Virginia Woolf's Women

by Vanessa Curtis

  Stella’s death certificate recorded a vague diagnosis of ‘operation shock’ and ‘suppositive acute peritonitis’, but in a letter to Vanessa Bell as late as 1941, Violet Dickinson, Stella’s friend, confided that one of Stella’s nurses proclaimed her to be ‘malformed’ and that ‘marriage had finished her off’. Whatever the cause of Stella’s tragic death, the gentle surrogate mother figure, whom the children had come to rely on, had been snatched away only two years after Julia’s death. From 19 July 1897, the nightmare from which Virginia never fully extracted herself for the rest of her life began in earnest.

  The immediate shock and horror of Stella’s sudden death is no more apparent than in the pages of Virginia’s 1897 diary, where the next day’s page is left completely blank and the following entry starkly reports that Stella had been buried in Highgate next to Julia, and that none of the children had attended. This is perhaps not as odd as it seems, for the entire family were agnostics. On Thursday 22 July, Virginia was in serious shock – the diary entry reads only that she ‘forgot what happened’. The house filled up with the same set of grieving relatives, still barely over Julia’s death, and a mad Duckworth cousin who insisted on praying in the room where Stella had died at No. 24. The Stephen family decided to get away from all this by taking their annual summer holiday, this year at Painswick in the Cotswolds at a house lent to them by Fred Maitland, but it was a nightmarish summer. While they were there, the first anniversary of Stella and Jack’s engagement occurred, a row broke out between George and Leslie, and an anguished Jack poured his heart out to Virginia in the summerhouse as she stared dismally at a leafless tree outside, an image that was to haunt her for the rest of her life.

  Although the holiday was spent in mourning, it had at least provided a break from the atmosphere at Hyde Park Gate. Now, faced with going back to this house with the absence of both Julia and Stella, Virginia was terribly distraught, recording on the day of their departure that she was ‘very strange and unhappy’. Oddly, she reserves words of stronger passion not for Stella’s death, but for her pen. ‘With terrible agony & excitement chose a nib for my pen’ she notes on 24 September, but ‘it was too fine – oh the despair of that moment’. A miserable trip to Jack Hill’s family home at Corby took place, where Virginia was haunted by the spectre of her dead half-sister: ‘here she hangs like a pale rose; against that queer still brick wall’ she recalled in an early draft of A Sketch of the Past.

  ‘Vanessa’s name was of course suggested by Stella’s’ noted Leslie Stephen in his Mausoleum Book. He is referring to the two nicknames of Jonathan Swift’s lovers, Esther Johnson and Hester Vanhomrigh. So, already possessing a literary name, it seemed fitting that Stella would go on to provide the inspiration for some of Virginia Woolf’s fictional heroines. While Virginia was still a small child, Stella had already featured in her mother’s short stories. Although ostensibly written for Virginia, Vanessa, Thoby and Adrian, Julia Stephen’s Stories for Children often feature the ‘good’ child who seems, subconsciously or otherwise, to have been modelled on Stella. Clara, the heroine in ‘Tommy and His Neighbours’, is just the sort of child that Stella appears to have been – quiet, well-behaved, shy and always at her lessons. ‘The Monkey on the Moor’, which features a ‘wicked little girl’ called ‘Ginia’, revolves around Annie, the little girl who befriends everyone, invites them to tea in the nursery and has eyes that are ‘blue’ and ‘kind’. In ‘Cat’s Meat’, Lady Middleton, a caricature of how Julia saw herself at the time, returns from one of her endless missions to help the poor and is poured a cup of tea by Maggie, who ‘although only seven was a helpful little creature’. The pouring of tea at 22 Hyde Park Gate had remained Stella’s duty up until her death; afterwards, Jack Hills gloomily remarked that only Stella and Julia had known how to handle the heavy silver pot.

  ‘Even now it seems incredible’ remarked Virginia Woolf in Reminiscences, referring, over ten years after the event, to Stella’s untimely death. ‘We cannot easily make sense of an apparently pointless and destructive event like Rachel’s death’ says Jane Wheare in her introduction to the new Penguin edition of The Voyage Out. Although certain characteristics of the heroine, Rachel Vinrace, in this first of Virginia’s novels, can be traced to Woolf herself, glimpses of Stella can be seen in parts. The ‘voyage’ of Woolf’s title is often construed as referring to her move from Kensington to Bloomsbury. It could also be applied to the voyage of self-discovery that Stella was just embarking on at the time of her death – a journey that had taken her away from the cloying gloom of 22 Hyde Park Gate to a house of her own with a new husband. The Voyage Out can therefore be seen as a homage to the gentleness and sympathetic nature of women such as Stella, whose intelligence was often to be overridden and ignored by the men in their lives. Was Woolf thinking of Jack Hills when, in the guise of Terence Hewet’s long, cliff-top reply to Rachel (who has confessed that she feels intimidated by St John Hirst’s intellect), she allowed vent to her feelings about men and their role within the family? Jack Hills had been a solicitor:

  Consider what a bully the ordinary man is … the ordinary hard working, rather ambitious solicitor or man of business with a family to bring up and a certain position to maintain’.

  It is significant that in The Voyage Out, Rachel has a gift for playing the piano – the one talent that had been allowed to develop in the absence of conventional school and university education. Virginia Woolf did not play the piano, after a series of disastrous lessons, but Stella had an aptitude for the instrument, although she had never benefited from any formal education.

  The confusion over Rachel’s illness and death in The Voyage Out cannot help but bring to mind the terrible confusion and tension of Stella’s final days. Rachel’s first doctor, Rodriguez, maintains that she is getting better when in fact her family can see her failing fast. After a new doctor is brought in, Rachel appears to be recovering, as indeed Stella did during the last five days of her life. She then dies and Terence, at her side, utters the words ‘no two people have ever been so happy as we have’, words that perhaps Jack Hills uttered to Stella as she died (he was present at her death, as the certificate verifies), and words that were later echoed by Virginia Woolf in her suicide note to Leonard. Even Rachel’s hour of death, 3 a.m., precisely mirrors that of Stella’s.

  After Rachel’s death, Evelyn’s ‘what did it matter then? What was the meaning of it all?’ echoes the young Virginia’s diary entries just after Stella’s death – ‘it is hopeless and strange’. Rachel – gentle, talented, about to enter into marriage – is taken away from those who love her in the cruellest of ways, leaving chaos, grief and confusion behind her. In The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf is able to let us glimpse the bewilderment and misery that she felt on losing Stella, which she had not been able to express in 1897.

  Night and Day, Woolf’s next novel, also contains memories of Stella and her difficult relationship with her stepfather, Leslie Stephen. Although the inspiration for Katharine Hilbery is clearly Vanessa Bell, to whom the book is dedicated, and Katharine is a strong character much like Vanessa (in an early draft of the novel, Woolf makes Katharine an aspiring painter), there is, in the chapter where Katharine announces her engagement, a sudden and vivid recollection of Leslie Stephen’s reaction to Stella’s engagement. It recalls his self-pitying outbursts of grief and annoyance:

  Had he loved to see her swept away by this torrent, to have her taken from him by this uncontrollable force, to stand by, helpless, ignored? Oh, how he loved her! How he loved her!

  The Stephen children’s reactions to Leslie’s temper are recaptured within this novel as well, Woolf seeming to give vent to her own pent-up annoyance in the following passage where Mr Hilbery

  strode out of the room, leaving in the minds of the women a sense, half of awe, half of amusement, at the extravagant, inconsiderate, uncivilized male, outraged somehow and gone bellowing to his lair with a roar which still sometimes reverberates in the most polished of drawing
rooms.

  To the Lighthouse (1927) also explores some of the difficult emotions that arose in the aftermath of Stella’s death. It is at once lyrical and visual, complementing the images from Stella’s photograph album of the time, telling the story of the Stephen/Ramsay family at their beloved holiday home. Written thirty years after Stella’s death, and almost twenty years after she first explored her half-sister’s death in Reminiscences, the book pays homage to Stella’s beauty and gentle nature in the character of Prue Ramsay, but even so many years later, there is still a sense that Woolf is not fully ready to explore the horror of Stella’s death. ‘Prue the Fair’, as Mr Bankes refers to her at the opening of the book, is a submissive and feminine young woman who worries extensively about keeping the rest of the family happy, taking full responsibility for Mr Ramsay’s rage when he, for example, finds an earwig in his milk. She has only just, like Stella, begun to explore the possibilities of happiness in her own life. In a touching tribute to the relationship between Stella and Julia, Prue is shown to idolize her mother, Mrs Ramsay. Watching her come downstairs one evening, Prue admits to herself that this relationship is ‘the thing itself’; ‘she felt as if there were only one person like that in the world; her mother’. Prue was expected to marry and have children, but her eventual marriage is described within three abrupt sets of parentheses, as though describing this slightly tedious event would take away the impetus from the more important descriptions of spring evolving into summer. Woolf chooses to make the event more vivid for the reader with this use of stark, brief text. She repeats the formula for her next mention of Prue:

  [Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness connected with childbirth, which was indeed a tragedy, people said. They said nobody deserved happiness more.]

  By bracketing the text once more, Woolf forces two immediate reactions from her reader: firstly, shock, due to the suddenness of the announcement; secondly, bemusement – why is such an enormous bereavement described in three brief sentences and then not mentioned again? Inevitably, the answer seems to be found in Virginia’s reaction to Stella’s death in 1897, and the brevity of her subsequent diary entries. The references to childbirth are something of a revelation – Woolf makes no reference at all to Stella’s pregnancy in her 1897 diary, neither does she speculate on it in the earlier reminiscences contained in Moments of Being; but here, in To the Lighthouse, thirty years after the bereavement itself, Woolf makes her first allusion to the controversy that surrounded the cause of Stella’s death.

  As if to make amends for keeping Stella at arm’s length in To the Lighthouse and to compensate for Prue’s unhappy fate, Woolf’s next ‘family’ novel, The Years (1937), fully resurrects Stella in the character of Eleanor Pargiter. Eleanor, whilst possessing the sweet-naturedness of Prue Ramsay, also displays determination and dedication to good causes coupled with the qualities of spirit and individuality, qualities that Stella was just starting to develop after leaving 22 Hyde Park Gate.

  Eleanor Pargiter is ‘the soother, the maker-up of quarrels, the buffer between her and the intensities and strifes of family life’ in the same way that Stella, replacing Julia, had been the unselfish soother of Leslie and Virginia’s illnesses and bad tempers. Eleanor is given to philanthropic acts, for example planning to build cottages for the poor, just as Stella was doing in Southwark for Octavia Hill. Once again, Leslie’s jealous possessiveness of Stella is mirrored in Colonel Pargiter’s reaction to Eleanor’s independence: ‘a spasm of jealousy passed through him. She’s got her own affairs to think about’. After Rose Pargiter’s death, the Colonel comes to rely on Eleanor in the same way that Leslie came to rely first on Stella and then on Vanessa. Eleanor, however, never marries, but stays resolutely single – it is as if Woolf, perhaps still partly blaming Stella’s death on Jack Hills, has decided to keep Eleanor away from any man who might pose a threat to her health and independence, giving her instead a long, peaceful, single life. This book, the last of Woolf’s to feature any characters inspired by Stella, ends with a realization of happiness for Eleanor, and also with the sense that Virginia, in 1937, has now finally laid Stella to rest:

  The sun had risen, and the sky above the houses wore an air of extraordinary beauty, simplicity and peace.

  Although both Julia Duckworth Stephen and Stella Duckworth Hills may have found their well-earned peace and posterity in the pages of Virginia Woolf’s novels, Virginia herself, after their deaths, was left with a negative and damaging view of heterosexual love. Although later in her career she came to view at least one female member of her family, her great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, as a positive role model who had managed to balance a career with a happy marriage, Mrs Cameron was dead by the time Virginia had been born. Instead, by the time she turned thirteen, Virginia had seen her beautiful mother die in the large marital bed at 22 Hyde Park Gate, worn to the bone by grief, over-work and the demands of her overbearing husband. By the age of fifteen, Virginia had witnessed the transformation of Stella into a flushed, ecstatic vision of love – ‘oh and I remember the rapture of that love. I got it full and strong and very beautiful’ – and then watched helplessly as her half-sister returned from honeymoon appearing suddenly broken, exhausted and dying, seemingly destroyed by the only man that she had ever loved.

  To an impressionable, nervous teenager like Virginia, the loss of two such central figures to their own dogged beliefs in selflessness at all costs was instrumental in planting the seeds of her perennial depression. These, in time, grew into a painful struggle between the pull of her creative genius and the behaviour expected from an ‘Angel in the House’.

  The ghosts of Maria, Julia and Stella were to haunt Virginia Woolf for the duration of her life. They continued to gaze out mournfully from photographs and paintings. Their musty black dresses continued to hang in the huge oak wardrobes at Hyde Park Gate. They were rarely discussed, except in sudden bursts of anguish; their widowers and children awkwardly avoided speaking the dead women’s names, consequently the grief was never fully exorcized and these ‘Angels’ retained, in death, much of the presence and enigma that had so powerfully surrounded them in life.

  Although Virginia was capable of much laughter and enjoyment in later life, when her face was caught in repose often the mournful, severe expression of Julia Stephen would become more prominent. There was to be a cluster of other women who, in a variety of ways, would influence Virginia Woolf profoundly, but it was Julia’s ghost, above all others, who continued to preside, much as she had done at the Victorian tea table, in the memories of everyone who had known her. A family friend, William Rothenstein, eulogized Julia Stephen and her enigmatic daughters in this vivid cameo of Hyde Park Gate family life:

  George was cheerful and talkative, but his sister Stella, and Virginia and Vanessa his step-sisters [sic], in plain black dresses with white lace collars and wrist bands, looking as though they had walked straight out off a canvas by Watts or Burne-Jones, rarely spoke. Beautiful as they were, they were not more beautiful than their mother.

  2 Vanessa

  The calm of the moment was as an instinctive shield to cover her wounded senses; but soon they would collect themselves and fall to work upon ail these difficult matters so lavishly heaped upon them – and with what result?

  In April 1941, when Virginia Woolf made the decision to leave her home at Monk’s House in Rodmell and took the brave, lonely walk to her death in the River Ouse, she left suicide notes for only two people. One was addressed to her husband, Leonard Woolf, the great companion and support of her life; the other was to the woman who had shared the complexities of her life from babyhood until the very final day, a stretch of time spanning fifty-nine years. Writing the final words to her sister, Vanessa Bell, Virginia concluded that ‘if I could I would tell you what you and the children have meant to me. I think you know’.

  The Stephen sisters experienced a very different childhood from Stella’s. Although still bound by the cast-iron rules of Victorian society to appear
at the tea table and entertain the ceaseless round of visitors to 22 Hyde Park Gate, the children also had the delights of Kensington Gardens at the end of their road, with the Round Pond and the Serpentine for sailing their toy boats on. As young children, Virginia and Vanessa loved to lie under the trees in the park, reading copies of Tit-Bits magazine and eating chocolate. These years, before the bereavements and breakdowns began, were magical, childish and healthy, with summers spent at Talland House and winters tucked up in Kensington in the nursery with a blazing fire going, although even when she was very little, Virginia was still insecure enough to fear Vanessa falling asleep before she did, and would put a stop to this by addressing her loudly. She already felt inferior to this clever, sensible elder sister, remembering in an early draft of A Sketch of the Past ‘how imperfect’ she had felt compared to Vanessa, ‘how vain and egotistical, irritable’.

  By the time they reached their teens, with no formal school to attend and only a few hours of lessons at home, the Stephen girls had plenty of time on their hands for shopping, reading, visiting friends and playing in Kensington Gardens. On these occasions they were usually chaperoned by Stella or taken by Leslie – Julia was often out visiting the poor.