Virginia Woolf's Women

by Vanessa Curtis

  Ottoline met D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda as a couple for the first time in January 1915. Although she did not like Frieda, thinking her coarse and ill-mannered, she grew fond of Lawrence and, as was her way, tried to help him with his writing by supporting him emotionally and financially. She stuck by him when his novel, The Rainbow, was banned for its lewd content. She allowed him to bring his unsuitable friends to Garsington, many of whom repelled her and insisted on playing childish dressing-up games on the lawn.

  Lawrence was untrustworthy from the start, sucking up to Ottoline and then viciously ripping her character to shreds behind her back to Dorothy Brett and Katherine Mansfield. Virginia, too, had been guilty of this behaviour for many years, but she never intended her digs at Ottoline to be for general consumption, confining them instead to her letters and private diaries. Lawrence took the unpleasantness to unacceptable limits; shortly before Christmas 1916, Ottoline gained access to the manuscript of his new novel, Women in Love. On reading it, she was extremely shocked and hurt at the crass portrayal of herself that was thinly disguised in the character of Hermione Roddice:

  She was impressive, in her lovely pale-yellow and brownish-rose, yet macabre, something repulsive. Her long pale face, that she carried lifted up, somewhat in the Rossetti fashion, seemed almost drugged, as if a strange mass of thought coiled in the darkness within her, and she was never allowed to escape.

  Hermione is described as ‘bullying’ and as having a singsong voice. Her interest in books is ridiculed, as are her clothes, which are described as being ‘dirty dresses’ like those worn by an ‘old hag’. The fictional house featured in Women in Love is clearly based on Garsington. Ottoline was furious and at the same time desperately worried that there might be some truth in this unkind portrait. She at first tried to lay the blame at Frieda Lawrence’s door, but there was no evidence to suggest that Frieda had collaborated as closely with her husband on this book as she supposedly had on Sons and Lovers. Lawrence was, somewhat naïvely, surprised at Ottoline’s adverse reaction to his book. He had continued to eat her food and accept her gifts while he had been penning these hurtful descriptions. Eventually Philip Morrell went to Lawrence’s agent and threatened to bring legal action against any publisher who brought out the book, and Lawrence was unable to have it published in England until May 1921. The intimacy which in retrospect had proved to be one-sided, between Ottoline and D.H. Lawrence ended abruptly until an attempt at reconciliation was made some twelve years later.

  Ottoline was often to attract satirists, and at the end of 1921, just after Women in Love had finally been published, another trusted friend, Aldous Huxley, revealed an unflattering portrait of her as Priscilla Wimbush in his new book, Crome Yellow. Priscilla had a

  large square middle-aged face, with a massive projecting nose and little greenish eyes, the whole surmounted by a lofty and elaborate coiffure of a curiously improbable shade of orange.

  What incensed Ottoline was not so much these unflattering descriptions of her own appearance – she was getting rather used to them – but the fact that Huxley had incorporated many caricatures of her friends into his book as well. Huxley, like Lawrence, had enjoyed Ottoline’s hospitality for many years and even had his own room at Garsington. To find rude and unfunny descriptions of her friends Brett, Carrington, Bertie Russell and Mark Gertler, caused Ottoline to inform Huxley that his book reminded her of ‘poor photography’, nothing more and nothing less.

  By the beginning of 1922, Ottoline was starting to sift out her true friends from the rest of them. She loved, and was loved by, Virginia, Duncan Grant, and Desmond and Molly McCarthy (her many preserved letters to ‘Dearest Molly’ are touching and genuine in their loyalty and affection). In nearly every one of her letters to these trusted friends, Ottoline begs for a visit or a letter. Virginia and Leonard did make an effort to visit Ott more regularly, and after one particularly memorable weekend at Garsington, Ottoline’s note of thanks to Virginia reads like a love letter; humble, self-effacing and, despite the advantages of her aristocratic connections and her imperious manner, demonstrating the insecurity that possessed Ottoline throughout her life:

  I carry with me a most lovely remembrance of that evening – you and the window with the tree behind you and the garden and everything. I felt myself intensely stupid and Leonard – although I love him – frightens me very much and makes me acutely self-conscious.

  Alas, again her treasured friend was to let her down; Virginia’s own interpretation of this evening (in a letter to Roger Fry) was that Ottoline had been ‘garish’ and that the moonlight, which had provided such an attractive backdrop to Virginia’s own beauty as she posed by the window, had shown up Ottoline’s face powder rather unflatteringly.

  Antipathy had also sprung up between Ottoline and Vanessa Bell, although much effort was made by Virginia and Duncan to dissipate it. Despite this, Virginia continued to write to Ottoline regularly, matter-of-factly remarking in a letter to Barbara Bagenal (24 June 1923) that Ottoline had stripped her of all ‘joie de vivre’, leaving an unwelcome echo of her drawl and the overpowering scent of dried roses and face powder in her wake. Nonetheless, the two women were still growing closer; Ottoline was impressed by To the Lighthouse when it came out in 1927, and wrote Woolf an admiring letter, and Virginia, vividly described by Ottoline at this time as ‘a lovely phantom’, began to realize that Ottoline suffered appalling headaches and periods of incumbency similar to her own. She wrote back, offering genuine words of comfort and sympathy.

  Ottoline’s headaches grew worse as she regretfully decided to sell Garsington and live at 10 Gower Street in London; the house was becoming expensive to maintain and the visitors were draining both her energy and the Morrells’ finances. In February 1928, all of a sudden she developed a vicious cancer of the jaw, which meant a long stay in hospital and an operation to have her lower teeth extracted and part of her jawbone removed. A postcard to Molly McCarthy written from the Fitzroy Square hospital makes gloomy reading: ‘awful, awful pain – and still it goes on. It has been a nightmare, the pain indescribable’. But far worse than the pain was the indignity of having to live with a seriously disfigured chin, which she did her best to disguise by swathing veils and scarves beneath it, tying them with typical Ottoline flamboyance. The private emotional cost to her must have been immense.

  The Bloomsberries, alarmed to find out that Ottoline was not, as they at first thought, merely playing the melodramatic hypochondriac, rallied around to try and make amends. Duncan Grant, who had always genuinely cared for her, sent a much-treasured letter of sympathy; Roger Fry shamefacedly tried to make peace after all the years of antipathy; Virginia, always sympathetic towards others’ illnesses, wrote a letter that touched Ottoline, who up until this point had still admired Virginia mainly for her intellect rather than her perception. This letter proved to be a great turning point in their friendship and whilst Virginia found it hard to give up poking fun at Ottoline in her letters to friends, she finally began to admire Ottoline’s strength and loyalty over and above all her other characteristics. She encouraged Ottoline to start writing her memoirs, and promised to read them and make constructive comments. The two women had already grieved together over the death of Katherine Mansfield in 1923; they now shared an intense and deep grief at the death of Ottoline’s ‘most loveable’ Lytton Strachey in 1932, and the terrible suicide of his partner, Carrington, shortly afterwards. Together with Vanessa Bell, they mourned the huge loss, two years later, of Roger Fry.

  Ottoline suffered a stroke in 1937 that paralysed and threatened to kill her. Philip answered Virginia’s anxious letter of enquiry not with the truth, but with a false reassurance that Ottoline was in good health – in fact she was dying – and a remarkably tactless request that Virginia should start an affair with him! Virginia refused to give him any more encouragement and there was silence until Ottoline’s death on 21 April 1938.

  Philip asked Virginia to write an obituary, which she reluctant
ly did. A service of remembrance was held on 26 April at St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, with an order of service combining a traditional selection of hymns and readings. A biblical quotation, at once inappropriate and yet seeming also to capture something of Ottoline’s own preferred phraseology, was printed on the cover:

  I should utterly have fainted but that I believe verily to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.

  In dramatic contrast to this service was the ‘farewell message’ that Philip found amongst Ottoline’s papers. Written nearly three years previously, she had left a request that he circulate it amongst her friends if she should die. Hence, Virginia found the following extraordinary document lying on her doormat in December 1938:

  Don’t mourn for me, dear friends. When you are quiet and alone remember me kindly, and when you are in a lovely country – in England or Italy or Greece – give an affectionate thought to me who drank in the beauty and the poetry of the lands that you are gazing at.

  Furthermore, said Ottoline in her eccentric farewell:

  I should like to call to my side and wave good-bye to the many friends I had in the shops.

  She concluded by saying that she did not want her friends to

  send any wreaths for my dead body, but gladden my soul by giving something for a night shelter or a coffee stall for the poor and destitute – those who have no shelter.

  Virginia wrote to Margaret Llewelyn Davies shortly after Ottoline’s funeral and admitted that she had grown ‘very fond’ of Ottoline, who in her eyes had become ‘shabby and humble and humorous’. But even her much earlier impressions of the woman she had known since 1908, although not always flattering, were often perceptive. Ottoline herself would probably have agreed with Virginia’s portrayal of her odd combination of aristocracy and insecurity, immortalized in the character of Mrs Flushing in The Voyage Out:

  She had a strongly marked face, her eyes looked straight at you, and though naturally she was imperious in her manner she was nervous at the same time.

  In 1916, Lytton Strachey, while staying with Ottoline at Garsington, met the writer Katherine Mansfield. Katherine expressed great enthusiasm for Virginia’s The Voyage Out and desired to meet the author. This information was duly relayed back to Hogarth House; the Woolfs were looking for new, talented writers to contribute stones to the Hogarth Press, and were keen to commission Katherine.

  The first meeting of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield took place during February 1917 and was seemingly not a success, at least according to Virginia, who related to Vanessa that her visitor had appeared ‘hard’ and not very pleasant company. The two women met again in June, when Virginia, despite her initial misgivings, invited Katherine to dinner at Hogarth House and listened to her talking about her life and work with growing interest. Katherine submitted Prelude, her story about a family moving to the country, told in short sketches through the eyes of one family member after another; it is a long story, related with clarity and humour. The Woolfs were impressed and invited Katherine to stay at Asheham for a long weekend, and there, Virginia and Katherine walked over the South Downs and developed an interest in each other’s writing. Prelude, on publication, was a great success and sold out very quickly. This pale, striking, dark-haired author was to have a profound impact on Virginia Woolf personally and, more significantly, professionally, over the next six years.

  Prelude can be read as an autobiographical sketch of Katherine Mansfield’s childhood in New Zealand. It is drawn partly from memory, partly from imagination, and Katherine’s mother must have filled in further details because Katherine herself was only five years old at the time of the move. Prelude describes, through the eyes of the children and their dissatisfied parents, Mansfield’s move from Tinakori Road, in the city, to a country house, Karori. The mother in the story is clearly based on Annie Beauchamp, Katherine’s mother, a frustrated, repressed woman who constantly bemoaned her lost opportunities, blaming them partly on Harold, her wealthy husband. Annie, as photographs testify, was very beautiful, but cold and formidable. She was neither a relaxed nor a natural mother, but prided herself instead on good organization of her home and family. The homes were many; by moving house so often, Annie had installed in her middle daughter, Katherine, a lifelong inability to settle down at one address.

  Annie’s perpetual moves between England and New Zealand meant that the Beauchamp family were constantly split up during Katherine’s formative years. Finally, in late 1898, the family settled for a couple of years in Wellington, New Zealand, in a large, elegant white house, typically Victorian in style and feel. The children were predominantly cared for by Granny Dyer, who provided inspiration for Katherine’s grandmother character in Prelude. The wealthy Beauchamps gave the parties that were to inspire their daughter’s famous and evocative story, The Garden Party, which memorably details the social stereotyping of that era. Servants did the cooking, cleaning and gardening while Annie Beauchamp entertained her husband’s admirers, so Katherine grew up aware of the class divide between herself and the staff who referred to her as ‘Miss Katherine’. She attended three schools during the period she lived in New Zealand, and developed a passion for reading from the age of eight, when she proudly wore spectacles that did little to aid her perfect sight.

  In 1903, the family uprooted yet again and took the older Beauchamp girls, including Katherine, to Europe, where they were left in the care of relatives from London while their parents returned home to New Zealand. Katherine was enrolled at Queen’s College, Harley Street, where she studied French, English, singing and music. Boarding in rooms at the top of the college, she met the girl who was to become a devoted friend for the rest of her life – Ida Baker, melancholy and plain, but gentle and kind. Katherine remembered the three years at school in London with affection in later years, although she reluctantly had to return home to New Zealand in 1906 to face both a dull, constrictive existence with her parents, sisters and little brother, and the death of her beloved grandmother. Initially the Beauchamps were reluctant to indulge Katherine’s craving to return to England, but as they began to understand their daughter’s potential and see the lack of good colleges and libraries at home, they eventually arranged for her to lodge respectably in Paddington, with an allowance to keep her in some comfort. So, in 1908, Katherine, aged twenty, arrived back in England.

  At this stage in her life, the differences between Katherine’s existence and that of the 26-year-old Virginia Stephen were many. Katherine had travelled, been embroiled in love affairs both with men and women, been indulged and expected to pleasure-seek by her family, benefited from formal schooling and, as a teenager, enjoyed robust good health. Virginia, on the other hand, had only recently escaped the insular world of 22 Hyde Park Gate, had travelled to Europe infrequently, relied solely on the library of her father for education, stayed chaste despite interest from various suitors, had endured unwanted molestation from her half-brothers, borne the brunt of four close bereavements, and had suffered two episodes of nervous breakdown. She had only one close friend, Violet Dickinson, whose advice and love she craved and desired, always in the knowledge that her feelings were reciprocated. Katherine had her close friend, Ida Baker, but usually dismissed poor Ida’s efforts to help her, using and then dropping the devoted young woman, safe in the knowledge that Ida would each time come crawling back in the end.

  On paper, these differences between Virginia and Katherine, made it seem unlikely that the two would ever meet, but despite their different upbringings, both the thin, nervous Virginia Stephen and the podgy, rebellious Katherine Beauchamp, wanted to break free of the Victorian/Edwardian repressions and limitations that had plagued the two of them since birth. More importantly, each woman had a passion for writing and an all-consuming ambition to succeed in the literary world.

  By the time she first met Virginia in 1916, Katherine had changed her surname to ‘Mansfield’. It was her middle name, and she thought it a more appropriate name for a writer. She ha
d survived several unsuccessful love affairs, and had even been married briefly to George Bowden in 1909, leaving him shortly afterwards, all the time coping with a gradual decline in health, which manifested itself initially with bouts of peritonitis and gonorrhoea. She had already established herself as a successful author with the inclusion of several short stories in New Age magazine. She met John Middleton Murry, editor of a pioneering new literary magazine, Rhythm, in 1911, and began an affair with him. This was to be the one serious relationship of her life, although it was by no means conventional and often proved far from idyllic.

  Virginia had the security that Katherine envied in her marriage to Leonard Woolf, was living between Richmond and Sussex, had recently recovered from the most serious yet of her breakdowns and had published The Voyage Out to considerable acclaim. The first meeting between the Woolfs and Katherine, accompanied by Murry, was not a success; neither couple thought much of the other, and Katherine preferred her subsequent meeting with D.H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, with whom she felt relaxed enough to laugh and be irreverent.

  Still wary of one another, in 1917, when Katherine and Virginia spent time alone together at Asheham, they discovered that they were working towards similar goals. Virginia, becoming stronger and more ambitious by the day, witnessed the first of Katherine’s painful descents into illness, watching her struggle to recover from the rheumatism that delayed the publication of Prelude. Virginia quite enjoyed the Asheham visit, but was not enthused, merely remarking to Vanessa that Katherine seemed to have lived an interesting life. Katherine, meanwhile, was delighted to have spent a weekend indulging in just the sort of conversation she most enjoyed, and so wrote a warm letter of thanks to her hostess: