Virginia Woolf's Women

by Vanessa Curtis

  So plods my stallion up my evening lane

  And fills me with a mindless deep repose

  Wherein I find in chain

  The castle, and the pasture, and the rose.

  Vita’s love of the countryside and the trees, plants and wildlife within it, became stronger every day, and the famous Sissinghurst gardens began to take shape, providing a source of comfort and shared pleasure for Harold and Vita. There were always animals around, as Vita loved dogs and had given one of hers, Pinka, to Virginia. Surprisingly, given her aristocratic upbringing, Vita abhorred cruelty to animals and forbade any hunting or shooting on her land. The following poem reveals both her anger and the softer, more endearing side of her nature:

  Within the acres that I rule

  The little patch of peace I vaunt

  Where ways are safe and shadows cool

  Shall come no scarlet-coated fool

  To tease my foxes from their haunt.

  Vita’s newfound happiness at Sissinghurst occupied her fully for a while, but in Virginia’s life, significant changes were occurring. By the time she first visited Sissinghurst, Virginia was becoming involved in an absorbing new friendship with the composer Ethel Smyth. In addition, she was deeply immersed in writing The Waves. The pattern of friendship between Virginia and Vita was settling into something less disruptive and of more benefit to both of them. Their letters continued to be loving, genuine and intimate right up until Virginia’s death in 1941, but in 1931, after finishing All Passion Spent, Vita predictably fell in love again, this time with the journalist Evelyn Irons.

  Evelyn returned her passion wholeheartedly, and the two became lovers, sleeping together at Sissinghurst. As was usual with Vita, complications occurred; Evelyn was already living with another woman, Olive Rinder. The inevitable happened – Olive went to Sissinghurst to inspect her rival, promptly falling in love with her. Vita, unable to resist flattery, and still desperately needing to be loved and desired, carried on seeing both women! Evelyn’s infatuation, demonstrating the incredibly powerful effect that Vita had on so many women, can clearly be seen in one of her earlier letters:

  Darling, shall I say ‘I am completely happy. I don’t miss you much. I don’t think I love you quite as passionately as I did yesterday’? No, I’ll give you the truth – I can’t live without you and I’ll love you till I die.

  Vita responded, typically, with an overly sentimental poem:

  Since in each other’s arms they sleeping lay

  Towards each other had no need to turn

  When love was interwoven night and day.

  In the spring of 1931, no doubt curious about Evelyn, Virginia asked if she could watch a newspaper being printed at the Daily Mail, where Evelyn worked. Virginia did not record this visit, which also included Vita and Leonard, and it is difficult to gauge her reaction to Evelyn, as some seventy letters from Virginia to Vita written during this year later went missing; but the visit made a notable impact on Evelyn, who wrote her account of it some thirty years later in a 1963 issue of the New Yorker magazine. The piece is worth including here, for it gives a poignant, affectionate and witty picture of the Daily Mail’s two striking female visitors. Vita was forty, Virginia fifty:

  But there they were, perched round the room like unfamiliar night birds: Vita Sackville-West, tall, intensely handsome, wearing her usual long, dangling earrings and smoking through a paper cigarette holder; Leonard Woolf, a dark brooding man with aggressive eyebrows; and Virginia Woolf, recalling the moon in the daytime sky – ethereal, bone-pale, the eyes set deep in the skull. She was fifty, but age had nothing to do with her appearance; she might have looked like that forever. You might as well show those clattering presses to a ghost, I thought, but she had asked to be shown them … Mrs Woolf put on a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles and looked at this scene with intense interest. We inspected everything, down to the circle of telephone booths in the centre of the roll … as we left the plant on our way to supper at the Jardin des Gourmets, one of the printers from the composing room who had come out onto the sidewalk to take the air grabbed my arm, drew me aside and asked, ‘Who’s that lady that was asking all the questions up there?’ ‘Virginia Woolf,’ I answered. ‘That’s her husband and they run the Hogarth Press.’ ‘Oh,’ he said in a disappointed voice. ‘Books.’

