Virginia Woolf's Women

by Vanessa Curtis

  Now old Ethel Smyth wants to come to stay at Sissinghurst. What am I to do? I adore Ethel, but I don’t want to give up an evening to her. Very difficult. She will talk about life and how impossible it is for women to play in orchestras. And although she is a damned good writer I have a suspicion that she is a damn dull musician … one cannot hurt the feelings of people of 73.

  Vita continued to demonstrate both her respect for the elderly, and her frustration at Ethel’s monopolization of Virginia in a cross letter to the latter:

  Isn’t it enraging that of all people in the world, your own particular Ethel should be the one to prevent me dining with you tomorrow? But there it is – the engagement has been arranged for weeks past – I get letters fairly trumpeting with excitement from Ethel by every post – supplemented by post cards and telegrams, and so I felt I simply couldn’t put her off – much as I longed to. Anyone else – any herring griller – could have gone to hell. But Ethel, I reflected, is 75 and one cannot play fast and loose with the old.

  Ethel, Vita goes on to say, has ‘defrauded’ her of an evening with Virginia. Despite her exhaustion, Vita did love Ethel dearly and enjoyed her humour as much as Virginia did.

  Looking back, after Ethel’s death, Vita gave a recognizable portrait of the woman who frustrated, pestered and amused her closest friends, and a taste, in turn, of what it was like for Virginia to be loved by Ethel:

  And how angry she would get when her friends didn’t answer her letters in detail. Poor Virginia Woolf, endlessly patient under this loving persecution, had to endure long questionnaires: ‘You haven’t answered my questions one, two, three, four – right up to twenty. Please reply by return of post’. Ethel seemed to command endless time, and to expect her friends to command equal leisure. Blinkered egoism could scarcely have driven at a greater gallop down so determined a road. But although a nuisance, Ethel was never a bore.

  Ethel certainly never bored children, for whom she held great appeal, either. Vita’s son, Nigel, has recorded his own impression of Ethel:

  I just remember Ethel. She often came to Long Barn, dressed like a coachman in cloak and tricorn hat and she was vigorous in a way that didn’t frighten children, bursting through the weeks like paper hoops, a woman whose pertinacity was irresistible. Deafness, which can make people tedious to their friends, was for Ethel an asset. She told us to yell at her, and we yelled with an exuberance unequalled when talking to normal people. Once she insisted, when sitting on our terrace at Long Barn, on hearing a nightingale. A bird sang its heart out in the garden, but not a note penetrated to Ethel until it obligingly perched on the table in front of her and gave her a solo performance. How we cheered! How we adored her!

  Ethel continued to confound and exasperate Virginia over the eleven years that they knew one another, bringing interruptions, some welcome, many not, to Virginia’s work process and flow of inspiration. It cannot be denied that on many an occasion the libretto from one of Ethel’s own compositions seemed remarkably appropriate to Virginia’s mixed feelings about the earthquake that was Ethel:

  Again you think you’d like to see a friend

  but if the friend turns up to spend the day

  you cannot imagine what madness made you suggest it.

  Despite the trail of exhaustion and frustration that Ethel often left in her wake, she also had a hugely important and positive influence on Virginia’s writing between 1930 and 1941. Her own reactions to Virginia’s work were mixed. She loved To the Lighthouse, referring to the ‘submergence, stupification, awe and a lot of other things’ that she gained from reading it. She enjoyed the spirited feminist tone of both A Room of One’s Own and The Common Reader, but on reading, or attempting to read, Flush (1933), she wrote to Vanessa Bell in horror, admitting that ‘Flush is the sort of book that gives me the kick-screams to think of, indeed I only read a chapter and could read no more’.

  Ethel also found it difficult to read The Waves, which was finished during the second year of her friendship with Virginia. She expressed her doubts a couple of years after its publication, in her diary:

  I can’t get on with The Waves, and I rather doubt the judgement of those, mainly quite young people, who rave about it. But her second volume of The Common Reader is superb.

  However, after The Waves had first come out, during the second half of 1931, Ethel had written to Virginia not of her disappointment, but of her enjoyment of some of its more alluring and enduring qualities:

  The book is profoundly disquieting, sadder than any book I ever read and because it has no adorable human being in it (like the Lighthouse, sad as it is) there is no escape from its sadness.

  Ethel’s effect on Virginia’s writing was also liberating and intense; Virginia realized that, like her Suffragette friend, she had a right to free speech, and the anger that she had suppressed, or masked with humour, in A Room of One’s Own, was at last fully unleashed as a direct result of her many conversations with Ethel Smyth. Ethel’s passion for life, music, her commitment to the WSPU, her carving of a niche for herself in a male-dominated field, her rebelliousness and fiery belief in careers for women, all contributed to Virginia’s sudden, vigorously angry voice of protest, clearly heard in The Years and Three Guineas.

  Virginia had described Ethel as a ‘burning rose’ in a passionate letter to her, written in 1930 – a rose that was thorny, flushed and pink. In The Years, Virginia’s exploration of the nature of patriarchy in public and private guises, she resurrects the rose imagery and lets it grow into the character of Rose Pargiter, a full-blown tribute to Ethel. Rose, ‘thorny Rose, brave Rose, tawny Rose’, is unmarried, unconcerned with clothes, good-looking in a ‘ravaged way’, stout and possesses Ethel’s unwavering faith in her own beliefs:

  ‘Well, I’m proud of it!’ said Rose, brandishing her knife in his face. ‘I’m proud of my family; proud of my country; proud of …’

  ‘Your sex?’ he interrupted her.

  ‘I am,’ she asseverated.

  Ethel, of course, approved of this book greatly and although she admitted to having initially found it ‘unintelligible’, she later decided, on re-reading it, that the book was ‘superb’ and rang Virginia up to tell her so.

  Three Guineas, published in 1938, owes much to Ethel’s feminist militancy. Virginia’s book set out to answer an imaginary letter from a barrister, asking how war might be prevented. Her response proved her to be a major pacifist, a feminist, and a woman who had been angry for far too long at the inequality of the sexes. It included much historical reportage on the women’s reform movement and, inevitably, provoked a huge and varied postbag from the general public; letters that made ‘a valid contribution to psychology’, as Virginia ironically commented to Ethel.

  Despite Three Guineas provoking more correspondence than any of her others, Virginia complained that none of her closest friends or relations bothered to write to her about it. Indeed, many of them were shocked and uneasy at its content and at the angry tone of the author. The exception to the rule, as ever, was to be Ethel. Delighted, she wrote to Virginia that ‘your book is so splendid it makes me hot’. To Ethel, Three Guineas must have seemed the equivalent of her own March of the Women.

  Virginia was again to use Ethel as her inspiration for a character, in her last novel, Between the Acts (1941). Miss La Trobe, the creative director of the summer pageant, is a lesbian, mannish in behaviour and appearance. The following passage may well have been inspired by Virginia’s very first sighting of Ethel at that concert in the Queen’s Hall: Miss La Trobe’s ‘deep-set eyes’ and ‘very square jaw’ are undoubtedly Ethel, as is the following description:

  Outwardly she was swarthy, sturdy and thick set; strode about the fields in a smock frock; sometimes with a cigarette in her mouth; often with a whip in her hand; and used rather strong language – perhaps then she wasn’t altogether a lady? At any rate, she had a passion for getting things up.

  Virginia admired and enjoyed the things that Ethel herself ‘got up’
, in particular her life as a musician and composer. Although not talented musically in any way, Virginia had been surrounded by music from childhood, due largely to Stella’s ability to play the piano and violin. There had been music played in the drawing-room at Hyde Park Gate, or at Talland House, and Stella had played in an orchestra and regularly attended concerts. As a young adult, Virginia had often gone to the Queen’s Hall, witnessing the great Henry Wood conduct some significant premières of orchestral work; in February 1905 she had taken her seat for the very first performance of Richard Strauss’s Symphonia Domestica, a work she judged as beautiful and slightly unintelligible, before returning home where Cordelia Fisher played the pianola for the family.

  During this same month, she attended a performance of Brahms and Beethoven at the Queen’s Hall, proclaiming it to be first-rate. She saw Edward Elgar conduct his own music, including Pomp and Circumstance, and shortly afterwards attended another performance of Beethoven, Elgar and Bach. This pattern of regular concert-going was to continue up until her marriage in 1912 and then became more spasmodic as music became more ‘modern’. Ethel would no doubt have been annoyed to hear that, in 1917, Virginia had admitted to walking out of a concert at the Aeolian Hall in Bond Street when the ‘English piece came on’.

  Virginia realized, without regret, that her enjoyment of music was limited, and noted in her diary that at certain concerts her musical friends, such as Saxon Sydney-Turner, listened ‘critically, superciliously, without programmes’ whilst she, no doubt, needed the written explanation of each piece to aid her understanding. She continued to display a certain awe and respect for concert musicians, such as the ones who played their way through a Beethoven Festival Week in April 1921:

  Do I dare say I listened? Well, but if one gets a lot of pleasure, really divine pleasure, and knows the tunes, and only occasionally thinks of other things – surely I may say listened.

  Virginia not only listened, but also began to use musical imagery in her diary as a consequence of frequently attending orchestra concerts. In October 1924 she referred to Lytton as an ‘exquisite symphony’, full of deep, rumbling first violins. Sometimes she used her diary for ‘doing my scales’, implying that she ‘warmed up’ for the serious writing of the day in much the same way that an instrumentalist did before a concert. With these ‘scales’ completed, Virginia then used musical rhythm as a way of forming and shaping her sentences; she walked over the South Downs making up words that fell in strict time with her footsteps. Music continued to be a pleasure and an inspiration for her writing; in 1924 she confessed that ‘it’s music I want; to stimulate and suggest’.

  One early result of Virginia’s fascination with music, the players and their audience, was the short story A String Quartet (1921), in which the thoughts of the audience are captured as the music inspires their imaginations to unfold and takes them on a journey back through their memories. As the four musicians simultaneously lift their bows and place them on the strings and the music commences, the reader gains a taste of the many images that must have flitted through Virginia’s own mind as she sat in the audience at the Queen’s Hall:

  Flourish, spring, burgeon, burst! The pear tree on the top of the mountain. Fountains jet; drops descend. But the waters of the Rhône flow swift and deep, race under the arches, and sweep the trailing water leaves …

  Virginia used musical imagery to describe Ethel, three months after their first meeting, writing to Smyth, her ‘burning rose’, that ‘the thorn hedge is the music; and I have to break my way through the violins, flutes, cymbals, voices to this red burning centre’. Spending time with Ethel forced Virginia to re-evaluate the process of musical composition and see it in a new light. Rather than merely listening, she now had an intimate insight into the mind of a professional composer. Virginia admired Ethel’s way with notes immensely, although she did not always enjoy live performances of her friend’s music, in particular The Prison, which left her horrified. She did greatly appreciate and learn from Ethel’s own descriptions of how she composed music, drawing instant parallels with her own literary process:

  She says writing music is like writing novels. One thinks of the sea – naturally one gets a phrase for it. Orchestration is colouring. And one has to be very careful with one’s ‘technique’.

  Virginia was taken with the way that profound and passionate music poured from the practical-natured Ethel straight on to a manuscript page, where it was quickly notated for posterity. She analysed Ethel’s skill in her diary:

  I am always impressed by the fact that it is music – I mean that she has spun these coherent chords harmonies melodies out of her so practical vigorous, strident mind.

  But Virginia’s admiration for Ethel stretched beyond music and into writing. During a speech that she had to give to the London National Society for Women’s Service, Virginia paid tribute to Ethel’s other skill:

  When I read what Dame Ethel Smyth writes I always feel inclined to burn my own pen and take to music – for if she can write as well as all that, why shouldn’t I compose, straight off – a masterpiece?

  Virginia could not, of course, have stepped down from the lectern and written a symphonic masterpiece – but much of her writing continued to take music as its inspiration. Ethel was quick to see this, and wrote to Virginia using a series of highly flattering comparisons between her and the great composers that Smyth so admired:

  First of all I think of you as a creator. I mean of what you stand for, than of anyone I have met. I felt like that about Brahms when I was young – and I was quite right … there is something in your vision no one else has ever seen and it affects me like music.

  Two weeks later, she made a further musical comparison, one that must have fed Virginia’s ego immensely:

  Look here: to certain qualities to you as a writer I can swear and I am going to put very moderately: sense of beauty (top marks), sincerity – ditto – a mastery of language like Toscanini’s mastery over orchestral players.

  Perhaps as a result of listening for so many decades to the work of Beethoven, Virginia’s To the Lighthouse seems to demonstrate her knowledge of classical sonata form. There is the Exposition, or main theme, ‘The Window’; this is further explored in the Development, ‘Time Passes’; the third and final part of the novel, ‘The Lighthouse’, is a Recapitulation of the first theme, and can even be seen to have a Coda at the end (the arrival by boat at the lighthouse). These three sections neatly come full circle, as do the movements of a Beethoven or Mozart piano sonata.

  The Waves explores Virginia’s experiences as a concertgoer, this time in a negative manner: the author juxtaposes the themes of music and greed, imbuing the experience of sitting in the audience with a nasty, sordid undertone. Here, older, more cynical, aware of imminent old age and with her mind awash with thoughts of patriarchal oppression as she was preparing to experiment with ideas for The Years, Virginia now condemns the sort of people who attended the lunchtime concerts she once sat through so regularly:

  Here is a hall where one pays money and goes in, where one hears music among somnolent people who have come here after lunch on a hot afternoon … we lie gorged with food, torpid in the heat.

  In The Waves, the four players who featured in The String Quartet appear to have been resurrected, but whereas once they were the innocent ‘four black figures’, now, ten years later, they represent a nightmarish unreality; here is the negative effect of music on an unsettled mind:

  Then the beetle-shaped men come with their violins; wait; count; nod; down come their bows. And there is ripple and laughter like the dance of olive trees and their myriad-tongued great leaves when a seafarer, biting a twig between his lips where the many-backed steep hills come down, leaps on shore.

  In the same way that the Gloria of Ethel Smyth’s requiem Mass catapults the entranced listener towards death with all guns blazing, leaving him in stunned silence, Virginia’s momentous final paragraph of The Waves (‘Against you I will fling myself, unvanqu
ished and unyielding, O Death!’) leaves the reader reeling from the effect of this equally dramatic sentiment; in mood and feel, the conclusions of both works are strangely similar.

  In 1938, whilst Ethel was battling with old age, deafness, forgetfulness and a bad temper, still pestering Vita with visits to Sissinghurst (‘she arrived in a state. Her hair was coming down and she mistook her muffler for a handkerchief’), Virginia was still musing on the connections between life, music, writing and art as she prepared to write her autobiographical A Sketch of the Past, concluding that

  The whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words, we are the music; we are the thing itself.

  Virginia’s last extant letter to Ethel, written during her final month alive, was characteristically affectionate and teasing. In it, she promised to visit Ethel on ‘a Wednesday’. Ethel found this odd and analysed it in a letter to Vanessa written shortly after Virginia’s death; Virginia had not been in the habit of making such vague arrangements, and her mind, mused Ethel with the benefit of hindsight, must have been elsewhere. Woolf had always been genuinely glad to hear from Ethel, who had given her over a decade of spirited friendship and who encouraged her to be frank and honest about subjects that had been left buried and untouched for far too long. Although Ethel had long since got over the obsessive side of her passion for Virginia, and indeed had fallen in love with somebody else as she entered her eighties, her own last letter to Virginia written a month before Woolf’s death, was truly affectionate. However, with its conclusive tone, Ethel almost seemed to pre-empt the terrible event that would shortly follow: