the core, she paid tribute to her parents in the characters of Mr and Mrs Ramsay, succinctly capturing Leslie’s gruffness and Julia’s sadness with uncanny accuracy. Despite losing her mother at the age of thirteen, Virginia’s perception and understanding of Julia’s grief after losing Herbert Duckworth is poignantly demonstrated in the character of Mrs Ramsay, shedding new light on the little we know of Julia today. ‘Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, halfway down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed’ wrote Virginia, remembering her mother’s melancholy nature. She mused further on this vision of woe:

  What was there behind it? Her beauty, her splendour? Had he blown his brains out, they asked, had he died the week before they were married – some other, some earlier lover, of whom rumours reached one?

  Virginia’s tribute to Julia in the character of Mrs Ramsay also allows us a tiny glimpse of the ‘old Julia’, the one who had known brief happiness. Although Mrs Ramsay possesses great sorrow and resignation, she also ‘claps a deerstalker’s hat on her head’ and runs over the grass in galoshes to snatch up a mischievous child. These little flashes of humour are tiny chinks of light in an otherwise dark and oppressive portrayal of Julia/Mrs Ramsay’s malignant sadness. Virginia later recalled, as she wrote her only attempts at autobiography, A Sketch of the Past/Reminiscences, that Julia was ‘very quick; very direct; practical; and amusing’. Julia appeared to have two distinctly conflicting sides, as did Mrs Ramsay – an old-fashioned, haunting beauty contrasted with a sharp, impatient severity. The loss of Julia was catastrophic to Virginia: ‘she was the whole thing; Talland House was full of her’ recollected her daughter, many years later. In the same way, the death of Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse symbolizes the end of the house, which crumbles and decays with neglect, while the ghost of Mrs Ramsay haunts the artist Lily Briscoe in the same way that Julia, until her exorcism in To the Lighthouse, haunted Virginia Woolf.

  They were the sun and moon to each other; my mother the positive and definite, Stella the reflecting and satellite.

  After Julia’s sudden death, the burden of caring for the family and nursing Virginia through her first, early breakdown, fell upon the shoulders of Julia’s eldest daughter, Stella Duckworth. Stella, born on 30 May 1869, spent all but the first and last two years of her life in the shadow and service of her grieving, melancholy mother. Writing in A Sketch of the Past (1939), Virginia recalled that her half-sister’s ‘first memories were of a very sad widowed mother who “went about doing good” … visiting the slums, and the cancer hospital in the Brompton Road’. The passage also refers to Stella as having ‘lived in the shade of that widowhood’ and that she perhaps ‘took then the play that was so marked – that attitude of devotion, almost canine in its touching adoration; that passive, suffering affection; and also that complete unquestioning dependence’.

  Amongst the nine hundred archived letters, on their black-edged, cream paper, that Maria Jackson sent to her daughter Julia, are a small handful addressed to ‘Bunch’ (short for ‘Honeybunch’, Maria’s nickname for Stella). They contain telling indicators of the sort of pressure that Stella, aged only four at the time of receiving the following letter, was being put under – she was expected to be the perfect grandchild:

  My darling Old Bunch, I like your story very much – I hope you will write another … when you write again, tell me how the music gets on.

  Although she was only a tiny child in 1873, Stella was already being forced into the role she was to hold until Julia’s death in 1895, namely that of ‘second best’. ‘Stella is a jewel only inferior to you my angel for who could be like you?’ wrote Maria to Julia. However, Maria did possess a very real, if suffocating, affection for her first granddaughter. A poem, entitled ‘For Stella on her 5th Birthday’ waxes lyrical about the little girl, albeit in the popular and over-sentimental Victorian language of the time. It contains a predictable tinge of unnecessary melodrama; the penultimate verse is particula
rly gloom struck, if flattering:

  Five summers only has thou known

  A rose bud, thou, without a thorn

  I may not see the rose when blown

  My night draws near – with thee, t’is morn

  At the age of ten, Stella had a new baby half-sister, Vanessa Stephen (from her mother’s second marriage) whom she was expected to help care for. Thoby followed Vanessa in quick succession, and by the time 1881 had arrived, Stella was not only a surrogate mother, but also seemingly a nurse. She wrote to reassure her grandmother when Julia was suffering as a result of a difficult childbirth and exhaustion:

  Please make yourself quite easy now dear Granny about her. I am very careful when I give her medicine – I have been afraid to [do] very much washing in case of chilling her – with the exception of hands face and feet she washes herself elsewhere.

  Stella, at the time of writing that letter, was only twelve years old. There is some evidence that her own health was poor at this time, no doubt due to having to follow a punishing, grown-up regime of caring for others when she should have been enjoying her childhood. In her 1984 biography of Virginia Woolf, Lyndall Gordon notes that Stella had suffered from rheumatic fever as a child. In Maria’s letters to Julia, there are some references to Stella having difficulty walking, but she fails to mention the cause: