Virginia Woolf's Women

by Vanessa Curtis

  Virginia must have continued with her terrifying interrogation during the first face-to-face meeting between herself and Carrington, for the latter detailed the event in a letter to Vanessa Bell:

  I went yesterday to Virginia. What an examination!! But I was rigid and denied everything. I thought her indeed charming and also the grissily wolf [sic].

  Virginia invited Carrington to Asheham again for a short holiday in February 1917, and shortly afterwards wrote to request some of Carrington’s woodcuts for the Hogarth Press’s Two Stories, offering to pay her 15/-. Carrington’s ecstatic response to this letter, sent from Tidmarsh Mill (where she was now living with Lytton), demonstrates not only her growing admiration for Virginia, but also her unique ability to poke fun without fear of rebuke:

  I am only too delighted at the prospect of my humble woodcuts embellishing your literary masterpiece.

  Virginia was delighted with the quality of the resulting woodcuts, and wrote to tell Carrington so, ending her letter with a warm invitation to dinner. Shortly afterwards, however, Virginia turned to Vanessa and Duncan for the next set of woodcuts, complaining that Carrington had cut her margins too low. This seemed not to affect the development of their friendship, but until the end of 1918 there were some slight tensions, mainly due to Virginia’s jealousy of Carrington’s special relationship with Lytton. Carrington herself, aware that she could never replace Virginia in Lytton’s life, seemed to accept this good-naturedly enough, being able to put Virginia firmly in her place whilst still encouraging the Woolfs to visit Lytton:

  Please write a postcard and say when we may expect you and if you dare refuse I shall pray to God to send the shingles upon your heads – and I’ll never cut a blasted woodblock for you again.

  Virginia was more cautious, suffering pangs of jealousy as she strove to maintain her special place in Lytton’s life:

  Intimacy seems to me possible with him as with scarcely anyone; for besides tastes in common, I like and think I understand his feelings – even in their more capricious developments; for example in the matter of Carrington. He spoke of her, by the way, with a candour not flattering, though not at all malicious.

  That entry in Virginia’s diary goes on to record a conversation with Lytton in which she begged for reassurance – granted – that he still liked her ‘better’ than Carrington. Whether or not this conversation leaked back to Carrington is unclear, but in January 1918, there was a short period where the artist appeared to turn against Virginia, accusing her on the telephone of being depressing and unnecessarily critical of her friends. Again, no serious harm was done, and from then on, Virginia softened her opinion of Carrington.

  In July 1918, Woolf admitted that she was conscious of Carrington’s ‘admiring and solicitous youth’, perceptively expressing a fear that the young woman was becoming too reliant on Lytton as her sole source of happiness and that she appeared to be risking her own life in doing so. Later in the same month, Virginia rather patronizingly complimented Lytton for ‘improving’ Carrington. Lytton replied by stating that even if this were so, he must be free to ‘go off’ with other people whenever he so desired. Virginia’s response did not ‘quite please’ Lytton, for she acerbically suggested that perhaps Carrington might ‘follow suit’ and find her own amusement elsewhere. Here, for the first time, is Virginia’s first written acknowledgement of Carrington being a desirable and charismatic person in her own right.

  By the summer of 1918, Carrington was back at Asheham for a longer visit, and both she and Virginia greatly enjoyed themselves. The latter was impressed by Carrington’s complete unselfishness as a guest – Carrington spent most of her time cutting grass, pumping water or going for long solitary walks between Asheham and Charleston. Virginia noted Carrington’s full, ‘clever’ face and concluded that although her appearance as a ‘whole just misses’, it also ‘decidedly misses what might be vulgarity’. Carrington wrote to thank Virginia for the visit in a loving, exuberant and endearing letter in which she promises to come and ‘dig the garden for Leonard like an old Mole’. Gifts to Virginia followed, including a large pat of butter that delighted both Woolfs.

  In Gretchen Gerzina’s 1989 biography of Carrington, the author states that ‘not until the day before Carrington’s suicide in 1932, did Virginia fully understand the depth of Carrington’s devotion to Lytton and forgive her for removing him from the Bloomsbury fold’. This is patently untrue; a careful study of Virginia’s letters and diaries reveals that not only did she understand Carrington’s love for Lytton, but also approved of the effect that it had on him. As early as January 1919, she was writing of her fondness for Carrington and noting the calming effect that she was having on the edgy, melodramatic Lytton: ‘she has increased his benignity’ and ‘his way of life insofar as it is unconventional, is so by the desire and determination of Carrington’. Carrington never, as Gerzina claims, tried to ‘remove’ Lytton from Bloomsbury; she must have known that any such effort would have proved futile. Instead, his Bloomsbury friends became her friends as well and, as a couple, they entertained Virginia, Vanessa, Duncan, Maynard, David Garnett and many others, until Lytton’s death.

  In 1920, another person became part of Lytton and Carrington’s complex relationship. Ralph Partridge was a friend of Carrington’s brother, Noel, and he and Carrington soon became lovers. Ralph moved into Tidmarsh, where further emotional complications arose when Lytton became attracted to him. Lytton recognized an opportunity to see Carrington safely married, thereby removing some of her dependence on him, and so he encouraged the union. Ralph married Carrington in 1921 and, almost immediately, both partners were unfaithful, Ralph with Clare Bollard (a friend of Gertler’s) and Frances Marshall, Carrington with Gerald Brenan. Virginia, keeping a beady eye on the situation, noted that Carrington seemed ‘embarrassed’ by Ralph and, after the wedding, she briskly recorded that ‘certainly she is not in love; and he has the obdurate Anglo Indian in him’.14 Woolf continued to monitor the relationship, and her assessment of the physical and mental changes in Carrington as she witnessed her new husband’s unfaithful nature in full swing, strike a chilling note:

  Carrington is going to sit out his infidelities, which she does with her lips tight shut. She is going to paint. But she will never be a young woman again.

  And, even more ominously:

  Carrington as if recently beaten by Ralph. Is she really rather dull, I asked myself? Or merely a sun flower out of the sun?

  Carrington’s self-confidence, never strong at the best of times, was being sapped away by the difficult ménage à trois at home. Her letter written to Gerald Brenan in 1923 wistfully states that she is far keener on the Woolfs than they are on her, and she speaks of the ‘queer’ love that she has for Virginia.

  Every member of the Bloomsbury Group visited regularly when Lytton and Carrington moved to Ham Spray House in Wiltshire, in 1924. Here, Carrington painted, decorated, designed Lytton a library, and made a unique home in which she and Lytton continued their unusual, loving and, to Carrington, life-sustaining relationship. Despite her happiness in the new home, she was accused by Virginia of becoming dull, spending too much time in the kitchen on Sundays and being overly domestic; these were things that Virginia, with hired helps, rarely had to worry about. Carrington, who was ensnared by what she referred to as Virginia’s ‘lesbian soul’, by now truly worshipped Virginia.

  In 1929, Carrington read A Room of One’s Own and, despite finding it ‘fascinating’, vocalized her own charming but bewildered opinion in a letter to Lytton:

  I still don’t agree that poverty and a room of one’s own, is the explanation why women didn’t write poetry. If the Brontes could write in their Rectory, with cooking and housework, why not other clergyman’s daughters?

  Virginia was viewing Carrington with some bewilderment as well; although she rarely spoke negatively about her, in a letter to Vanessa, she refers to Carrington as appearing ‘slightly shrivelled’ and was irritated by her ‘usual stupid petti
coat’.

  Despite the differences in their age and physical appearance, Virginia Woolf and Carrington had more in common than perhaps is evident on first reading about them. Even from childhood there were many similarities; both had, after all, grown up in large, Victorian families with many siblings. Their mothers, Julia Stephen and Charlotte Carrington, had toiled ceaselessly on behalf of the poor, although whereas the agnostic Julia’s charity work was done out of duty and a need to block out the reality of her own traumatic widowhood, Charlotte actively adored playing the martyr and ‘worked off her sensual side in religious outbursts’.

  As children, Carrington and Virginia had adored, and been particular favourites of, their respective fathers. Leslie Stephen cherished his ‘little Ginia’ from the moment she was born, and Virginia understood and respected him, despite his bursts of tyranny. He, in turn, supported and encouraged her early love of books and writing, leaving her a share of his estate to help finance her writing ambitions. Carrington’s father, Samuel, understood her need to be creative, and after his death in 1918, Carrington received a small annual legacy that enabled her to spend time on her art and proved that her father had taken her talent seriously. Shortly after his death, Carrington described her father as he had been in old age, in words that Virginia might have used to describe Leslie Stephen: ‘that craggy old hoary man with his bright eyes and huge helpless body’. Carrington then affectionately immortalized Samuel in her work, featuring him in numerous sketches and paintings; Virginia immortalized Leslie Stephen in To the Lighthouse and in her autobiography. Both women were profoundly affected by the deaths of their beloved fathers.

  Virginia and Carrington also would have been able to talk about the grief of losing an elder brother; Teddie Carrington died on the Somme in 1916, and Thoby Stephen at home in 1906 from typhoid contracted in Greece. Again, their sisters paid lasting tribute to these handsome young men in their chosen art forms – Teddie featured in Carrington’s pencil sketches and drawings, and Thoby inspired the character of Jacob in Jacob’s Room (1922).

  As well as sharing similar family backgrounds, the emotional health of each woman was precarious. Virginia’s breakdowns and depressions had been prolonged and dramatic in a way that Carrington’s were not (until the death of Lytton in later life). Nevertheless, the effects of mental illness, and its resulting vulnerability, were visible on their faces. The following passage about Virginia is by Frances Partridge, who knew both women:

  Virginia’s [face] bore the stigmata that are to be seen in many who have been gravely mad – a subtly agonised tautness, something twisted. She was not at home in her body.

  This second passage, describing Carrington, is by Julia Strachey, a friend of Frances’s, who was acquainted with both Carrington and Virginia:

  If one came closer and talked to her, one soon saw age scored around her eyes – and something, surely, a bit worse than that – a sort of illness, bodily or mental. She had darkly bruised, hollowed, almost battered sockets.

  Over the course of their lives, these two women suffered from a higher-than-average number of physical ailments: Carrington was forever enduring bad colds and flu, and raised temperatures and appalling, gnawing headaches continually plagued Virginia. Both of them possessed a fairly philosophical attitude to these complaints; Carrington turned hers into letter sketches to amuse her friends, and Virginia read, slept and ate at Leonard’s insistence, knowing that this was the best way to regain her health.

  Although in her mid-thirties Virginia Woolf became a confident, successful and sociable writer, as an adolescent she was crippled by shyness, blushing furiously whenever spoken to. As a young woman she had endured the misery of being ‘mute’ at the endless succession of balls and parties that the Duckworth brothers had forced her to attend. Carrington was also shy, eschewing ‘society’ and all that it stood for, and she remained this way throughout her life, often finding it easier to communicate with animals than with people. She suffered from physical awkwardness, turning her feet in and hanging her head. Virginia’s own awkwardness stemmed from her above-average height and thin, angular body; she lacked confidence in her appearance and thought her neck particularly unattractive.

  Carrington and Woolf had eccentric tastes in dress, which, although making them the objects of strangers’ attention, did little to mask their attractiveness. Carrington did not care for clothes and wore long, shapeless frocks or smocks, which immediately labelled her as an artist. Virginia, descended from a mother whom she remembered as having possessed only one dress, also cared little for clothes shopping, and would pack books for the Hogarth Press dressed simply in overalls or a dressing-gown. Formal visits to dressmakers traumatized her, reminding her of the torturous trips made from Hyde Park Gate. She did enjoy dressing-up for parties or theatre visits, however, choosing unusual or boldly coloured garments that attracted much attention:

  It was very odd indeed, orange and black, with a hat to match, – a sort of top-hat made of straw, with two orange feathers like Mercury’s wings, – but although odd it was curiously becoming and pleased Virginia because there could be absolutely no doubt as to which was the front and which the back.

  The difficulties that each woman had with her self-image and physicality were part of the reason that neither Carrington nor Virginia ever became mothers; the other, more realistic, fear was that children would hamper and restrict their ability to paint or write. Carrington was ill at ease with her femininity and hated to be reminded of it; menstruation threw her into turmoil. Virginia, after a brief time during her 1904 breakdown, when she begged Violet Dickinson to find her a baby, never again showed overly strong maternal urges. There was a six-month period after her marriage to Leonard when the Woolfs seemed to take it for granted that children would follow, but after consulting with Virginia’s doctors, Leonard decided that her state of mind would not benefit from the strain of pregnancy, childbirth and rearing of a child. The matter was dropped, and although Virginia often envied Vanessa and her ‘brood’ of children, she also came to realize that her career as a novelist depended on uninterrupted peace and quiet, and she endeavoured to comfort herself with the knowledge that her earning potential was far greater than Vanessa’s. However, a little wistfulness was always to remain, so Virginia channelled it into forging close relationships with her nieces and nephews. Her imagination and her ability as a storyteller made her hugely popular with other children, too – the sons of Vita Sackville-West, Ben and Nigel, looked forward to the great treat of Virginia coming to tea for precisely that reason.

  Carrington also appealed to children and for a short time was an art teacher, which she had enjoyed, but she did not welcome children to Ham Spray, fearing that they would annoy Lytton and prevent both adults from working. She had no maternal urges whatsoever, and so on finding herself pregnant by Beakus Penrose in 1929 became suicidal with fear and depression. After a fruitless and dangerous attempt to miscarry by riding her horse vigorously over the Downs, Carrington, humiliatingly, had to allow her husband, Ralph, to pay for an abortion at a nursing home. Her elation on terminating the pregnancy was short lived and contributed, together with the constant absence of Lytton, as he grew more deeply involved with Roger Senhouse, to her worsening depression.

  Virginia and Carrington had the habit of adopting nicknames for themselves and other people that they were fond of. Carrington used a selection of strange or self-effacing names when signing her letters to Lytton; two of the more frequent ones were ‘Mopsa’ and ‘votre grosse bébé’. She later invented ‘Kunak’, ‘Amigo’ and ‘Doric’ (sometimes written backwards as ‘Cirod’) for her lover, Gerald Brenan. Virginia had a host of animal nicknames that were used in letters to Vanessa and Violet Dickinson, and she referred to herself and Leonard as ‘Mandril’ and ‘Mongoose’, or to herself, less frequently, as ‘Marmot’. These nicknames imply great affection, but also suggest the strong need for petting and reassurance that both Carrington and Virginia required regularly from their partn
ers.

  The two of them were highly insecure women, suffering from separation anxiety whenever parted from loved ones; Virginia had suffered terrible agonies as a child when Julia Stephen came home later than expected. She transferred this anxiety into every close female friendship that she ever had, and also established it in her marriage to Leonard, hating their rare times apart and writing obsessively for calming words about his health and whereabouts. Her anxieties appeared to worsen if events were out of her control; when Leonard visited the doctor, she would pace the pavements outside, convincing herself of the worst. Carrington hated to be apart from Lytton and wrote him wretched, emotional letters of such intensity that Lytton was understandably reserved and apprehensive in his replies. She understood that her insecurity put pressure on Lytton, and wrote to tell him so:

  Lytton every time you come back I love you more. Something new which escaped me before in you completely surprises me. Do you know, when I think of missing a day with you it gives me proper pain inside. I can’t help saying this at a risk of boring you.

  Such insecurities gravitated outwards, affecting each woman’s chosen field of work. Carrington was always to be prodigiously hard-working and prolific, taking on many commissions as well as painting portraits and oils on a daily basis and decorating her friends’ fireplaces, walls and doors. She also made glass pictures, signboards and bookplates, and decorated tiles. Yet she would doubt her own talent to the end. Virginia tried to boost Carrington’s confidence by encouraging her to provide original woodcuts for the Hogarth Press, and she praised the results. Although both Roger Fry and Clive Bell could have used their influence in British art circles to help progress Carrington’s career, it is significant that neither of them did; after a consultation in 1916 with Roger about her work and future as an artist, Carrington felt discouraged. She lost faith and confidence in her painting and refused to exhibit, writing to Lytton of her frustrations: