Virginia Woolf: A Biography
Vintage

VIRGINIA WOOLF

A Biography

QUENTIN BELL

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© Quentin Bell 1972, 1982, 1990, 1996

Originally published in two volumes, Volume One in June 1972

and Volume Two in October 1972 by The Hogarth Press

First published in one volume by The Hogarth Press 1982

First published in one volume, with revisions, by The Hogarth Press 1990

Pimlico edition, with further revisions, 1996

Quentin Bell has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published in 1972

This edition published by Vintage in 2017

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

CONTENTS

Cover
About the Book
About the Author
List of Illustrations
Family Tree
Dedication
Title Page
Foreword to the Pimlico Edition
Volume One
Chapter 1  1882
Chapter 2  1882–1895
Chapter 3  1895–1897
Chapter 4  1897–1904
Chapter 5  1904–1906
Chapter 6  1906–1908
Chapter 7  1908–1909
Chapter 8  1909
Chapter 9  1910–1912
Appendix A  Chronology
Appendix B  Report on Teaching at Morley College
Appendix C  Virginia Woolf and the Authors of Euphrosyne
Appendix D  Clive Bell and the Writing of The Voyage Out
Appendix E  The Dreadnought Hoax
Volume Two
Chapter 1  1912–1915
Chapter 2  1915–1918
Chapter 3  November 1918–December 1922
Chapter 4  1923–1925
Chapter 5  June 1925–December 1928
Chapter 6  1929–1931
Chapter 7  1932–1934
Chapter 8  1934–1936
Chapter 9  November 1936–September 1939
Chapter 10  1939–1941
Appendix A  Chronology
Appendix B  Fantasy upon a Gentleman
Appendix C  Virginia Woolf and Julian Bell
Picture Section
A Note on Sources and References
References
Volume I
Volume II
Book List
Index
Volume I
Volume II
Copyright

For

OLIVIER

FOREWORD TO THE PIMLICO EDITION

Virginia Woolf was my mother’s sister. In 1964, some twenty years after Virginia’s death, my uncle Leonard Woolf wrote to me saying that a number of people had it in mind to write her biography. He said he had to give them lunch and then to persuade them not to, and this was becoming a great bore … He ended by suggesting that I should do it.

I replied that I did not think that the biography should be written by a member of the family and that I personally knew too little about English literature, or at least literary criticism, to undertake such a task. In the end I agreed to write my aunt’s life because I didn’t like the idea that the authorised biography should be written by anyone but me. Nevertheless the objections that I had raised were valid and had to be met.

Being closely related to one’s subject was in some ways an advantage; the great mass of evidence with which I had to deal was more easily understood because I knew most of the people and many of the situations referred to. But at the same time I was very much attached to my aunt and had continually to beware of an affection which could easily result in a loss of objectivity. A biography which is also a filial or indeed a nepotal offering tends to become the most tiresome kind of hagiography. This was a real danger because Virginia Woolf’s character has frequently been attacked, and at that time many people thought of her as a wealthy, precious, difficult and malicious snob. As a biographer it was my task to determine as honestly as possible how much truth and how much falsehood there was in that description and to do so conscious that to a large part of the public it would appear that I was defending a family jealous of its reputation and careless of the truth. In such a position the biographer is subject to two opposing temptations: either he may paint a portrait which is more beautiful than reality, or, in his anxiety to show how free he is of nepotism, emphasise blemishes. In either case he errs; the truth and nothing but the truth must be his object.

If the portrayal of Virginia as a person was difficult it was at least a moral exercise and this, though hard, is clearly comprehensible; one knows what one ought to do. The portrayal of Virginia Woolf as an artist is much more difficult because very often one does not. There is, in the corpus of her writings, much that is plain as day, but there are difficult passages in the novels and at times her intention is not obvious. Such obscurities offer a tempting field for the speculative writer. Thus it has been suggested that The Waves, which seems to analyse the thought and feelings of a group of people, is in fact the study of one individual; it has even been suggested that To the Lighthouse is a Christian allegory. I do not attempt exegesis of this kind, neither do I try to assess or to compare the aesthetic value of the different novels. All such speculations are left to the reader.

Thus the purpose of this volume was purely historical; and although I hoped that it might assist those who attempt to explain the writings of Virginia Woolf, it could do so only by presenting facts which hitherto had not been generally known and by providing what was, I hope, a clear and truthful account of the character and personal development of my subject. In no other way could I contribute to the literary criticism of Virginia Woolf.

There is in the history of English literature a cautionary tale which I for one bear always in mind. Dr Johnson, surely the greatest English critic of the eighteenth century, sitting in judgment on “Lycidas” – one of our finest poems – condemned it utterly. If the best of critics can go so sadly astray what hope is there for the rest of us? Speaking for myself I cannot claim to be reliable. I once thought Orlando was the finest of Virginia’s novels; I do not think so now. And when it was published I thought The Years a masterpiece and told Virginia as much; I could not say the same today. Critically I feel that I serve not as a compass but as a weathercock – nor do I think that I am alone in this.

Thus it is that you will find no critical valuations of Virginia Woolf’s novels in this volume, nor do I attempt the kind of theorising which finds in all her written work those religious, political, or philosophical meanings which seem so evident to those who are determined to find them. I do not even think that Virginia’s concern with the liberation of her sex, important and deeply felt as it certainly was, actually informed every single work that she ever wrote.

What I have tried to do is to give as clearly as possible the ascertainable facts of Virginia Woolf’s life, a life so remarkable as to need no adornment and no decoration with literary criticism. Her character was not in all respects admirable, but it offers us much that is worthy of admiration. Her books were of course the grand events in her life, her children as one may say, and I have tried to describe their origins, the work involved in bringing them to birth, and the deep emotions that resulted from their reception by the critics.

This biography could not have been written without the help of a great many institutions and of persons, many of whom are now dead. I hope some memory may survive of their fine generosity and my gratitude.

Quentin Bell, 1996

Chapter One

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1882

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VIRGINIA WOOLF WAS a Miss Stephen. The Stephens emerge from obscurity in the middle of the eighteenth century. They were farmers, merchants and receivers of contraband goods in Aberdeenshire. Of James Stephen of Ardenbraught practically nothing is known save that he died about 1750, leaving seven sons and two daughters. Following the tradition of their race most of the sons wandered abroad to seek their fortunes. One, William Stephen, settled in the West Indies and prospered in the unpleasant trade of buying sickly slaves and then curing them sufficiently to make them fit for the market. Another, James, trained as a lawyer, became a merchant and was shipwrecked on the Dorset coast. A man of Herculean stature, he saved himself and four companions by the aid of his own exertions and a keg of brandy. It was dark, a tempest was raging; but they scaled a seemingly impossible precipice where “a cat could hardly have been expected to get up” and found themselves upon the Isle of Purbeck. Here James was first succoured and then entertained by Mr Milner, the Collector of Customs; he managed matters so well that he was able to secure not only much of the cargo of the vessel, but also the heart of Miss Sibella Milner, whom he secretly married.

The married life of Mr and Mrs James Stephen was not fortunate. He failed in business, fell into debt and presently found himself in the King’s Bench Prison. In this predicament James Stephen reacted in a manner which was to set an example to his descendants. He took up his pen and argued his case. He was (so far as I know) the first of the Stephens to write a book and from that time on there was scarcely a one who did not publish and never, certainly, a generation which did not add something to the literary achievements of the family.

James Stephen also started a family tradition by carrying his argument to the courts. In fact, he went further and organised an agitation in the prison which nearly ended in an insurrection.

Imprisonment for debt was, he declared, a barbarous thing and moreover a thing repugnant to the spirit of the common law, to Magna Carta, to statute law, justice, humanity and policy.1 These were things worth saying, but so far as he was concerned they had no practical effect and, in the end, he owed his release to his creditor. Stephen’s legal and political battles had convinced him that his talents lay in the direction of advocacy rather than of commerce. He entered the Middle Temple, but the British Themis, who was to welcome so many of his descendants, rejected him. His protests had made him too many enemies and he was debarred by reason of his “want of birth, want of fortune, want of education and want of temper.”2

But there was a back door to the legal profession and by this Stephen made his entry. He became the partner of a solicitor under whose name he could carry on his business. It was not, however, a business which could bring him much credit. His clients were of a dubious kind. His work was done in public houses; it brought him little reputation and less money. His poor wife, who believed that these misfortunes were sent by the Almighty to punish her for having consented to a secret marriage, died in 1775. He followed her four years later. He was only forty-six; he left six children and about enough money to pay his debts.

James, the second of these six children, whom we may for convenience call “Master James,” is the one who most concerns us. Brought up in an atmosphere of penury and litigation, he proved very much his father’s son. He too was a writer of pamphlets and a pleader of causes; but whereas his father had been concerned with his own affairs, Master James used his argumentative talents for greater purposes. In the interests of patriotism and humanity he was to champion the cause of freedom and to start a war between two great nations.

His first campaign, however, was very much in the parental tradition. With little formal education James made his way to, entered, and despite ill-health pursued his studies at the Marischal College, Aberdeen. He read what was then called Natural Philosophy (i.e. science) and not without success; but he then found his way barred by an examination which was conducted in Latin. In this he knew that he would inevitably be failed and, what was even worse, be made to look ridiculous (he was a very sensitive man).

What then was to be done? It may be thought an extraordinary thing that a youth of seventeen should have the boldness to conceive, and the dexterity to accomplish, a plan for covering his own defects, and saving his credit, by innovating on the established practice of an antient University.3 Yet this I conceived and effected.

In other words he had the regulations changed to suit his needs.

The passage here quoted is from the Memoirs of James Stephen written by himself for the use of his children. It is an interesting document made more entertaining by a certain vein of complacency in the author. Stephen felt able to congratulate himself on this and other triumphs, on the exertions which enabled him to surmount very serious disabilities and yet become a Member of Parliament, a Master in Chancery and a very respected member of society, because he could ascribe the glory of the business to a Higher Power.

God answered his prayers, God watched over his interests, God guided his footsteps. There are moments when the relationship between James Stephen and his Maker seems almost conspiratorial. He put his trust in Providence with such perfect simplicity that, while paying his addresses to one young woman, he got another with child. Nor was this confidence misplaced. Between them they managed matters in the most satisfactory way. He married the one and the other found a husband. Their bastard son became a most respectable clergyman.

As a public man Master James became identified with two great causes. Both resulted from a sojourn in the West Indies. Here there was already a family connection begun by his uncle William; here Stephen practised as a lawyer and here he saw how easily the British blockade was being broken by French and American traders. He who, in his youth, had been a zealous partisan of George Washington, was indignant. He was moved to write a pamphlet entitled War in Disguise, a pamphlet which resulted in the Orders in Council, the Continental Blockade and, much to Stephen’s chagrin and astonishment, the War of 1812.4

But, from his first arrival in the Western Hemisphere, James had been dedicated to another and nobler cause. He first realised the infamy of slavery when he saw how monstrously a Negro might be treated by the West Indian Courts. Having once perceived the iniquity of the thing he made himself a restless and consistent friend of the oppressed. On his return to England he became the trusted ally of Wilberforce, whose widowed sister he married after his first wife’s death. In the House of Commons, when he was not defending the Orders in Council, he was attacking slavery; it was the refusal of the Government to act on this question which led to his withdrawal from Parliament.

There was, in the neighbourhood of Clapham, a group of friends: prosperous and worthy men marked by a certain decent godliness, a fair degree of wealth, an ardent concern for the enlightenment of the heathen and the liberation of the slave. Amongst them were Charles Grant and Zachary Macaulay, John and Henry Thornton, John Shore (later Lord Teignmouth), Granville Sharp, William Wilberforce, John and Henry Venn–respectively rector and curate of Clapham; these were the so-called ‘saints’ of the Clapham Sect. James was drawn to this evangelical society not so much by his religious views–although he certainly took the spiritual colour of his surroundings–as by his political opinions. But in general the Clapham Sect was concerned with works rather than with faith, with policies rather than with parties. The abolition, first of the slave trade, and then of slavery itself, was its grand motive. It was therefore compelled to fight for its beliefs at the hustings and in the House of Commons. Its leaders were not divines but politically conscious members of the middle classes, men therefore who knew that, to attain their ends, they must collaborate with persons whose humanitarianism had a different origin than theirs. Tories and Anglicans, they found themselves allied to Radicals, to Quakers and to the followers of Bentham–men who in other connections were their antagonists–while Pitt, the intimate friend and political ally of Wilberforce, had sometimes to be their enemy. In the great work of committee-making, pamphlet-writing and public agitation these sincere, eloquent and influential men had, therefore, to learn the political lessons of tolerance and compromise. Thus the Christianity of Stephen and his Clapham friends, ardent though it was, never attained the dogmatic certainty, the super-mundane, persecuting passion of some other sects.

The Clapham Evangelicals must have felt themselves to be, as indeed they were, the conscience of the British middle classes and therefore an enormous political power. For this reason, if for no other, they were concerned above all with moral questions and when, in later generations, the eschatological superstructure of their faith collapsed, the moral fabric remained. This persistence of the moral, as opposed to the theological, element in the beliefs of their great grand-parents was to have a very important effect upon a later generation.

