Virginia Woolf's Women

by Vanessa Curtis

  It was not like one’s feeling for a man. It was completely disinterested, and besides, it had a quality that could only exist between women, between women just grown up. It was protective, on her side.

  By 1918, Katherine Mansfield was still writing about woman-to-woman attraction, but her matured writing skills now employed much more symbolism, achieving an effect nearer to Virginia Woolf’s. In Carnation (1918), a schoolroom setting provides the background for a French lesson on a hot, stuffy day. Read purely at surface level it is a well-written, descriptive and colourful tale of adolescence, but with more attention to the symbolism within, Carnation becomes a story of seduction; the deep red carnation itself is employed as an instrument of sexual temptation with which Eve ‘tickled Katie’s neck’ before pulling it gradually to pieces, eating it one petal at a time. In 1908, Katherine had written a forerunner to this story, in poetry form; the poem, Scarlet Tulips, describes the ‘flowering’ of the female genitalia.

  Virginia Woolf’s self-styled ‘sapphist’ story, Moments of Being: Slater’s Pins Have No Points (1927), echoes the language of Mansfield’s Carnation. Written at the height of her affair with Vita Sackville-West, it also features a teacher/pupil schoolroom relationship and the awakening of a young girl’s lesbian desires. The purple cloak of the teacher recalls the purple ink that symbolized Virginia’s love for Violet Dickinson, and curiously, the flower used to represent desire is again a carnation, just as it was in Mansfield’s earlier story; the teacher, Julia, crushes it ‘voluptuously’ in her hands.

  It is unlikely, given her writing in Slater’s Pins, that Woolf’s negative reaction to the publication of Mansfield’s openly bisexual story, Bliss, was due to any prudish disgust at the content. The story describes a married woman’s burgeoning feelings for another woman – who turns out to be her husband’s lover. It is far more likely that Woolf’s literary sensibilities were disappointed by the hard, glib style of Mansfield’s narrative after the more accessible, prosaic text of Prelude. However, her legendary prediction of the demise of Mansfield’s career – she noted simply in her diary ‘she’s finished!’ – proved unfounded, for after Bliss, Katherine went from strength to strength, publishing The Garden Party and Bliss and Other Stories to rave reviews. Woolf professed not to be jealous, but the very frequency of her mentioning this fact suggests otherwise.

  Although united by their love of words, there were many times when the two women were torn apart by professional rivalry. Their opinions of each other’s fiction were generally positive and encouraging, but Woolf’s reviews tended to be slightly kinder. Mansfield’s review of Kew Gardens for the Athenaeum in June 1919 admires Virginia’s prose, proclaiming it to be bathed in beautiful light, and full of poise and colour, but Mansfield, whose fiction was fast-moving and full of sharp dialogue, never learned to appreciate the slow-moving attention to detail that Woolf excelled in, hence Kew Gardens was also said to ‘belong to another age’. Mansfield’s review of Night and Day, again for the Athenaeum, gave crueller vent to her dislike of what she saw as stuffiness, concluding with the cutting line ‘in the midst of all our admiration it makes us feel old and chill: we had never thought to look upon its like again!’ In addition she finds Woolf’s portrayals of Mr Clacton and Mrs Denham lacking in depth and credibility, imagining that these characters were left suspended and motionless when Woolf removed her pen from the page until ‘she [added] another stroke or two or [wrote] another sentence underneath’.

  Mansfield compared Woolf to one of Virginia’s favourite authors, Jane Austen, but the comparison was not intended to be read as a compliment. Woolf pondered this review in a letter to Clive Bell, calmly professing not to understand it. She remained, at least in letters to Katherine, without malice, writing to congratulate her on Bliss and Other Stories when the collection was published in 1920. Indeed, Woolf was still to recall the brilliance of this collection in 1922, although she also referred to it, in a letter to Janet Case, as ‘hard’, ‘shallow’ and ‘sentimental’, a combination that apparently had forced Woolf to run to her drinks cabinet and resulted in her refusing to read the follow-up, The Garden Party. Her envy of Mansfield’s success was expressed in the one simple line ‘but she takes in all the reviewers, and I daresay I’m wrong (don’t be taken in by that display of modesty)’.

  Virginia, however, was never put out for long. In a subsequent letter to Clive, she recovers her humour sufficiently to write a paragraph parodying Mansfield’s writing style, calling her version ‘rather better than the original’.

  The posthumous publication of Katherine’s Journal, 1914–1922, revealed a different side of Katherine Mansfield to the public. The honest and detailed, unselfish descriptions of her daily struggle with appalling physical health painted her in a light hitherto unseen by many, including Virginia. Ida Baker had always portrayed Katherine as a beautiful, suffering martyr, but Murry, Virginia, and Katherine’s family could see that her opinion had been hugely clouded by love, lust and her own low self-esteem. The Journal revealed Katherine, in the final months of her life, when illness had stripped away much of her bitterness and had silenced her cruel tongue and hurtful lies, as a much softer, more honest and endearing person.

  In the short story that Virginia had so disliked, Bliss, Mansfield’s heroine, Bertha, reflects on her happy life:

  They had this absolutely satisfactory house and garden. And friends – modern, thrilling friends, writers and painters and poets. And then there were books and there was music.

  This passage could be seen as an early version of the entry in Katherine’s own journal, where Mansfield expressed, more eloquently than she had ever done so before, her desire to go on living, and how she aimed to achieve true happiness:

  I mean the power to lead a full, adult, living, breathing life in close contact with what I love – the earth and the wonders thereof – the sea – the sun … then I want to work. At what? I want so to live that I work with my hands and my feelings and my brain. I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music.

  Woolf’s review of Katherine’s Journal, published firstly (unsigned) in the Nation & Athenaeum on 10 September 1927 and then reprinted in the New York Herald Tribune on 18 September, is written with the benefit of hindsight, reflection and the passage of time, which mellowed her memory of Katherine and the events surrounding her pitifully sad death. Woolf had admitted privately to friends that on first reading the journal she had felt a mixture of ‘sentiment and horror’, but she eventually wrote a kind review, stating that Mansfield had been the leader of her chosen medium, the short story, and had not been succeeded by anybody. She paid moving tribute to Mansfield’s approach to her work, revealing her to have been ‘sane, caustic, and austere’. It is an honest and sensitive assessment of an enigmatic, frustrating but dedicated individual and her contribution to literature.

  After Katherine’s death, those who had known her well continued to ponder her character and discuss her life and work for many years. Virginia immediately penned a long and revealing passage in her diary, where she described Katherine’s illness, her appearance, her interest in unusual clothes, her huge brown serious eyes and the many earnest talks they had enjoyed together about the art of writing. In numerous letters over the next few years, Virginia asked her friends to give her their true opinions of Katherine’s work, seemingly still regarding the dead woman as a threat to her own career. It is likely that Katherine would have greatly admired the change in Virginia’s own writing as she moved towards modernism in all her great novels, but she did not live to see them written; she might have particularly enjoyed Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves and Between the Acts.

  After her friend’s death, Virginia concluded, rightly, that she would continue to think about Katherine for the rest of her life. Katherine even haunted her dreams for a while, as an apparition wearing a white wreath.

  Other friends also continued to analyse their own particular relationships with Katherine Mansfield.
As late as 1931, Ottoline Morrell, willing as always to see the good side in a person, wrote an eight-page letter to Rosamund Lehmann in which she tried to describe the friend who had alternately enchanted, abused and loved her:

  I think she found it very difficult to be real, for she was naturally an actress. She took on parts so easily that she didn’t know what she was herself … she had cheap taste – slightly ‘Swan & Edgar’ … as a companion she was intoxicating … she was jealous of Virginia.

  But it was perhaps in the following line that Ottoline, not a writer but a perceptive and observant woman, achieved the nearest thing to a truthful, fair assessment of the complex character that was Katherine Mansfield. It is a line that Katherine herself would probably have rather approved of: ‘she wasn’t a fraud – she was more of an adventuress’

  5 Carrington

  She was everywhere, in everyone’s house – and once inside, so glowing with sympathetic magnetism and droll ideas for them all that there wasn’t a person of her vast acquaintance who did not get the impression that she was their very best friend.

  Julia Strachey/Frances Partridge, ‘Carrington, A Study of a Modern Witch’‚ 2000

  Dora Carrington might at first glance seem to be an intruder in a book that is devoted to Virginia Woolf’s women. She certainly did not influence Virginia as profoundly as some of the other female contenders for inclusion in this book, but Virginia and Carrington were friends, albeit never close ones.

  They were first brought together by their mutual love for an effeminate, difficult, homosexual man – Lytton Strachey. Their early friendship was based mainly on mistrust, from Virginia, and indignation, from Carrington. It took from 1916 until 1932 for Virginia to develop the great fondness towards Carrington that she eventually discovered she possessed. Although the friendship never grew intimate, Carrington’s extraordinary kindness and her eccentric, loveable personality drew out many of Virginia Woolf’s softer, more endearing traits, and it is for this reason that Carrington deserves her inclusion in this book, for, through her, we see a different, perhaps more accessible, side of Virginia. Carrington rarely provoked Virginia’s cruel tongue, for instance – after they had ironed out their initial misgivings, the mocking tone that Virginia often used in letters to Ottoline, Ethel or even Violet, was markedly absent from her correspondence to Carrington, and, scrutinized carefully, their lives reveal a remarkable number of similarities, both personally and in their attitudes to art and literature.

  Dora De Houghton Carrington was born on 29 March 1893, the fourth of five children born to Samuel and Charlotte Carrington. Dora received the high school education that Virginia had missed out on, starting at Bedford High School for Girls in 1903, where she began to display her prodigious talent for art. She lived with her parents at 1 Rothsay Gardens in Bedford, and was still living there in 1910, when she won a coveted scholarship to the Slade School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture. Here, Carrington dropped her Christian name, took up her easel, slashed her long fair hair into a thick golden bell, and began the work that was to continue for the rest of her life.

  Her new-found independence was greatly at odds with the late-Victorian societal pressures that were still in evidence at her parents’ house; although Carrington adored and revered her father, sketching him almost obsessively, she did not admire her fussy, martyr-like mother, who crammed the house with ornaments and devoted herself to charity work and religious causes. Eventually Samuel Carrington retreated into a weary world of his own and Carrington decided to seek lodgings elsewhere. She found them in 1912, by renting a studio in Chelsea, which she financed by selling paintings and teaching art privately.

  Carrington’s family situation eased slightly in 1914 when the Carringtons moved to a Georgian farmhouse in Hurstbourne Tarrant, Hampshire. There were enough outbuildings for Carrington to have her own studio, and here she began her love affair with the landscapes and scenery of the countryside, first capturing the view from her top-floor bedroom in an evocative watercolour entitled ‘Hill in Snow at Hurstbourne Tarrant’ (1916).

  The other love affair that began at this time was with a fellow student, Mark Gertler, whom Carrington had met at the Slade just before graduating. Their twelve-year long friendship, which started so optimistically with shared trips to galleries and exhibitions, became troubled very quickly and caused both of them much unhappiness. Although passionate towards Gertler when discussing art, Carrington, at eighteen, had not yet had her sexuality awakened; her upbringing had taught her to repress her innermost feelings. She was looking for a platonic soul mate, but what she found was a man who was highly sexed and constantly irritated and frustrated by Carrington’s lack of passion. The heartbreaking letters that passed regularly between them pay sad testimony to the anguish that this long relationship caused. On graduating from the Slade, Carrington had fallen into an unhappy, confused state. She was unsure of her own identity, haplessly seeking somebody who would restore it to her. That somebody, a fellow guest at Virginia Woolf’s country home, Asheham, was to be Lytton Strachey.

  Strachey, along with Clive Bell, Duncan Grant and Mary Hutchinson, had been staying at Asheham, which Virginia had just leased jointly with Vanessa Bell. Attracted to Carrington from the moment he first laid eyes on her, he had boldly tried to kiss her during a walk across the South Downs, the feeling of his beard prompting an enraged outburst of disgust from the unwilling recipient. According to legend, Carrington plotted frenzied revenge, creeping into Lytton’s bedroom during the night with the intention of cutting off the detested beard. Instead, she was mesmerized by his eyes, which opened suddenly and regarded her intently. From that moment on, the two became virtually inseparable.

