Virginia Woolf's Women

by Vanessa Curtis

  On a deeper level it is possible to detect within Friendship’s Gallery clear traces of the strong beliefs that were to determine and shape Virginia’s writing career. Her admiring descriptions of Violet building her own cottage lead naturally to comparisons with the ideas that Virginia was to demonstrate years later in A Room of One’s Own. Her clever but scornful renaming of a baby boy as ‘Violent’ reinforces the reader’s growing perception of Virginia as a budding feminist who much preferred the company of women to men. Her dialogue, bringing to life Violet’s witty and unconventional conversation in polite company, also hints at her feelings about the limitations imposed upon women by Victorian society. Therefore, Friendship’s Gallery could also be said to precede the thinking behind The Years, Three Guineas and many of Woolf’s essays, letters and articles. It also appears to be an exorcism of the difficult summer of 1904 spent recovering at Burnham Wood, as Virginia includes a description of the house and garden, as well as mentions Violet’s unfailing practicality and kindness towards her.

  In addition, Friendship’s Gallery is a tribute, intentional or otherwise, to Stella Duckworth and Julia Stephen, and it appears to offer us an early version of Julia’s fictional counterpart, Mrs Ramsay in To The Lighthouse, as well. As the heroine, Violet, strides ‘across the grass to slap some mournful dowager on the back’ or takes ‘a sick man to the London hospital’, here are the memories that later lead to Mrs Ramsay running across the grass in her deerstalker’s hat; here are the ghostly presences of Julia and Stella, angelically tending to the poor and needy.

  Although Friendship’s Gallery is immature in places, and the writing style is inconsistent and often overly foolish, it is nevertheless an important indicator of Virginia Stephen’s development as a writer. It also reminds us that, far from being the fragile, haunted-looking person who gazes out from old photographs, Virginia in ‘real life’ possessed an earthy, robust wit and enjoyed laughing and teasing. Violet brought these attractive qualities to the fore, and for that reason her part in Virginia’s life should not be underestimated.

  Virginia’s gift of Friendship’s Gallery marked a change, the first in five years, in her relationship with Violet Dickinson. In April 1908, during a holiday at St Ives, Virginia began a new flirtation with Clive Bell and gradually began to replace Violet with this charming, witty male admirer. Clive was a stimulating correspondent with a great interest in Virginia’s early writing, and she even trusted him enough to show him incomplete drafts of The Voyage Out. Her great need and passion for Violet, which had been intense since 1902, finally began to diminish, although their correspondence continued to demonstrate great affection and nostalgia.

  Violet disapproved even more of Virginia’s proposed move into a shared house at Brunswick Square than she had the first move to Gordon Square; Virginia intended to set up home with three single men (Leonard Woolf, Duncan Grant and Maynard Keynes), a move that would have seemed scandalous in 1908. Characteristically, Violet pushed her own worries aside and continued to offer a listening ear to Virginia, particularly when, during 1910, Virginia suffered a short, milder resurgence of her 1904 breakdown. Gradually, though, Violet’s own letters became less frequent, prompting a worried Virginia to enquire as to why Violet never seemed to answer her letters any more. It seems she still expected to receive Violet’s full attention, whilst neglecting to return it in quite the same way.

  Virginia’s short period of illness in 1910 did not develop into the full horror of her previous bout, although she was required to spend six weeks in a nursing home. She had good reasons to try and maintain her health – the first novel was progressing well, and she was due to marry Leonard Woolf, which she wrote to tell Violet about in 1912. Her letter is full of anxious requests for Violet to approve this match (which she did). After the wedding, Violet, eager as ever to help, sent Virginia the well-intentioned gift of a cradle, but Virginia’s precarious state of health during 1912 led Leonard, in conjunction with her doctors, to decide that having a baby would be a serious threat to her health.

  In late July 1913, having delivered the typescript of The Voyage Out to Gerald Duckworth, Virginia’s mental health began to spiral downwards again, and she was sent back to the nursing home for a fortnight. But it was not until she left there to return home to London that illness struck again with full force: on 9 September, after a disastrous holiday in Somerset, Virginia took an overdose of veronal and was sent to recover at George Duckworth’s spacious estate, Dalingridge Place. Violet’s concern can be interpreted from reading the letter sent to ‘My dear Miss Dickinson’ from Jean Thomas, the proprietor of the private nursing home where Virginia had previously recuperated:

  Virginia and Leonard are at Mr George Duckworth’s with two nurses and all seems to be going as quietly as can be expected at present. It was a huge dose of veronal medicine she took at Brunswick Square and she was only saved by a stomach pump being used at once. It is the novel which has broken her up. She finished it and got the proofs back for correction and suddenly couldn’t sleep and thought everyone would jeer at her … it was all heart-rending … they will blame Sir George [Savage] probably but they have never really done what he advised except get married. And the marriage brought more good than anything else till the collapse came from the book and as the doctors say, it might have come to such a delicate, brilliant creature after such an effort however much care and wisdom had been shown. But one just aches and aches because of it all and it is so sad that you too must suffer for her – this friend of yours.

  Virginia spent most of 1914 recuperating, then at the beginning of 1915, she turned thirty-three. Suddenly, with less warning, another attack of illness came on in mid-February, culminating in a more severe and violent breakdown on 4 March. With Virginia in a local nursing home from 25 March onwards, Leonard organized the move to Hogarth House in Richmond. Virginia was installed there with four nurses to look after her. Again, an illustration of how badly she had been affected, and of how concerned Violet must have been, can be found in Jean Thomas’s 1915 letter to Violet:

  It has been a very sad time with Virginia. She has been about as low as possible, and has had three nurses constantly in attendance, also Leonard’s undivided attention and devotion and a great part of the time a very clever, wise doctor, Mr Fergusson working under Mr W. Craig. She has not been here – indeed I have not seen her since her mind gave way, it seemed best to leave the nurses to be worked by Leonard and Dr Fergusson … Virginia went into a local nursing home with her 3 nurses while Leonard moved from their rooms into Hogarth House. Then when all was straight a week ago, Virginia was moved into their own house. She was excited by the move but is quieter now and really getting better, they think. But her mind seems to be played out and simple as it apparently has never been before.

  By 1916, Virginia had recovered and was never to suffer such a severe breakdown again, until the beginnings of a serious attack led her to end her life in 1941. Her friendship with Violet faded over the years until their contact was very sporadic, but Violet never failed to write letters of appreciation on the publication of each of Virginia’s novels. In 1924, Dickinson called Jacob’s Room ‘exquisite’, and in 1927, after To The Lighthouse had been published, she wrote predicting that Virginia would deservedly be swamped in ‘adulation’, ‘praise’ and ‘appreciation’. Violet’s comments did not mean as much as they once had to Virginia. In 1933, on seeing Violet Dickinson and Nelly Cecil walking towards her unexpectedly, Virginia went so far as to hide from the two old ladies, one of whom she had once loved so passionately.

  There were still some occasional teasing references to the past in their correspondence. In 1937, Virginia wrote to Violet enquiring ‘am I right in saying that to be 6 ft tall in the age of Q[ueen] Victoria was equivalent to having an illegitimate child?’, and in 1938, she complained jokingly that ‘only the village idiot’ ever wrote to her about her books. As a gift, Violet typed out all of Virginia’s letters to herself and sent them, neatly bound, for her t
o keep. Virginia was touched, but very embarrassed to see so many examples of her early writing spread out anew before her now highly critical eye.

  Violet admired Virginia’s biography of Roger Fry in 1940 and wrote to tell her so. Scrawling back from Monk’s House, with an air raid going on overhead, Virginia replied to explain that she had not managed to get Roger’s ‘charm’ into the work, which she much regretted. This letter is the last extant from Virginia to Violet. After reminiscing fondly about their time at Fritham in 1902, she ends her letter with the invitation ‘and so one day let us meet’. That day, sadly, was never to be realized.

  Virginia’s friendship with Violet could be categorized as a ‘romantic’ one, which in the Victorian era would have consisted of a passionate and intense companionship, involving an enormous interlinking in each other’s lives and often daily contact, as well as the sharing of intimate confidences and private desires. These relationships were commonplace and considered healthy in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but if the language that flows through Virginia’s letters to Violet is analysed today, it takes on a different meaning, often proclaimed to be unashamedly lesbian in tone.

  Books such as Virginia Woolf, Lesbian Readings (Barrett and Cramer, New York University Press, 1977) see this relationship as a ‘warm-up’ for the later one between Virginia and Vita Sackville-West. The many animal references to wallabies and kangaroos in Virginia’s letters to Violet are taken not merely as terms of a deep love or a nurturing, mother/child protection, but as the language of total ecstasy. In Surpassing the Love of Men, Lillian Faderman has argued that ‘ecstasy’ within a romantic friendship at the turn of the twentieth century was not necessarily achieved through sexual activity:

  These romantic friendships were love relationships in every sense except perhaps the genital … thus they might kiss, fondle each other, sleep together, utter expressions of overwhelming love and promises of eternal faithfulness, and yet see their passions as nothing more than effusions of the spirit.

  Faderman goes on to discuss Victorian women’s commonplace ‘deep-rooted antipathy’ towards heterosexuality, feelings caused by the risks of childbirth and the knowledge that to love a man ‘meant pain and burdens and potential death’. Virginia undoubtedly had experienced this emotion, in the wake of what happened to her exhausted mother and submissive, pregnant half-sister. With other women, though, a woman could inhabit ‘the same sphere and she could be entirely trusting and unrestrained’.

  Moreover, women such as Virginia, who were ambitious and sought to make a name for themselves in a particular field, would have searched for a ‘kindred spirit to appreciate their achievements and sympathise with them for the coldness with which the world greeted their efforts … such a relationship was thus charged with a warmth, a fervor, a passion that went beyond simple friendship’. Women who lived ‘by their brains’ needed a ‘profound friendship’ that extended through ‘every phase and aspect of life, intellectual, social, pecuniary’. As the first true critic of Virginia’s early work, Violet certainly fulfilled the role of ‘kindred spirit’.

  Whether or not the two women experimented in what would today be termed a ‘sexual’ way is hard to prove, although there can be little misinterpretation of the sentence ‘it is astonishing what depths – what volcano depths – your finger has stirred in Sparroy’, written by Virginia to Violet in July 1903. It is probable that, on occasion, the two women shared a bed – in the early years of their friendship, Virginia makes written allusions to having a double bed ready in anticipation of Violet’s visit to join her on holiday. Virginia’s reminiscences in letters to Violet shortly before her death recall ‘all kind of scenes’ up in the bedroom at 22 Hyde Park Gate. It is clear that Virginia much preferred the company of Violet to that of any man in her life – in an early letter in which she demands a ‘hot’ reply from Violet, Virginia outlines her idea for a play, all about a man and a woman who grow up almost but never quite meeting each other in the flesh. The dramatic divide between the Virginia who loved and revered women, and the Virginia who had seen the damaging effects of heterosexual love on those she had loved and lost, is clearly illustrated in the outline of this unwritten play.

  Regardless of the question marks that still hang over the exact nature of their early relationship, there can be no denying that Violet was the first true emotional and physical love of Virginia’s early adult life. Whether Virginia knew that she was ‘in love’ at the time is hazy – Quentin Bell states that it is ‘clear to the modern reader, though it was not at all clear to Virginia, that she was in love and that her love was returned’.

  Virginia’s death in 1941 brought to an end a long, loyal and important friendship between two women. By the time Virginia’s body had been found, Violet was feeling ‘utterly thankful’ that Virginia was finally out of misery and away from illness. Her letters to Vanessa continued to offer support and advice, never failing to mention some anecdote or other concerning Virginia, often with admiration and always with love and pride.

  In 1945, three years before her death, Violet retreated into virtual isolation at Burnham Wood. With a broken hip and struggling to see the best in a ‘melancholy world’, she reminisced to Vanessa about the Hyde Park Gate of the 1880s and 1890s, remembering Julia’s beauty, Stella’s saintly nature, the shy and awkward young Virginia who wouldn’t look her in the eye, and the gloomy atmosphere of the house, which Violet had been forever trying to brighten up. The ghosts of the past returned to haunt her – she was still pondering, in 1942, the exact cause of Stella’s death in 1897, and on getting rid of an old bureau, she came across a bundle of letters from Vanessa, which brought back vivid memories of Virginia’s illness in her care during the dreadful summer of 1904.

  Violet continued to write with great warmth and gratitude to Leonard and Vanessa, and informed the latter of her almost childlike pleasure as she waited to receive her copy of Virginia’s Death of the Moth (published posthumously in 1941). She continued to visit her own family home at Kingweston in Somerset, where her second cousin Joy remembers her as ‘a charming elderly lady, tremendously interested in one branch of the family which she was researching … she was forever plying my mother with all sorts of questions in the back of the car’. Joy goes on to recall that ‘my brother and I were impressed by the long black jumper & skirt, possibly the sort of garb favoured by the intellectuals and the Bloomsbury set’. Violet’s long and detailed history of the Dickinson family still exists today, in the possession of her relatives at the Dower House in Kingweston.

  In her last surviving letter to Vanessa Bell, Violet remarked that it was a great nuisance becoming deaf, but with typical selflessness, her last line exhorted that ‘the one comfort is never to pity oneself’. Throughout Virginia’s life, Violet had provided endless interest, support and care, remaining loyal and concerned whilst managing to retain her great independence and self-respect. She had given Virginia her first taste of enduring, heartfelt love and helped her to launch her writing career. She had shaped the young Virginia Stephen’s way of thinking and was a highly influential role model: a woman who had built a ‘room of her own’ and lived the life of her choosing.

  In 1948, Violet Dickinson, Virginia’s truly loyal friend, whose great pleasure in life had been to look after the Stephen girls, died, with dignity, just as she had lived. She was eighty-three.

  4 Ottoline and Katherine

  Lady Ottoline Morrell, not always discriminating about people, recognised the uniqueness of Virginia Woolf.

  William Plomer, 1975

  Towards the latter part of 1908, Virginia’s friendship with Violet Dickinson was cooling considerably. Now living at Fitzroy Square with her brother Adrian, Virginia’s confidence was beginning to grow, both personally and professionally. Her need for Violet was diminishing, but her desire to be admired was as intense as ever. Who better, then, to enter her life at this time than Lady Ottoline Morrell, aristocrat and aspiring literary hostess, with a penchant for e
ntertaining and a glamorous home in Bedford Square, within five minutes of Virginia’s own house?

  Ottoline Violet Anne Cavendish Bentinck was infamous as a society hostess. Those who have only seen her portrait as painted by Simon Bussy in 1920, showing the grotesquely jutting chin, long nose and small, piercing eyes under a blanket of coppery hair, will have gone away with the impression that Ottoline was some kind of witch; it might have been difficult to believe that the beautiful Stephen sisters could have wanted to spend much time with this odd-looking woman. The portrait is an unkind caricature – Ottoline was, in fact, much sought after in her youth, possessing an unusual beauty and considered a ‘good catch’, admired by many distinguished suitors for her honesty and raucous sense of humour.

  Ottoline was born at East Court, Hampshire on 16 June 1873, the daughter of General Arthur Bentinck, heir to the Fifth Duke of Portland, and August Bentinck, his 39-year-old Irish wife. Ottoline was close to her father, whose health was already failing when she was born; even at the age of four, on hearing of his death, the little girl had suddenly become aware of the fragility and futility of life, and as an adult, Ottoline remembered exactly how she had felt at that moment: ‘I should also one day die and go out into the unknown’.

  Ottoline’s half-brother, Arthur, became the heir to the Duke of Portland, and in December 1879, he, Ottoline, their brothers and their mother (newly titled Lady Bolsover) were driven in style to stately Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire. From that day onwards, Ottoline was obliged to grow up in a huge, cold and lonely home. Fortunately, the new Duke’s inheritance included Bolsover Castle, a half-hour drive from Welbeck, and here, in a smaller and more intimate atmosphere, Ottoline developed a passion for interior design and furnishing. Many years later she used what she saw at Bolsover in her country home, Garsington, in Oxford. This happy time was also to be cut short: Arthur married and Ottoline’s mother had to leave Bolsover to the young Duke and Duchess. She took Ottoline with her, and they moved into a charming house, St Anne’s Hill, in Chertsey, but the relationship between mother and daughter began to go sour. Lady Bolsover became an obsessive invalid, terrified of being left alone, and her daughter, now aged sixteen, was expected to spend every night sleeping in the same room.