  Although Vita and Virginia stayed in touch, their correspondence became less frequent from 1932 onwards. Despite Virginia’s success as a writer and the extraordinary amount of anguish and mental energy that she poured into The Years (not published until March 1937), Vita’s lapse as a correspondent hurt Virginia enough for her to complain to Ethel Smyth that she ‘never heard a word from V., which rather hurts me’. Her relationship with Vita up until that point had still been influencing her writing, and a recognizable portrait of Vita was drawn in the character of Kitty in The Years; Kitty has a commanding presence and a dashing, aristocratic manner reminiscent of Vita’s. She ‘strides’ rather than walks, drives a large car, loves gardening and loses her inheritance because she is female. Virginia used Kitty to reflect on Vita’s grief at losing Knole:

  Spring was sad always, she thought; it brought back memories. All passes, all changes, she thought, as she climbed up the little path between the trees. Nothing of this world belonged to her; her son would inherit; his wife would walk here after her.

  But, like Vita, Kitty is ‘in the prime of life; she was vigorous. She strode on’.

  Mitchell Leaska sees Vita’s character in Virginia’s last novel, Pointz Hall (published posthumously as Between the Acts). It is certainly true that Mrs Manresa is confident, ebullient, and at times, too much to handle. Virginia’s description of this character brings to mind her earlier observations, noted in her diary, concerning Vita’s admirable command of hounds, children and land:

  Vulgar she was in her gestures, in her whole person, over-sexed, overdressed for a picnic. But what a desirable, at least valuable, quality it was – for everybody felt, directly she spoke, ‘she’s said it, she’s done it, not I’, and could take advantage of the breach of decorum, of the fresh air that blew in, to follow like leaping dolphins in the wake of an ice-breaking vessel.

  There was no doubt that Vita did, at times, appear oversexed and bumptious compared to the slender, refined Virginia. Vita’s life from the age of twenty up until she was in her sixties had been a permanent struggle between her desire for ‘wanderlust’ and her deeply engrained notions of how an aristocrat should behave. She never lost the insecurity that stemmed from her childhood, and frequently felt pressured by the need to conform to the behaviour that was expected of women who had come of age in Edwardian society. These conflicting voices within her, and the determination to try and maintain, at least outwardly, her respectable, heterosexual marriage whilst simultaneously indulging in a series of unsteady love affairs, caused endless misery to herself, Harold and a host of other people. She possessed a duality of nature that is accurately caught in Lillian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men:

  There was a split in her personality all right, but not the kind she imagined. Rather it was the split of an individual deceiving herself with a notion of her freedom and bohemianism, entrapped by the moral shibboleths of her day, which limited her perspective as surely as if she had been a model of conformity.

  Vita grew more reclusive as she aged, and her love affairs diminished, to be replaced by contentment and a peace of mind previously unobtainable. She withdrew into her private world at Sissinghurst, wrote a gardening column for the Observer and continued to write poetry and articles, although the cultivation of her gardens became, in old age, her preferred occupation. Her marriage to Harold survived all the years of uncertainty and emotional turmoil, partly due, no doubt, to his great gentleness and understanding, and it remained solid and a source of much shared happiness until their deaths.

  Virginia’s affection for Vita continued. Her last extant letter to Vita was written on 22 March 1941, a week before her death, and in it
she offered, somewhat vaguely, to come to Sissinghurst. The visit never took place.

  Vita mourned Virginia with anguish after her death, writing to Harold in 1949 that the two people she missed most were Virginia, and Geoffrey Scott, but pointing out that whereas Scott had proved to be a ‘nuisance’, Virginia had never been a ‘nuisance, but only a delight’.