  Initially, Strachey’s friends viewed the idea of Carrington and Lytton as a couple with repulsion; it was considered extremely inappropriate. Even though it was evident almost from the start that they were to enjoy a platonic relationship rather than a sexual one, the relationship was the talk of Bloomsbury for several months. They were a curious looking couple: Lytton was tall and lanky, bespectacled and with a curiously high-pitched voice, Carrington was short, chubby, eccentrically dressed and with daringly short hair. Her unconventional looks have been discussed many times in memoirs and fiction; her close friend, Julia Strachey, described her as a ‘modern witch’ and reminisced, after Carrington’s death, on the artist’s striking physical appearance:

  Carrington had large blue eyes, a thought unnaturally wide open, a thought unnaturally transparent, yet reflecting only the outside light and revealing nothing within, just as a glass door betrays nothing to the enquiring visitor but the light reflected off the sea … From a distance she looked a young creature, innocent and a little awkward, dressed in very odd frocks such as one would see in some quaint picture-book; but if one came closer and talked to her, one soon saw age scored around her eyes.

  In 1916, Carrington met the writer Aldous Huxley at Ottoline Morrell’s Garsington Manor. Huxley was a favoured guest and even had his own permanent room in the house, but little did the visitors who flocked to Garsington know that Huxley, like D.H. Lawrence, was writing copy for his books about the people he purported to love and admire. Although, as we have already seen, Huxley’s caricature of Ottoline was merciless, Carrington seems to have escaped with a kinder portrait, probably because Huxley fancied himself to be in love with her.

  On many a hot night, Huxley and Carrington would sleep outdoors on the roof at Garsington, or talk into the early hours. The image of Carrington in her purple pyjamas found its way into Crome Yellow and emerged in the character of Mary Bracegirdle. The portrayal is not entirely sympathetic or flattering, but some of the character’s dialogue is obviously based on Carrington’s own; in the following passage, where Mary describes her ideal partner, it could be Carrington describing her search for love that ended in meeting Lytton:

  It must be somebody intelligent, somebody with intellectual interests that I can share. And it must be somebody with a proper respect fo
r women, somebody who’s prepared to talk seriously about his work and his ideas and about my work and my ideas. It isn’t, as you see, at all easy to find the right person.

  Carrington’s striking looks inspired virtually everyone she met to try and capture what they saw. Huxley was no exception, and his recognizable portrait of her in Crome Yellow also echoes Julia Strachey’s own reminiscences:

  On his other side, the serious, moon-like innocence of Mary Bracegirdle’s face shone pink and childish. She was nearly twenty-three, but one wouldn’t have guessed it. Her short hair, clipped like a page’s, hung in a bell of elastic gold about her cheeks. She had large blue china eyes, whose expression was one of ingenuous and often puzzled earnestness.

  Huxley may have been recalling one of Carrington’s late-night confessions, about the complications of her platonic love for Lytton, when he gave Mary Bracegirdle a melancholy mood that results in her analysing out loud the difficulties of such love:

  The difficulty makes itself acutely felt in matters of sex. If one individual seeks intimate contact with another individual in the natural way, she is certain to receive or inflict suffering. If, on the other hand, she avoids contact, she risks the equally grave sufferings that follow on unnatural repressions. As you see, it’s a dilemma.

  Carrington was still pondering the dilemma of loving Lytton, who had already admitted to friends that he was useless at having sex with a woman, when she first encountered Virginia Woolf. Their friendship got off to a particularly awkward start: on route to Charleston, in the company of David Garnett and fellow Slade student Barbara Hiles, Carrington was forced to break into Asheham overnight when they found themselves without lodgings. Virginia’s caretaker dutifully reported the break-in, and Virginia imperiously summoned a terrified Carrington to Richmond so that she could explain what had happened. Although Virginia admitted to David Garnett that she was not really annoyed, she confessed to enjoying the power of her reputation for being foreboding, reporting that ‘Miss Carrington’ had ‘quaked’ at the sound of her voice.