Master James died in 1832, just before the final abolition of slavery in the British Empire. His legitimate sons all became lawyers; it was indeed a decidedly forensic family. The third son, yet another James, must have shown considerable talent at the Bar (they all did), for he was soon earning £3,000 a year–a very handsome income in those days. He moved, sacrificing much of his income, to a permanent position in the Colonial Office. His reason for doing this was clear enough. It was as an administrator that he could best carry on the great family campaign against slavery. He was known in Whitehall as ‘Mr Over-Secretary Stephen,’ for he was not simply one of those civil servants who gently but firmly override the wishes of those ministers who, nominally, are set above them.5 He was a civil servant with a policy; in fact it was more than a policy, it was a mission, which had to be imposed, willy-nilly, upon the Colonial Office, the Colonies themselves and whatever Government happened to be in power.

That policy was, of course, the policy of Emancipation, for although other matters, such as the grant of self-government to Canada, occupied some of his time, the protection of the Negro was the grand business of his administration. To oppose, to delay, to nullify and to thwart that policy was the aim of the Colonies themselves, by which, of course, I mean the ruling white minority in the Colonies. The colonists, as always, were ably assisted by influential friends in London. These had to be outwitted, argued down, browbeaten, and Mr Over-Secretary Stephen was the man to do it.

Sir James Stephen, as he eventually became, was a courageous, intelligent and capable administrator. He was also, as he himself admitted, anything but a simple man. He inherited all the boldness of his father and his grandfather; he was formidable and implacable, driving others almost as hard as he drove himself, working long hours in the Colonial Office and making others work equally hard, still finding time for numerous contributions to the Edinburgh Review, dictating 3,000 words before breakfast. A monster of industry and learning, he was also a vulnerable and an unhappy man. His achievement fell far short of his ideals. He was blamed for measures that he had opposed as well as for those which he had favoured; he felt such criticism deeply, all the more so because, as a civil servant, he could not reply to it. He was desperately shy, he was intensely pessimistic. He was so convinced of his own personal ugliness that he would not have a mirror in his room. He would shut his eyes rather than face an interlocutor. He wished he had been a clergyman, a recluse, anything but what he was. He was terrified of being comfortable and although he would not deny pleasure to others he was anxious to deny himself. Once he tasted a cigar and liked it so much that he resolved never to taste another. It occurred to him that he liked taking snuff–immediately he emptied his snuff box out of the window.

“Did you ever know your father do a thing because it was pleasant?” asked Lady Stephen of her son Fitzjames.6 “Yes, once, when he married you” was the prompt reply of yet another brilliantly argumentative Stephen.

But James Stephen’s marriage was not simply pleasant–it was in the highest degree prudent. In marrying Jane Catherine Venn, Stephen allied himself completely with Clapham, for the Venns were, so to speak, at the very heart of the Sect. The Venns had always been clergymen; they receded in an unbroken succession of pastors to that time at which it first became respectable to have a priest as an ancestor; their connection with Clapham Rectory was a long one, and it was Jane Venn’s grandfather’s Compleat Duty of Man which provided the Clapham doctrine, if one may here speak of a doctrine.

It might be supposed that the daughter of an evangelical parsonage would hardly be the person to discourage Stephen’s natural inclination to gloom and to self-mortification. But the Saints of Clapham were not in favour of immoderate austerities and the Venns, in particular, were a cheerful commonsensical race who loved to crack a joke and saw no harm in innocent pleasures. There was something a little mad in Stephen’s self-mortification; Jane Catherine Venn was as sane a woman as ever breathed. She was also a handsome, amiable person with a strong disposition to look always on the happiest side of any matter. She provided her husband with a home in which he could forget the agonies of public life. It was, by modern standards, rigidly puritanical; their children were to go neither to balls nor to theatres–but neither might they condemn those who enjoyed such amusements; it was for them a sober but a happy place, lightened by the benevolence of their father and by their mother’s laughter.

One thing more must be said about the household of Sir James Stephen. It respected art, by which I mean literary art (painting and music were, I surmise, neglected). Lady Stephen admired Cowper and Wordsworth, Scott and Campbell. Sir James turned to more serious and more edifying writers, but he could also appreciate Voltaire and Montaigne; his friends, who were not numerous, included J. S. Mill, the Venns, the Diceys, the Garratts, a serious and enlightened company.

Sir James had five children–one died in infancy, one in early manhood; but the other three survived and were to be of importance to the children of the next generation. They were: James Fitzjames, Caroline Emelia and Leslie, the father of Virginia.

Caroline Emelia will reappear in this story; she was an intelligent woman who fell, nevertheless, into the role of the imbecile Victorian female. She fell in love with a student and had some reason to suppose that her affection was returned; but the young man never declared his feelings. He went to India and nothing more was heard of him. Her heart was broken and her health was ruined; at the age of twenty-three she settled down to become an invalid and an old maid. She lost her faith and set herself with great diligence to find another; after a number of experiments she discovered a congenial spiritual home in the Society of Friends.

Fitzjames, one may guess, smiled grimly at his sister’s life of passive suffering and equable gentleness; but he would probably have allowed that a life devoted to religion and philanthropy was not unsuitable for a woman. He himself was, most emphatically, a man. His life had therefore to be more positive, more aggressive, more brutal. When he and Leslie went as day boys to Eton they were horribly bullied. He was ashamed of this always, for he felt that he had not resisted persecution stoutly enough. However, this humiliating acknowledgement of the superior strength of others came to an end at last. Fitzjames grew to be a big broad-shouldered fellow known to his playmates as ‘Giant Grim’ and well able to give blow for blow with anyone. He had, he said, learnt that “to be weak is to be wretched, that the state of nature is a state of War and Vae Victis the great law of Nature.”7

His younger brother, Leslie, was a nervous, delicate boy, his mother’s darling, fond of and over-excited by poetry, too sensitive to be able to endure an unhappy ending to a story. At school he needed all the protection that Fitzjames could give him and thus I see them: the tough, self-reliant, no-nonsense Fitzjames, shouldering his way through the horrors of a British public school with a frightened, delicate junior in tow. At Cambridge too, it was Fitzjames who led the way, who became known in the Union as the ‘British Lion,’ a roaring, crushing, rampageous debater, packing a cruel punch in argument, chosen for the brightness of his intellect and his manifest intellectual integrity as a member of that arch-intellectual society, ‘The Apostles,’ while Leslie, altogether gentler, more diffident, less brilliant, was never an Apostle and never emerged from the main rank of undergraduates.

It must have been clear to everyone that the elder brother would make a name for himself, would be called to the Bar, would become a judge and a baronet–as indeed he did; while Leslie would become a clergyman and sink gently into decent obscurity–as he might have done. All his life Leslie was, I think, matching himself against his all too admirable sibling. Fitzjames was physically strong; he too would make himself strong. Like Fitzjames he would walk for miles; but he would do more, he would run, he would row, he would scale mountains, and in fact he became, as he, in his self-deprecating way, put it ‘wiry.’ He was in fact a famous walker, an oarsman, a coach of oarsmen, one of the great mountaineers of the nineteenth century. In the same way he adopted, I think, some of Fitzjames’s robust habits of thought. He became half a philistine, almost anti-intellectual. He followed Bentham and J. S. Mill; he was “Broad Church,” unsentimental and manly.

His nephews and nieces remembered Fitzjames in his later years as a powerful, bulky figure sternly buttoned into a frock coat conducting Lady Stephen to church every Sunday morning, there to pay his respects to a being in whom he had ceased to believe.

“He has lost all hope of Paradise,” declared the irreverent young, “but he clings to the wider hope of eternal damnation.”8

This was unjust; but it was true that, to him, evil seems to have been a much more real thing than goodness. His constant preoccupation was with the vices that menaced society; he had no use for optimism, cant, gush, enthusiasm or–as it sometimes appears–for compassion. The engines of repression were to be ruthlessly employed; justice, though it must be administered with scrupulous fairness, demanded that punishments should be inflicted in a spirit of righteous vengeance. For all his scepticism he accepted the morality of his age with few reservations. He is as far from the genial libertinism of the eighteenth century as he is from its frivolity.

The same could be said of Leslie; the younger brother had the milder temper and the warmer heart; but this did not prevent him from sharing the same inhibitions and the same indignations or, it should be added, from displaying the same courageous intellectual integrity.

While Fitzjames went to London, the Bar and journalism, Leslie gained a Fellowship at Trinity Hall. At that time it was still necessary for a Fellow of Oxford or Cambridge to take Holy Orders. Leslie was ordained in 1859 and thereby committed to a set of propositions in which he did not really believe. It is indeed hard, in this sort of context, to know what we are to understand by the word ‘belief.’ It is difficult to imagine Leslie, at any period of his adult life, praying for rain in a drought or for fine weather during a wet spell, solemnly uttering the words:

O Almighty Lord God, who for the sin of man didst once drown all the world, except eight persons, and afterwards of thy great mercy didst promise never to destroy it so again ….9

It was in fact at this point that Leslie stuck. The year was 1862, he was thirty, he had become convinced that ‘Noah’s Flood was a fiction’ and that it was wrong for him to read the story as if it were sacred truth.

He had never been a zealot; he had preached the gospels as they were understood by F. D. Maurice and the Broad Church party, that is, in a spirit of reverential scepticism, and it would have been easy for him, as for so many others, to have paddled around Noah’s Flood and never to have taken the plunge. Leslie had the courage to act resolutely in accordance with his convictions. He had a comfortable job at Cambridge but it involved telling what he now saw to be lies and this he refused to do.

At the same time it is possible that his loss of faith may have had unconscious motives. He had originally become a university teacher in order not to be a burden on his father; this involved, not only a profession of faith, but–for some years at all events–a celibate existence. After his father’s death in 1859 he slowly realised, firstly that he was the most irreligious, then that he was the most uxorious of men. Gradually he discovered how much he longed for the outer world, how little he really had believed and how glad he was, now that his father could no longer be hurt by the avowal, to make his disbeliefs public.

To leave the security of Cambridge was a hazardous thing and he was, as he himself said, of a rather anxious temperament (this was an understatement); but he took the risk with an untroubled gaiety which in later life astonished him, and came to London without money or prospects.fn1

In London, however, Fitzjames was ready to help him. Leslie was soon making a small but reputable name for himself in the Republic of Letters. He began as a journalist and an apologist for the Federal Cause in America, a cause which had few friends in this country. His sympathy for the Union led to a visit to the United States, to an interview with Lincoln and, more importantly, to a life-long friendship with James Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton and Oliver Wendell Holmes. His politics were radical, very much inspired by his friend Fawcett; they were not, however, his main interest. He tended more and more towards philosophical speculation and literary criticism.

In 1882 he began, at the invitation of George Smith the publisher, to make one of the world’s greatest instruments of scholarship: the Dictionary of National Biography; it is as the editor of that dictionary, as a literary critic and as an historian, that he is most gratefully remembered. He himself would rather have been remembered as a philosopher. His views were, to some extent, distorted by a morality which, though not as fierce as that of Fitzjames, was as narrow and as intolerant. It did not prevent him, however, from saying true, wise and amusing things about books and writers, or from taking a view of the world which is essentially honest, responsible and sane. Leslie Stephen’s reputation has endured. Like Fitzjames he knew how to write a good forceful English, but there is more of intimacy, of delicacy, of humour and even of fantasy in the work of Leslie. In short he was more of an artist.

In the twenty years that followed Leslie’s loss of faith he found himself as a writer and a thinker; he also found himself in another way. As we have seen, the escape from Cambridge was also an escape from the cloister; and although it took him some years to find a wife, when he at length did so he discovered that he was, in truth, a very domestic character. The wife whom he found was Harriet Marian, the younger daughter of Thackeray. She and Leslie fell in love and, after a rather awkward moment of hesitation and hanging back on his part, they were married.

We do not know much about the first Mrs Leslie Stephen. Her husband describes her as being neither very beautiful nor very clever; her nature was one of “quiet love”; she was amiable, gentle, simple with the simplicity of a child. Almost, one might guess from his account, a little dull, or at all events too childlike. And yet some of her letters have been preserved and from these it is evident that she had a sense of fun and was by no means deficient either in character or in intellectual curiosity. She seems, in fact, to have been a very proper wife for a highly intelligent man.

Certainly they were happy together, although their marriage encountered difficulties of a rather unusual kind. Until she found a husband the person whom Minny Thackeray loved best in the world was her sister Anny. In marrying the one sister Leslie discovered that he had, in a sense, married them both.

Now Anny was a more formidable, a more arresting personality than Minny. She was a novelist; her novels were tenuous, charming productions in which the narrative tended to get lost and in which something of her own vague, erratic, engaging personality is preserved. Minny considered that her sister was a genius; in this I suspect that she was mistaken, but she was a very talented person and one of her talents was for teasing. When Samuel Butler was at work upon Shakespeare’s Sonnets Rediscovered, Anny bewildered him by remarking: “Oh Mr Butler, do you know my theory about the Sonnets–that they were written by Anne Hathaway?” Butler never realised that the joke was at his expense; he used to tell the story sadly shaking his head and exclaiming: “Poor lady, poor lady, that was a silly thing to say.”fn2

At the age of seventy Aunt Anny, as she was called by all Leslie’s children, could impress a child by her extraordinarily youthful, vigorous and resilient optimism; when she was young, not only in spirit but in years, her ebullience must have been overwhelming. It is not hard to believe that such cheerful impetuosity could sometimes be exasperating. Leslie found it so; he loved silence and she was for ever talking; he loved order, and she rejoiced in chaos; he prided himself on his realism, she was unashamedly sentimental; he worried about money, she was recklessly extravagant; he prized facts, she was hardly aware of them.fn3

She and I had our little contentions.10 I had a perhaps rather pedantic mania for correcting her flights of imagination and checking her exuberant impulses. A[nny] and M[inny] used to call me the cold bath from my habit of drenching Anny’s little schemes and fancies with chilling criticism.

But they were more seriously divided by the fact that between them there was a kind of undeclared war for possession of Minny. War is perhaps too strong a word, for the three were bound by strong ties of affection, and yet it was a sort of contest, a contest which lasted for several years until it began to turn decisively in Leslie’s favour. For in time Minny came to the conclusion that her husband meant more to her than even her beloved sister. Perhaps she felt, as other women were to feel, how greatly Leslie depended upon her. At all events the marriage was eminently successful; it had been enriched by a daughter, Laura, born in 1870, and presently Minny was again pregnant. On the evening of 27 November 1875 she went to bed feeling slightly unwell. During the night Leslie was called to her.

I got up and found my darling in a convulsion.11 I fetched the doctor. I remember only too clearly the details of what followed; but I will not set them down. My darling never regained consciousness. She died about the middle of the day, 28 November, my 43d birthday.

Leslie was shattered, heartbroken, and desolated. Anny, it is true, remained to take care of him and his daughter, but here a further blow was preparing. Laura was no longer a baby and it had already been evident to her mother that she was a backward child. In this period of bereavement it became increasingly obvious that she was not simply backward; there was something seriously wrong. Leslie began to suspect that Mrs Thackeray’s madness had been inherited by her granddaughter. How bad her case might be it was too soon to tell; but clearly she would require special treatment. This domestic agony served to increase the tension between Leslie and Anny; Louise, the nurse, set herself against Anny’s authority and Leslie took her side. The scenes which, while Minny was alive, had been held in check became more frequent and more painful.

And then, rather surprisingly, Anny fell in love with young Richmond Ritchie, her cousin, her godson and her junior by seventeen years. He returned her affection and the flirtation, which had been treated as nonsense, suddenly became the real thing. Leslie found Anny and Richmond kissing each other in the drawing room and insisted that they should either marry or part. Although the marriage turned out well, Leslie hated the whole business; he was, as he realised, jealous; the quasi-maternal situation of the bride also aroused feelings in him the nature of which he may not have understood, and of course he lost his housekeeper.

Anny’s place was for a time taken by Leslie’s sister; but if Anny had been too resilient a companion, Caroline Emelia was altogether too flaccid.

Now Milly has loved me all her life; she has been much more like a twin than a younger sister; … Yet, as I found myself saying at this time, she was too like me to be helpful.12 If I put an argument in order to have it contradicted, she took it so seriously that I thought there must be something in it; if I was in doubt, she fell into utter perplexity; if I was sad, she began to weep–a performance which always came too easily to her. Consequently though a most affectionate she was a most depressing companion. And then, the society which suited me would have struck her as worldly; while her friends, though very worthy & some of them very clever people, struck me as intolerably dull.

The plan was tried and needless to say it failed. Milly’s health broke down almost at once and Leslie began to look for a professional housekeeper. The Huxleys recommended a Fräulein Klappert who had been a governess in their household. But there was another solution, one that Leslie had had in mind for some time and which was considerably more to his taste.

On the evening of 27 November, 1875, a few hours before Minny fell into those convulsions which were the prelude to her death, the Stephens had been visited by a close friend of the Thackeray sisters, Mrs Herbert Duckworth, a young widow. Feeling her own chronic grief as a kind of intrusion upon their happiness–for they still had a few hours of happiness–she had soon withdrawn to her own sad home. For her, after her husband’s death in 1870, “all life seemed a shipwreck.”13 Though left with three children, George, Stella and Gerald (a posthumous son), her despair was complete. But if she could no longer be happy she could at least be useful: she might comfort the afflicted and nurse the sick (in the 1870s her own relations seemed to sicken and to die in rather large numbers). She had, one might say, renounced the world, or at least she had renounced the happiness of the world, although this renunciation could hardly be called mystical, one of the consequences of her bereavement being a permanent loss of faith.14 It was this perhaps which enabled her to moderate her awe of Leslie Stephen the intellectual with a sympathetic interest in him as a man. After Minny’s death it was almost a matter of course that she should comfort him, mediate between him and her own friend Anny, reproach him when he was unreasonable, and listen to his grievances with the affectionate patience of a sister. Between them there grew up a close friendship, but it was at once understood that it was to remain fraternal; each had a requiem candle to burn before the altar of the dead.

It is unnecessary to describe the process which led to Leslie’s sudden éclaircissement, a revelation vouchsafed to him just outside Knightsbridge Barracks when he said to himself “I am in love with Julia!” and knew that he might again be happy, nor yet his gradual passage from the consciousness to the declaration of passion and hers from a kind, sad, but completely unqualified rejection, not so much of him, as of marriage, love, and happiness itself, to the faint adumbration of a tentative surrender.15 For at last, after much debate, she did find herself in a situation in which she was at least ready to contemplate the proposition that life might yet offer certain possibilities of felicity.

In the end it was Fräulein Klappert who settled the business. Both Leslie and Julia felt that her installation would bring about a definitive arrangement, setting the seal, as it were, upon their separation. There was, at all events, enough finality in the proposal to make Julia Duckworth aware of her own feelings; she realised that she could not break with Leslie. They were married on 26 March 1878.

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I must now attempt to say something about Virginia’s mother’s family. Here there is a good deal of uncertainty, of legend, and of scandal.

According to Virginia’s cousin H. A. L. Fisher, the historian, there was at the Court of Versailles during the last years of the old regime a certain Chevalier Antoine de l’Etang; his person was pleasing, his manners courtly, his tastes extravagant and his horsemanship admirable.16 He was attached to the household of Marie Antoinette–too much attached it is said, and for this he was exiled to Pondicherry where, in 1788, he married a Mlle Blin de Grincourt.

M de l’Etang entered and died in the service of the Nawab of Oudh; he left three daughters. Adeline, the one with whom we are concerned, married a James Pattle who was, we are told, a quite extravagantly wicked man. He was known as the greatest liar in India; he drank himself to death; he was packed off home in a cask of spirits, which cask, exploding, ejected his unbottled corpse before his widow’s eyes, drove her out of her wits, set the ship on fire and left it stranded in the Hooghly.

The story has been told many times. Some parts of it may be true. It is certainly true that Mrs Pattle came to London in 1840 with a bevy of daughters and that these ladies had a reputation for beauty. Four of them should be mentioned in these pages: Virginia, Sarah, Julia and Maria.

Virginia Pattle, the most beautiful of the sisters, married Charles Somers-Cocks and became Countess Somers; she was a dashing, wordly woman, impulsive, rather eccentric, who lived in great style. Of her daughters, one became Duchess of Bedford; the other, Isabel, married Lord Henry Somerset. This alliance, though grand, was by no means happy. Lord Henry, a charming man it seems, delighted Victorian drawing rooms with his ballads. He was, I believe, the author of One More Passionate Kiss; this embrace was reserved however, not for his beautiful wife but for the second footman. Lady Henry endured his infidelities for a time but presently she could stand no more. She confided in her mother who, allowing her indignation to master her prudence, made a public scandal. The sequel is interesting in as much as it gives a notion of the ethos of the Victorian age and of a system of morality which Virginia Woolf and her contemporaries were to encounter and to oppose.17

Lord Henry fled to Italy and there, in that land of Michelangelesque young men, lived happily ever after. His wife discovered that she had been guilty of an unformulated, but very heinous, crime: her name was connected with a scandal. Good society would have nothing more to do with her. She was obliged to retire from the world and decided to devote herself to the reclamation of inebriate women, a task which she undertook with so much good sense and good humour that she won the affection and admiration, not only of men of charity and good will, but even of the women she assisted.

Sarah Pattle made her empire in a less fashionable but more interesting part of the world. She married Thoby Prinsep, an Anglo-Indian administrator of some eminence who was, until its dissolution, a member of the Council of the East India Company. The Prinseps settled outside London in an old farm-house, Little Holland House, in what is now Melbury Road, Kensington; it was a pretty, rambling, comfortable sort of place and here, while her sister collected the aristocracy of birth, she entertained the aristocracy of intellect. Tennyson, Sir Henry Taylor, Thackeray and his daughters, William Allingham, Tom Hughes, Mr Gladstone, and Disraeli were habitués. They were able, at Little Holland House, to enjoy a respite from the formality, the regularity and the stuffiness of mid-Victorian society. Their hostess was both charming and eccentric. Meals were oddly timed and oddly disposed. There was something outlandishly charming, something free and easy about Little Holland House and to this ambience the painters must have made an important contribution. Chief amongst them was G. F. Watts; he was, for many years, a resident, Mrs Prinsep having ‘taken him up’ and established him in a studio. Holman Hunt, Burne-Jones and Woolner were very frequent visitors and so it would seem was Ruskin.fn4

But perhaps the most remarkable of the artists who frequented Little Holland House was Julia Margaret Cameron, the second of the Pattle sisters, the least beautiful but the most gifted. Like Sarah, Julia had married an Indian Civilian, like her she had a passion for artists and men of letters. It has been said of her that “she doubled the generosity of the most generous of her sisters, and the impulsiveness of the most impulsive.18 If they were enthusiastic, she was so twice over; if they were persuasive, she was invincible.”

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