  By 1953, however, with the benefit of hindsight and the passing of time, Vita’s positive memories of Virginia were becoming tinged with doubts. She became able, on publication of extracts from Virginia’s diary, to glimpse the other side of Virginia’s character. It was the side that had rarely surfaced with Vita, but had the power to hurt and shock from beyond the grave, for the diaries contained spiteful and malicious references to many friends, herself included. How sad that, in the following paragraph, Vita’s great love for Virginia has been reduced to the word ‘like’:

  I can’t get over Virginia’s diary – so self-pitying, so vain in a way so malicious. The envy is difficult to understand. One realizes that she must have been far more mad than that calm exterior suggested. It doesn’t make me admire or like her less. But it will surely create a bad impression on those who never saw her great dignity or witnessed the wit and curiosity that rendered her animated. It really has left me with a puzzle.

  The other ‘puzzle’ that Vita was left trying to solve was whether or not she, better than anyone, could have persuaded Virginia not to kill herself. It seems unlikely that her involvement would have made any difference; such intense depression could not have been lifted by a friendly word. Vita must later have re-read her own poem, ‘Sissinghurst’, written in 1930 and dedicated to Virginia, with a shudder, for, in retrospect, the opening lines appear not only to have somehow predicted her friend’s weary descent into depression and death, but also even to recall Virginia’s own description of Julia Stephen’s exhausted demise back in 1895:

  A tired swimmer in the waves of time

  I throw my hands up: let the surface close.

  7 Ethel

  It is sometimes a relief to meet a primitive animal such as Ethel, a rogue elephant disobedient to the herd.

  VSW, ‘Ethel Smyth, The Writer’

  By the time Ethel Smyth burst into the life of Virginia Woolf at the age of seventy-two, her career as a working composer was largely over, and she had devoted herself to writing her autobiography. Virginia, aged forty-eight, was established as a successful author, with The Voyage Out, Night and Day, Jacob’s Room, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, A Room of One’s Own, The Common Reader and Mrs Dalloway all published to acclaim. She was working on The Waves and dividing her time between Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury and Monk’s House, Rodmell. Her life, although punctuated by headaches and influenza, was fairly sedate.

  Into this ordered calm, on 20 February 1930, exploded the extraordinary character of Ethel Smyth. Over the last decade of Virginia’s life, she was to become both a much-needed tonic and a dose of the worst possible medicine. There is little doubt that she brought love, friendship and inspiration into Virginia’s life, but Ethel often brought these gifts only when she chose to, causing great interruption to Virginia’s endless quest for a peaceful, productive writing day. Nevertheless, it was an endearing and enduring friendship, which tested Virginia’s patience to the limit at times, but also enabled her to put down on paper many private thoughts and emotions that had lain hitherto unconfessed. It was also to be the last great friendship of Virginia’s life.

  Ethel Mary Smyth was born in London on 23 April 1858, to Lt. Col. John Hall Smyth and Emma Stracey. From the start, she was encouraged to indulge her interest in music, although she did not develop a real passion for it until the age of twelve, when a governess played her a Beethoven piano sonata. Shortly after Ethel left school in 1875, her elder brother died unexpectedly in a hunting accident, and Ethel, who had decided that she must aim to study music at the Leipzig Conservatorium, found herself trapped at home instead, with a clutch of young siblings to care for. Her desire for Leipzig persisted; her father opposed the idea, but Ethel, true to form, argued her case with great stubbornness, for it seemed a much better opportunity than studying in London at the Royal Academy, which at the time did not offer the same high level of training given at Leipzig.

  While Lt. Col. Smyth tried to find reasons to keep his daughter at home, Ethel was introduced to Judy Ewing, a children’s author and the wife of the composer of ‘Jerusalem the Golden’, a popular Victorian hymn. Mr Ewing took one look at Ethel’s compositions and realized that he was witnessing an exceptional musical talent. He relayed this to Ethel’s parents and requested that he might start to teach her the rudiments of harmony and music theory. With the encouragement of her mother, Ethel went to Mr Ewing for classes in composition, and to Mrs Ewing for some literature classes. This agreeable arrangement went drastically wrong after only a short time when Lt. Col. Smyth became convinced that Ewing’s intentions towards his daughter were not just professional, but dishonourable. Ethel tried to convince him that he was wrong, but to no avail.

  It took two years for father and daughter to reach an uneasy truce, until finally, on 26 July 1877, Ethel Smyth, aged only nineteen, left for the Leipzig Conservatorium – the triumphant conclusion to her seven-year wait. Already showing signs of the boundless enthusiasm that was to render her such an exhausting friend in later years, she arrived several weeks before term started and wandered around Leipzig in a haze of happiness, admiring the architecture and standing with reverence in the church where Bach had once held the post of organist.

  Once term had started, Ethel was taken under the wing of a musical family, the Röntgens, who recognized and encouraged her talent; flatteringly, they compared her first efforts at writing a piano sonata to one written by Mozart. The first term threatened Ethel’s individuality – as anyone who has attended a music college will have experienced, there is something humbling about finding oneself surrounded by three hundred equally talented musicians – but Ethel continued to shine at composition, and although she never learned how to position her hands correctly on the piano, she demonstrated a talent for singing that more than compensated.

  Ethel met and befriended the daughter of the composer Felix Mendelssohn, Lili Wach, a friendship that stayed warm and close until Lili’s sudden death in 1906. Another beautiful friend, Lisl von Herzogenberg, became the object of Ethel’s desire, and, because she was childless, enjoyed lavishing maternal protection on Ethel, who, in turn, would be demanded by Virginia Woolf to supply this protection to her in later years.

  Through Lisl, Ethel was introduced to Brahms, an event she looked forward to greatly. Unfortunately, on showing the great composer one of her own fugal compositions, Brahms, quite reasonably, offered her some constructive criticism, whereupon Ethel lost control and challenged him on some minor detail, causing Brahms to finish his analysis by expressing contempt for this outspoken young woman. As she was to do so often in life, Ethel interpreted the snub as a sexist one; because she, a girl, had interrupted the great maestro, he had been reminded that she was after all, a mere female, someone not to be taken as seriously as a male composer. In fact, she was wrong – although Brahms did not hold a very high opinion of women in general, on this occasion he was irritated purely by Ethel’s obsession with a minor detail in the music. But the damage was done; although she was always to remain heavily influenced by his work, Ethel became fond of recalling that Brahms, when confronted by a pretty woman, had a ‘way of pushing out his lips’ that she found immensely irritating.

  In 1880, during a vacation in England, Ethel formed a close friendship with Rhoda Garrett, a member of the ‘Women’s Movement’ that would, many years later, become an integral part of Ethel’s life. (Rhoda’s cousin was Elizabeth Garrett-Anderson, who was to achieve fame as an ardent Suffragette). But Ethel, wrapped up in her music and the development of her composing career, was not to take the Garretts and their struggles for equality seriously for another thirty years.

  In 1882,
after four years of intensive study, Ethel decided to spend the winter in Italy. While baby Adeline Virginia Stephen was being introduced into the Stephen family nursery in Kensington, Ethel was touring Italy. Smyth began an unhappy affair with Lisl’s brother-in-law, Harry Brewster, and entered into an enormous correspondence with him; Ethel’s later letters to Virginia Woolf pale into insignificance beside the length of her letters to Brewster – some of them ran to over five thousand words. Returning to Leipzig, Ethel found herself without Lisl’s friendship, but in the company of several new acquaintances, including Tchaikovsky. Her chamber music was performed for the first time, to a clutch of disparaging reviews. Never one to remain disheartened for long, Ethel began composing her first important work, the Mass in D and on 26 April 1890, she made her debut in England with a performance of her orchestral work, Serenade. This piece was well received, and Ethel now had reason to feel positive about her future career.

  The Mass in D was premièred in 1893 at the Royal Albert Hall to a wildly enthusiastic reaction from the audience and also from The Times, which noted that ‘this work definitely places the composer among the most eminent composers of her time,’ but then goes on to add ‘and easily at the head of all those of her own sex’ (my italics). ‘Is a great female composer possible?’ scathingly asked The Star newspaper. George Bernard Shaw, in his early, less well-known vocation as a music critic, made snooty reference to the ‘appallingly commonplace preparatory passages’. In her own memoirs, Ethel recalled yet another galling comment: