Philip Tew

[In the following original essay, Tew discusses Woolf's life, career, awards and recognition, and overall body of work, while also examining the era in which Woolf wrote and the critical reception of her works.]

INTRODUCTION

Since her death in 1941 Virginia Woolf has become one of the most celebrated of English novelists. She is now one of the most widely read of twentieth-century writers in the English language; initially considered a minor modern novelist, she is now viewed as a major figure in the modernist movement. This shift in opinion has occurred partly because of recent recognition of Woolf's significance in the move toward a broader and more creative feminism with a politicized edge, as can be seen in her analysis in Three Guineas (1938) and other polemical works. On one level, she is considered an archetypal modernist alongside T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. On another, her work has offered many ideas and examples for women drawn to exploration of their gender and the cultural contexts of feminism. Increasingly, critics have drawn upon the contexts of both Woolf's life and her times.

There were several phases to Woolf's artistic development. She is perhaps best known for the period characterized by a trio of experimental novels, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), The Waves (1931), and her first feminist tract, A Room of One's Own (1929). There is, however, far more to Woolf, both textually and culturally, than her works of this period suggest. Most commentators agree that what might be called either plurality or complexity permeates every level of both her life and work. Certainly, both in a biographical and a literary sense, she remains a figure with myriad dimensions that can attract but are also capable of diverting the unwary reader or critic. Woolf was variously and often simultaneously a working journalist, a novelist with strong experimental tendencies, and a feminist polemicist who upset the sensibilities of many of her contemporaries with A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas. She was a modernist, a vulnerable obsessive (like her father before her, with his unfounded fears concerning money), a depressive who suffered many severe attacks of mental illness (a state whose recurrence she feared constantly), and a wife with lesbian tendencies in an asexual marriage. As a member of the upper-middle-class intellectual set, Woolf suffered from an irrepressible snobbery, but her connections allowed her to become a leading member of the now fabled Bloomsbury Group (named for the district of London in which several members of the group lived). Following these themes in her life and works is an intricate affair.

Woolf's work has made her a significant historical figure, but it may help readers to understand the woman behind the roles she played and to put aside momentarily the fame she achieved later in life. Until the age of thirty she was the unmarried Virginia Stephen, a spinster who was known only for being the daughter of a famous Victorian editor and writer, Sir Leslie Stephen. Not until the age of forty did she publish a work of fiction that was considered even by her friends as truly significant. Woolf was involved with the Bloomsbury Group, but during its first phase, before public recognition of the group came in the 1920s, she was chiefly a respected book reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement, an occasional journalist, and an extremely minor novelist. Before 1919 she had published only one novel, The Voyage Out (1915). She completed it before suffering a major nervous breakdown in 1913 that lasted two years and almost led to her permanent hospitalization. Publication of the novel was delayed until she recovered, but the book made little impression on readers. For many years Woolf suspected she might remain an abject failure. This self-doubt is difficult for the present-day reader or critic to absorb fully since her works are studied at universities across the world to illustrate aspects of the novel, feminism, and modernism as a cultural and aesthetic phase. Certainly, writing her fiction and having it taken seriously presented an uphill struggle for Woolf.

Even accounting for the fact that her important works did not begin to appear until she was forty, Woolf cannot be understood simply through her texts. One must also consider other major aspects of her life, including its social contexts. Although many critics remain uncomfortable with her narrow understanding of class and breeding, Woolf's upbringing was typical for a member of the upper-middle-class elite. She clearly thought that people could be judged according to their background, with most talent and creativity residing in the middle and aristocratic classes. As Rosamond Lehmann comments in Recollections of Virginia Woolf (1972), “She [Woolf] had a romantic view of charwomen and prostitutes; and her conception of the ruling classes, of rank, fashion, titles, society—all that—was perhaps a shade glamorous and reverential.”¹

Thus, the most germane approach to Woolf's life, even though it might appear the most traditional, is to explore the territory of her family background. The critical consensus seems to be that her upbringing was central to all phases of her writing. In Feminism and Art: A Study of Virginia Woolf (1968) Herbert Marder comments that “The prewar and postwar stages of her [Woolf's] life correspond, roughly speaking, to two stages of family life described in her work. In the first stage the family still seems part of a stable social order, though signs of strain are beginning to appear. In the second stage, the traditional institutions are crumbling, and we see people living amidst ‘scraps, orts and fragments’ of that old order. Virginia Woolf's pictures of family life contain an implicit evaluation of that order. …”²

Who, then, was Woolf before the Bloomsbury Group became established and prior to her becoming journalist? This period mattered to her on personal level, as is confirmed in the way she almost obsessively recorded the effects of her childhood in her diaries throughout most of her adult life. In the process of questioning the conventional Victorian world in a manner characteristic of the Bloomsbury Group, Woolf sifted through the meaning of her past. Her later fiction reflects this process of review. One example is To the Lighthouse, in which she originally intended to center the narrative on a character based on her father. Although she revised this plan, Sir Leslie Stephen remained a major feature in the characterization of Mr. Ramsay in the novel. Woolf also drew on memories of her mother, as well as her own experiences as a female. She created a strong portrait of her mother in Mrs. Ramsay and projected parts of her writing self (as well as the artistic self of her sister, Vanessa Stephen Bell) in the painter Lily Briscoe. Like Woolf trying to portray her father, Lily struggles to find the right medium through which to memorialize Mrs. Ramsay's power and presence. The synthesis in the novel of different elements of Woolf's personal history provides an example of her key themes and her method of work. She responded to the lived reality of a young woman struggling against various restrictive forces and circumstances. Without an understanding of this biographical background, readers can be overwhelmed by the Woolf myth and the critical industry that has grown up around her.

Like Woolf herself, nearly all critics of her work return constantly to the immensely complex coordinates of her upbringing. The events of her life are a guide to the forces behind her emotional and intellectual development. She was born into a late-Victorian world beginning to doubt traditional certainties. For all its loss of faith, England had been strengthening its world empire, cultivating several generations of young men ready to administer the imperial framework and bureaucracy as if it were a huge family. Women, as well as the indigenous peoples of the English colonies, were infantilized. Woolf was instructed in the ways of a society that stressed a family model with the father as the dominant figure. Growing up in such a patriarchal society could be stultifying, but in an essay on her father, “Leslie Stephen” (1932), Woolf takes pains not to condemn him outright: “The relation between parents and children today have a freedom that would have been impossible with my father. He expected a certain standard of behaviour, even of ceremony, in family life. Yet if freedom means the right to think one's own thoughts and to follow one's own pursuits, then no one respected and indeed insisted upon freedom more completely than he did.”³ This patriarchal model was not universal in Victorian society, but it exerted a powerful influence, especially on the legal framework and the economy of England. There were other important social undercurrents: increasingly, women fought for their right to individual expression and made more-organized political demands. These tensions can be charted in Woolf's own experience and that of her contemporaries, much as they can be charted in her fiction. As John Mepham summarizes the aim of the Bloomsbury Group, “They set out to demolish the Victorian family and the Victorian culture of muscular, imperial certainty and superstition.”⁴ This culture was the world of Woolf's father (apart from the superstition, since Leslie Stephen was a celebrated sceptic). For much of her adult life she recorded her response to these issues in various ways, often in her diaries and journals.⁵ One should keep in mind, however, that Woolf had reservations about the overall balance of her own record of her life and upbringing. In a February 1939 diary entry (made with her habitual lack of accurate or conventional punctuation), she notes that “It is unfortunate for truths sake, that I never write here except when jangled with talk. I only record the dumps & the dismals, & them very barely.”⁶

FAMILY BACKGROUND

Because Woolf's Victorian upbringing was so overwhelmingly important to her self-image, it is worthwhile to explore the dynamics of her early life in the Stephen household. She was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on 25 January 1882 to Leslie and Julia Stephen. According to her own account, she was conceived as a result of contraceptive failure. Woolf grew up among an extended family joined by the second marriages of both her parents. The Stephens had already had two children together: Vanessa, born in 1879, and Thoby, born the following year. A final child, Adrian, was born to the couple in 1883. Leslie Stephen also had a daughter, Laura (born 1870), from his previous marriage to Harriet “Minny” Thackeray Stephen. Julia had three children with Herbert Duckworth, her first husband: George (born 1868), Stella (born 1869), and Gerald (born 1870). Woolf grew up mainly under the care of servants; her parents were at times quite distant figures. The family lived in a gloomy, upper-middle-class Victorian mansion at 22 Hyde Park Gate, in a setting similar in many respects to those found in Woolf's novels Night and Day (1919) and The Years (1937).⁷ Her childhood environment, both in London and in summers spent in Cornwall, was to prove one of several factors central to her experience and her imagination. This experience initiated Woolf's resistance to the Victorian world in which she, her siblings, and her half siblings grew up.

The members of Woolf's extended family provided a fertile ground for characterization, but since she was not always precise in her fictional analogies, making too many close biographical assumptions in terms of the text can lead readers and critics astray. The work is not precisely the life. For instance, Woolf was essentially of a far higher social class than the middle-class Katharine Hilbery, the protagonist of Night and Day. Some aspects of Woolf's life can, however, be useful in understanding the major themes in her fiction. Many of the families portrayed in her major novels are extended ones, like her own. This family structure emerged from the Victorian realities of illness, death, and remarriage, which led to intricate sets of half siblings, cousins, and uncles and aunts without blood ties. Hence, although the world of Woolf's childhood was more formalized than that of the twentieth century and far more patriarchal in character, it was perhaps as emotionally confusing as contemporary society, in which divorce and illegitimacy are commonplace. As a response to these traumas, Woolf was to suffer from “the dumps & the dismals” for much of her life, leading to bouts of insanity and several attempts at taking her own life. These were the major characteristics of her personality, but, from childhood on, she could also be entertaining, garrulous, and severe in her questioning.

Woolf did not accept the Victorian world into which she had been born, despite the apparent success of her father and the social acceptance that came with it. Her father had undergone his own personal rebellion in his youth. After experiencing an unhappy and disturbed childhood, Leslie Stephen did not intend to have a family. As a young man he had taken holy orders, as was required of those who lectured at Cambridge University. Later he suffered a crisis of faith, partly as a result of the profound influence of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution as set forth in his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). Woolf shared her father's unease with religiosity and developed a similar bias against professed Christianity. She had a curious sense of spirituality she was unable to define precisely, a belief in some transcendent spirit, but, like her father, she was cold to organized religion. Years later, despite her own moments of mysticism and spiritual desire of an unspecified kind, she was unhappy with her friend T. S. Eliot's conversion to the Anglican faith. (She was especially critical of Eliot's decision to live in a religious establishment.) Yet, in other ways, Woolf was quite different from her father, with his certainties about character-building and his focus on the practical and pragmatic. As Noël Annan notes in his Leslie Stephen: His Thought and Character in Relation to His Time (1951), Stephen had been one of the original group of Victorians involved in promoting “muscular Christianity,” an approach to moral education in which a sound body and a strong sense of Christian ethics were key elements.⁸ As Annan observes,

Like many of his contemporaries, Stephen worshipped “character” as a Kantian Thing-in-itself, and failed to understand that character, uninstructed by the intelligence or informed by the emotions, is liable to be exerted on the side of injustice and intolerance. Guts and open-heartedness without some knowledge of the world are not enough, and to believe that “manly and affectionate fellows” could “fight a good battle in the world” was to glorify willpower as an end, not a means, and to forget that education means opening, as well as training, the mind.⁹

Such concepts as “muscular Christianity” became anathema to Woolf, and she took issue with her father's suspicion of German philosophy and the Romantic movement in the arts. In her opposition to his dogmatism Woolf began to develop her concept of a more disordered and fluctuating world of chaotic emotions and sensations, ill-fitted to maintaining traditional concepts such as character. Unlike his daughter, Stephen believed that the quality of someone's personality could become fixed into a system and viewed as an objective fact. He thought one could judge people morally and, from an emotional center, instruct them in ways of believing and behaving. Critics agree that Woolf questioned this certitude, and in her writing she balances any notion of character with a concept of the elusiveness of experience, often expressed through her commitment to recording intelligence and emotional depth. She saw the world as variable and in flux. Her work exhibits the ideas of selfhood propounded by the American psychologist William James, a friend of her father. As Judith Ryan explains in The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism (1991), “James adopted what he was later to call a ‘pragmatist’ position: the self is a convenient, practical label which we attach to our ever-changing sense impressions.”¹⁰ Such constantly altering impressions recur in Woolf's writing. In one essay, “The Death of the Moth” (1942), she reflects on the puzzle of even the simplest expression of life, as if creating a counterbalance to the overarching ideas of human society:

[B]ecause he [the moth] was so small, and so simple a form of the energy that was rolling in at the open window and driving its way through so many narrow and intricate corridors in my own brain and in those of other human beings, there was something marvellous as well as pathetic about him. It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zigzagging to show us the true nature of life. Thus displayed one could not get over the strangeness of it. One is apt to forget all about life, seeing it humped and bossed and garnished and cumbered so that it has to move with the greatest circumspection and dignity. Again, the thought of all that life might have been had he been born in any other shape caused one to view his simple activities with a kind of pity.¹¹

Outwardly, like so many Victorians, Leslie Stephen often presented “the greatest circumspection and dignity” in his behavior, which Woolf parodied in various father figures in her fiction, from Mr. Hilbery in Night and Day to Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. Yet, much like Mr. Ramsay, Woolf's father suffered his own doubts as to his achievements; thus, he came to be uncertain about his treasured concept of “character.” In spite of his prominent status, Stephen's beliefs were defied or contradicted by the paradoxes of his own life. He had wished to be known as a philosopher and thinker. His work in the field of biography was monumental but, in a middle-class sphere, ultimately populist. Stephen's behavior was often disordered and confrontational. In the posthumously published Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings (1976), Woolf recalls hearing of her father's childhood fury from her “aunt” Anny Thackeray Ritchie (the sister of Stephen's first wife, Minny). Woolf comments on “[t]his temper that he could not control, and that, considering his worship of reason, his hatred of gush, of exaggeration, of all superlatives, seems inconsistent.”¹²

Stephen excused his violent temper on account of the Victorian concept of the genius, which he manipulated in domestic circles, but he often doubted whether he possessed this quality. He was physically healthy, but since, according to Woolf's account of her parents, her father was “Too much obsessed with his health, with his pleasures, she [Woolf's mother] was too willing, as I think now, to sacrifice us to him. It was thus that she left us the legacy of his dependence, which after her death became so harsh an imposition.”¹³ Thus, from childhood Woolf was confronted with a father who was never, after his Cambridge years, to recover his intellectual or personal composure. He was tied to an idealization of his and Julia's curious, embattled marriage, an idealization that drew all of the extended family into a closed world of uncertainty, emotional longing, and formal social constraint. In her father's self-doubts lies perhaps the origin of Woolf's challenge to Victorian reason and order. Perhaps she even learned from his example that dependency brought on by mental and physical stress drew the care and empathy of others. Woolf attempted to analyze and unpick these key relationships in both her diaries and her fiction.

Woolf appears to have realized from childhood that her father was uncertain of his achievements as a writer, critic, journalist, and editor. From 1882 to 1891 he edited the first twenty-six volumes of an important reference work, The Dictionary of National Biography (1885-1901), and wrote 378 biographical entries for it. He was also esteemed for his books, including History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876) and several full-length biographies. Stephen's feelings of uncertainty about his achievements were exacerbated because he came from a socially significant family with ties to the liberal tradition in English political thought, which advocated policies favoring the rising middle class, such as voting reform and free trade. As Annan explains, the Stephens, and therefore Woolf, emerged from an intellectual aristocracy centered around four families that were interconnected through marriage and friendship: the Trevelyans, the Macaulays, the Huxleys, and the Arnolds. Both the Macaulay and Stephen families had ties to the “Clapham Sect,” an early-nineteenth-century group of wealthy Anglican evangelicals who advocated social reform, including the abolition of slavery, and missionary work. Stephen's grandfather James Stephens had married a sister of William Wilberforce, a key member of the Clapham Sect, and was a friend of Spencer Perceval, the English prime minister from 1809 to 1812. (While still in office, Perceval was assassinated in the House of Commons and died in James Stephen's arms.)¹⁴

Woolf's family and its traditions remained a matter of importance and pride for her. In a diary entry of 12 July 1936 she mentions going to Stoke Newington, where her great-grandfather lived. She comments approvingly on his friendship with Wilberforce.¹⁵ Of her father's childhood Woolf writes in Moments of Being that “He was a little early Victorian boy, brought up in the intense narrow, evangelical yet political, highly intellectual yet completely unaesthetic, Stephen family, that had one foot in Clapham, the other in Downing Street.”¹⁶ Her response was to add her own aesthetic view to this intellectual background in a way that was quite different from her father's negation of the liberal tradition.

The very range of literary and cultural influences represented by the generation that preceded Woolf may explain her need to create a different model of intellectual and artistic practice. She synthesized a new manner of writing derived from her need for an aesthetic that could challenge comprehensively that of her Victorian forbears. Through her “aunt” Anny, a daughter of the famous novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, Woolf had access to firsthand information about many luminaries of Victorian culture. These included Charlotte Brontë, Frédéric Chopin, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, Algernon Charles Swinburne, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James. Similarly, through her father Woolf could cite William James, Hardy, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Coventry Patmore, and George Meredith as family connections.¹⁷ Her models in later life were often people with similar connections to her family. When, as an adolescent, Woolf tried to write in the manner of Hawthorne, she was aspiring to emulate a writer with whom her father had become acquainted on a visit to America in 1868, where he also met Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. As Woolf observes in Moments of Being, her mother had known Tennyson and the painters William Holman Hunt and Edward Burne-Jones; she had also danced with the Prince of Wales.

Even in merely literary terms, this web of family acquaintances offered remarkable examples of achievement and styles to copy or adapt. For Woolf it seems to have represented a kind of cultural oppression. Such oppression could prove stifling for members of the next generation, or it could inspire them to resistance and cultural revolution. Woolf drew on these tensions for themes and subject matter in her early, more conventional writing. At the beginning of Night and Day Katharine Hilbery shows a visitor, Ralph Denham, a room preserved as an artistic shrine to her grandfather, a famous poet. Denham's family lives in Highgate, north of London, as did the family of Lytton Strachey, a member of the Bloomsbury Group and the author of Eminent Victorians (1918). Strachey's book, a series of biographical portraits of famous Victorians such as Florence Nightingale, constituted an attack on Victorian self-aggrandizement, and in that same tradition of cultural skepticism Denham wonders about the burden of this Victorian heritage for the Hilberys. There are parallels to Woolf's own upbringing and the public celebrity of her family in Katharine's position in Night and Day:

“Isn't it difficult to live up to your ancestors?” he [Denham] proceeded.

“I dare say I shouldn't try to write poetry,” Katharine replied.

“No. And that's what I should hate. I couldn't bear my grandfather to cut me out. And, after all,” Denham went on, glancing round him satirically, as Katharine thought, “it's not your grandfather only. You're cut out all the way round. I suppose you come of one of the most distinguished families in England. There are the Warburtons and the Mannings—and you're related to the Otways, aren't you? I read it all in some magazine,” he added.¹⁸

The influence of the past and the challenge of living in the present unburdened by the weight of this past are major themes in the Night and Day. Woolf's own family connections were so extensive they might have appeared exaggerated if rendered faithfully in her novels, so these factors are pared down in her fiction. Yet, these Victorian stabilities were created, much like the Hilbery legend, which, as Woolf demonstrates, is a conscious fabrication.

Victorianism and its emergent “traditions” were partly fixed by Leslie Stephen in his biographical work, itself a series that represented an extension of his intellectual circle. If Woolf fought this practice, in his own way her father had felt eclipsed by his own forebears, who had been both well-connected and reform-minded, something that Woolf appeared to register in contesting her father's worldview. Dissent and debate were ingrained traditions in this broader “clan,” which Stephen resisted in his early years. Perhaps Woolf inherited this trait from her “aunt” Anny, who had followed in the novelistic footsteps of her famous father, Thackeray. Stephen felt Anny's writing talent was exaggerated. At the same time, he felt himself to be secondary among the luminaries with whom he was acquainted and never achieved the creative or intellectual prominence that his daughter attained.

After a brief courtship and romance Stephen had married Thackeray's other daughter, Minny, in 1867. The novelist Elizabeth Gaskell had predicted such a union with either one of the sisters after seeing him together with them. The thought of her parents in their different worlds at this point remained a strong image for Woolf. In Moments of Being she describes her mother, widowed after the death of Herbert Duckworth in 1870, paying a visit to the Stephens (Julia lived next door in Hyde Park): “One evening she called on the Leslie Stephens, [and] found them sitting over the fire together; a happily married pair, with one child in the nursery, and another to be born soon. She sat talking; and then went home, envying them their happiness and comparing it with her own loneliness. Next day Minny died suddenly. And about two years later she married the gaunt bearded widower.”¹⁹ Hence, Woolf's mother was neither Leslie Stephen's father's first wife nor his first love. Likewise, in terms of both marriage and passion, her father had not been her mother's first emotional commitment.

One legacy of Woolf's father's trips to the United States in 1863 and 1868 was that her godfather was the strongly puritanical James Russell Lowell. In Moments of Being she recalls the silver bracelets her mother wore, gifts from Lowell. Woolf also recalls her first narratives as a child, such as one set at Talland House, a vacation retreat in St. Ives, Cornwall, that her father had bought in 1882, the year she was born: “the Talland House garden story about Beccage and Hollywinks; spirits of evil who lived on the rubbish heap; and disappeared through a hole in the escollonia hedge—as I remember telling my mother and Mr Lowell.”²⁰

Clearly, the point one can draw from all of these coordinates that formed her upbringing is that Woolf's early life was no ordinary one, even in a middle-class sense. She lived in an aristocratically well-connected, politically active and intellectually informed household that maintained a mixture of reserve and creative or intellectual ambition. It was not a harmonious environment. Like her sister, Vanessa, Woolf remembers a mixture of tension, intellectual challenge, austerity, and control. Even her mother was austere at times, some argue even more so than her father. Woolf tried hard to please her elders. She was garrulous and drawn to entertaining them with tales. Her life was dominated both by her father's formality of thought and his struggle to compete intellectually with his peers, who were often his creative or intellectual superiors. This is the underlying scenario for To the Lighthouse. Given this context, it is worth repeating that Woolf's reputation was not firmly established at the level of her own expectations until she was past forty, for up until that point she had written mainly reviews and only one novel of any real significance, the first two being conventional and unspectacular in their effect upon both critics and public. Both father and daughter were overly sensitive to notions of failure. Both suffered from a fear of obscurity, and many of Vanessa's comments reflect Woolf's closeness with their father. Generally, in family circles Stephen attacked anyone who opposed the concepts and notions he expressed. He was as generally insensitive, egotistical, and tyrannical as Woolf indicates in Moments of Being. Like so many people who browbeat their children, a great deal of this behavior stemmed from the insecurities of character that Woolf was to explore in her fiction. Her upbringing and her memories mattered to her as a passionate evocation of her being.

Woolf was very much the product of her complicated and often conflictual family background. Leslie Stephen's first wife, Minny, had given birth to a daughter, Laura, in December 1870. She turned out to be what was labeled in Victorian terms an “imbecile.” Whatever the real cause, clearly Laura suffered extreme learning difficulties and bouts of violent behavior. This was simply one of many disruptive and significant factors in Woolf's childhood. In 1875, after Minny's death, the distraught Stephen became increasingly dependent upon both of his next-door neighbors, the widowed Julia Duckworth and his sister-in-law, Anny. In this same year Anny, as Miss Thackeray, published her historical novel Miss Angel. It is the story of a female painter whose fate can be compared to the central narrative strand of To the Lighthouse, which concerns the efforts of artist Lily Briscoe. Anny's book was dedicated to Woolf's mother. Once he was married to Julia, the jobbing journalist Stephen was likely to find her praise of Anny's novel to be irritating. He and Julia seemed an unlikely match. She had been a renowned beauty since her youth and served as the model for Mary in Burne-Jones's painting The Annunciation (1879). In fact, her preoccupation was caring for the sick and disadvantaged. This inclination was so pronounced that she neglected her own children, wearing out her own energy and health in the process.

As Julia's relationship with her future husband deepened, she became involved in Laura's care. She advised Stephen during their protracted courtship. Despite his later irritation at Julia's philanthropy, involving her in Laura's affliction may have been part of his strategy to woo the widow. He knew how to exploit Julia's passion for caring for the unfortunate and sick, parading in letters his own physical and mental anguish, especially concerning his daughter. In summer 1877 he wrote from Coniston in the Lake District, “The chief sufferer is my poor little Laura. She seems indeed to be unconscious of her misfortunes and is very happy and (sometimes) very naughty—just now, for example, over her letters (Lord! How I hate those letters!) but she amuses herself with ‘benting’ as she calls it, meaning painting. … I have no doubt that Laura will be a worry to me as long as she and I both live.”²¹

The second marriage for both of Woolf's parents was a troubled one in terms of childcare; there were also arguments regarding Anny, and Stephen was jealous of the time spent by Julia on good deeds. Laura's presence above all is significant in locating Woolf's fear concerning her own madness, her behavior, and its possible outcomes. After the marriage, periodic disturbances erupted from Laura. She exhibited extremely disturbed behavior that must have been an intermittent feature of Woolf's early childhood. Finally, the decision was made to institutionalize the nineteen-year-old Laura in the summer of 1889, which was to be a permanent arrangement. As an exceptionally bright seven-year-old, Woolf must have been aware of the emotional turmoil and social trauma of this chain of events. Neglected by her family, and hardly alluded to in Woolf's writing, Laura outlived Woolf. She died in 1945 in an asylum.

Even before Julia's premature death in 1895, Stephen wrote of himself in a letter to his American friend Charles Eliot Norton that “I am becoming an old fogey.”²² Somehow, one is drawn irresistibly to the conclusion that this indicates part of the atmosphere that permeated Woolf's early life. As Jane Marcus says,

Leslie Stephen was thin-skinned and highly sensitive about masculinity. Insecure himself, he pushed his body to the limits of its endurance in mountaineering expeditions and then collapsed with real and fancied illness into the arms of a series of women to be nursed back to physical and mental health. He was obsessed with the idea of chastity in women; the names of his daughters are testimony to his dependence on male literary images of virginity from Dante to Swift to Lowell. His objections to Hardy's sexual women are well known, as is his formation of the taste of an age of readers of the Cornhill by the choice and direction of the writing of lady novelists whom he championed as fit for female readers and despised at his ease among men.²³

Clearly, the events of Woolf's early life were at the forefront of her mind with the effort of completing The Years, a novel charting a family progressing beyond the Victorian period. On 4 May 1937 she wrote in her diary recollecting that the day coincided with her mother's death in 1895, an event she was able to recall in great detail:

The day my mother died in 1895—that['s] … 42 years ago: & I remember it—at the moment, watching Dr Seton walk away up Hyde Park Gate in the early morning with his head bowed, his hands behind his back. Also the doves swooping. We had been sent up to the day nursery after she died; & were crying. And I went to the open window & looked out. It must have been very soon after she died, as Seton was then leaving the house. How that early morning picture has stayed with me! What happened immediately afterwards I cant remember.²⁴

Her mother's death had been a traumatic event. Woolf had problems in responding appropriately, drawn to laughter by her perception that one of the servants was insincere in her grief. She found the deathbed display of the deceased woman troubling. The sudden death of Mrs. Ramsay and her husband's anguish in To the Lighthouse are modeled on these events in Woolf's early teens, reflecting her shock at her mother's death. The setting of the novel is based closely on the Stephen holiday home that she loved so much in her childhood, Talland House, close to the Godrevy lighthouse. Her mother's death was followed by Woolf's first nervous breakdown, and subsequently she suffered bouts of depression and psychosis throughout her life. These experiences permeate her fiction, such as the graphic descriptions of Septimus Smith's psychoses in Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf feared her own mental condition intensely because of both Laura and the family propensity toward insanity.

Woolf's relationship with her father was not entirely a negative one. We know that he allowed her the run of his library without censure or prohibition, including the explicit works of the eighteenth-century novelists. Woolf recalls this liberality with affection in an essay published in The Captain's Death Bed and Other Essays (1950):

Even today there may be parents who would doubt the wisdom of allowing a girl of fifteen the free run of a large and quite unexpurgated library. But my father allowed it. There were certain facts—very briefly, very shyly he referred to them. Yet “Read what you like,” he said, and all his books, “mangy and worthless” as he called them, but certainly they were many and various, were to be had without asking. To read what one liked because one liked it, never to pretend to admire what one did not—that was his only lesson in the art of reading. To write in the fewest possible words, as clearly as possible, exactly what one meant—that was his only lesson in the art of writing. All the rest must be learnt for oneself.²⁵

Given this context of free access and personal choice for his daughter, one letter from Stephen to Norton in 1897 may be instructive, given that Woolf was by this time helping her father in his writing and research: “Of other books, I have got on my table William James' new essays [The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)]. He is the one really lively philosopher; but I'm afraid that he is trying the old dodge of twisting ‘faith’ out of moonshine. Well, I always like him, though I have not had time to read him.”²⁶ The Stephen family's attention might well have been drawn to James's text. James, citing Stephen's 1895 biography of his brother Fitzjames Stephen, repeats Stephen's recollection of an incident in which a tutor demanded of Fitzjames that he should prove God's omnipotence. In a prosaic review of James's work in The Agnostic Annual (1898), Stephen responded by refuting James's attack on objective certitude. In contrast to Stephen's skepticism about both God and James's work, there is much of James's challenge of simplistic realities in Woolf's notion of the world. In her writing is found elements of James's observation that “[t]he negative, the alogical, is never wholly banished” and his notion of life as change where “[t]he transitions are abrupt, absolute, truly shot out of a pistol; for while many possibilities are called, the few that are chosen are chosen in all their sudden completeness.”²⁷ Perhaps Woolf shared and integrated much more of this indeterminacy, “‘faith’ out of moonshine,” than her father could ever comprehend or accept. Not only is Stephen mentioned in James's book, but in a far more damning way he features in his daughter's work. His philosophical ambitions and severe limitations are inscribed as those of Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, reminding the whole world of his failure in comparison to the very contemporaries, such as James, that he was inclined to dismiss. More than this, Woolf's use of all of these elements in her fiction shows how acutely she observed her family and her father in particular.

Death, family, and intimacy were not merely fictional themes in Woolf. These issues were drawn from significant events in her own life. A series of traumas, including her mother's death, affected her state of mind and the emotional vocabulary upon which she drew in her writing. In 1892, Woolf's cousin and a former tutor to the royal prince, James Kenneth Stephen, died during his incarceration in a mental asylum. As a child she had seen his manic behavior played out at Hyde Park Gate, his condition becoming so dangerous that he was barred from visiting. In childhood Woolf accompanied her mother on charitable and philanthropic visits to working-class families, encountering some extreme examples of the poverty, deprivation, and suffering of late-Victorian culture. Later, in 1936, her sister, Vanessa, lost her son Julian when he was killed while driving an ambulance in the Spanish Civil War. The bereavement over Julian evoked in Woolf an image of her father in his old age and the memory of her brother Thoby, who died in 1907 of typhoid fever caught during a holiday in Greece with his brother and sisters. In her diary, Woolf noted of Vanessa,

[N]ow & then she looks an old woman. She reminds me of father taking Thoby's arm: so she asks Q. [Quentin, Vanessa's other son] to help her. How can she ever right herself though? Julian had some queer power over her—the lover as well as the son. He told her he could never love another woman as he loved her. He was like her; yet had a vigour, a roughness, & then as a child, how much she cared for him. I mean, he needed comfort & sympathy more I think than the others, was less adapted to get on in the world—had a kind of clumsiness, of Cambridge awkwardness, together with his natural gaiety. And thats all lost for the sake of 10 minutes in an ambulance.²⁸

Death had different effects upon the family members, as in Woolf's novels. At times Leslie Stephen, especially after the deaths of his first and second wives, demonstrated a reclusive tendency and distinct signs of depressive disorders. Woolf was increasingly to suffer from the latter characteristic as her friends died in the 1930s. Despite his articulation of his own pain, Stephen offered little empathy for the suffering or needs of others. He remained utterly conventional in a Victorian sense. He neglected his daughters' formal education, although some critics insist that this was primarily in response to their mother's objections. In this context it is significant that Julia Stephen also strongly opposed women's suffrage. He disapproved violently of Anny's marriage in 1877 to Richmond Ritchie (later Lord Ritchie), a distant cousin seventeen years her junior. Stephen could be urbane, flirtatious, and almost charismatic among his friends; as Woolf notes in Moments of Being, “There was a Leslie Stephen who played his part normally, without any oddity or outburst, in drawing rooms and dining rooms and committees.”²⁹ Yet, toward the end of his life, in his second bereavement, “it was the tyrant father—the exacting, the violent, the histrionic, the demonstrative, the self-centred, the self pitying, the deaf, the appealing, the alternatively loved and hated father—that dominated me then. It was like being shut up in a cage with a wild beast.”³⁰

After losing his second wife in 1895, Stephen threw a tantrum when Stella Duckworth, his stepdaughter, who acted as the family housekeeper, announced her plans to marry Jack Hills. Woolf watched helplessly as Stella died shortly after her marriage to Hills in 1897. Woolf and Vanessa had been forced to chaperone the couple on a seaside visit shortly before the marriage; later in life Woolf was disturbed by thoughts that Stella might have conceived during the trip and died from complications of pregnancy. Shirley Panken speculates that this experience confirmed in Woolf “a morbid connection of marriage and sexuality with injury, suffering and death.”³¹ Subsequently, Vanessa had an affair with Stella's widowed husband, Jack. Led by George Duckworth, most of the family disapproved, even Woolf. Her closeness to her sister was strained. Woolf's reaction was as much due to jealousy and a fear of losing her crucial intimacy with Vanessa as it was motivated by any moral view. Later, at the time of Jack's death in January 1939, Woolf noted in her diary that her father, faced with situations like this illicit romance, could become almost detached and aloof after his initial anger: “Then the long interviews with Nessa; her love; the row with George. ‘Are you going to get married?’—how he burst in on me & rather brutally told me his suspicion; asked me to speak to her—to warn her. I remember her dignified reproach—‘You too?’. And father's sense. ‘If she wants to I wont interfere.’”³²

Beneath the surface of order and regularity of the Stephen household lay a story of human tragedies and abuse. Years later, Woolf was to recall incestuous advances from both her half brothers, what she called their “malefactions.” In Moments of Being she recounts,

There was a slab outside the dining room for standing dishes upon. Once when I was very small Gerald Duckworth lifted me onto this, and as I sat began to explore my body. I can remember the feel of his hand going under my clothes; going firmly and steadily lower and lower. I remember how I hoped that he would stop; how I stiffened and wriggled as his hand approached my private parts too. I remember resenting, disliking it—what is the word for so dumb and mixed a feeling.³³

Gerald's brother, George, even perverted the family's time of bereavement. Twenty-seven at the time of his mother's death, George began abusing the thirteen-year-old Woolf at night in secret, a practice continued for many years. Throughout her life, Woolf both resented and felt disoriented by these experiences. She referred to them repeatedly. Her later sexual libido appears to have been repressed, and she was left with a general timidity toward or even repugnance at the idea of penetrative sex. Many commentators regard these traumas as key factors in her suspicion of sexuality of any kind during adulthood and perceive in these experiences likely contributory causes for the depressive illnesses that continued to plague her.

Against the backdrop of her father's playing out what Mepham describes as Victorian melodrama and control, this sexual abuse created a subtext to Woolf's strangely divided and maladjusted life:

Upstairs, George was a sexual hog, wallowing in his emotional excess (“Kiss me, kiss me, you beloved,” he would cry), while downstairs he was the very model of social decorum, pursuing his lazy career as a courtier and snob. Up in the study Leslie was a cool, radical sceptic, reasoning his way through the intricacies of utilitarian theory and quietly supporting Virginia's efforts to educate herself among his books. But down stairs, when Julia died, he would act out his melodramatically inflated grief. He would outrage his daughters by his displays of anger over the weekly accounts. Yet at other times, at tea with visitors, he would be charming and liked to flirt with women. Virginia was forced to play many parts—a hostess, a debutante, a nurse, a student.³⁴

Woolf stresses that during the period after her mother's death, she and Vanessa were “exposed” to their father as a “strange character.” Until her forties and the writing of To the Lighthouse, Woolf's mother obsessed her. She heard her mother's voice daily, as if she were being literally addressed.

It is against this oppressive scenario of family obsessions that the Bloomsbury Group emerged. Soon afterward, Woolf created her own distinctive modernist style. Both revoked the everyday and ideological aspects of the past in cultural and creative terms. Leslie Stephen's death from cancer in February 1904 precipitated the breakup of the extended family. Woolf attempted suicide, throwing herself from a second-story window. Nevertheless, she believed his death allowed the real beginning of her own existence, permitting a move toward independence. His legacy (£15,000) meant Woolf needed neither employment nor marriage (the chief option for women of her age) in any pressing manner. Initially, she found herself recuperating in Burnham Wood with a friend, Violet Dickinson. Dickinson nursed Woolf through the major breakdown she suffered. She heard obscenities from mad King George III skulking in the shrubbery and birds communicating to her in Greek (experiences she drew upon in sketching out Septimus Smith's madness in Mrs. Dalloway). Yet, according to S. P. Rosenbaum, the change was positive: “During those early Bloomsbury years, Woolf derived as much from this friendship [with Dickinson] as from those daring Thursday evening conversations, finding still in their ‘league together’ sources of her feelings about herself and her ambitions. It was in the heat of this affection that Woolf kindled so many of her ideas about people, art and politics.”³⁵ This female influence and emancipation was essential to Woolf's artistic identity. In her novels she moved from a period when “tea-table training”³⁶ was the norm, from a social scene where women were expected to say and contribute little, to a more fluid and constructive social patter. Increasingly, gender came to matter for Woolf.

After this initial recovery, Woolf harbored an irrational and violent hostility toward Vanessa. Thus, Woolf stayed in Cambridge with her father's sister, Caroline Stephen, who was unmarried and an influential Quaker writer. She was the basis for the character Eleanor Pargiter in The Years. Here Woolf seems to have mediated her skepticism and found a spirituality of an undefinable kind that led her to believe in some sense of a transcendent spirit. This was something she kept private even from her husband. While with her aunt, Woolf wrote a memoir of her father for his biographer, F. W. Maitland. This was her first published writing. In preparation, she reviewed the correspondence between her parents during their courtship, unraveling the complex interactions that lay beneath the middle-class surface of their lives.

Meanwhile, the Stephen household moved away from Hyde Park Gate to 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, then a run-down district. This transition initiated the Thursday evening meetings that inscribed a new literary and intellectual set into the cultural history of the period. Bloomsbury refers simply to the triangular area of London roughly situated between the major northern stations of Marylebone, Euston, and King's Cross and, to the south of them, the British Museum (and the former British Library). Here, a group of young graduates and intellectuals—based initially around the young Cambridge graduates who were friends of Thoby Stephen—met regularly on Thursday evenings. Together with the Stephen sisters, Virginia and Vanessa, they discussed matters of aesthetics, beauty, and sexuality. Woolf has become linked inextricably with the development of this so-called Bloomsbury Group (sometimes referred to as the Bloomsbury Set), which is considered an avant-garde artistic movement or coterie. The first great events that drew public attention to the group were a Postimpressionist art exhibition organized by Roger Fry in the Grafton Galleries and the publication in 1918 of Strachey's Eminent Victorians. The first challenged artistic conservatism. The second debunks the cult of personality and moral genius that underpinned the previous age.

Woolf became more confident and animated during this time. She could be caustic both with her wit and comments, a characteristic that she retained throughout her life. She loved indulging in gossip. Woolf reveled in the bohemian area of Bloomsbury and the freedom their new living arrangements offered, experimenting with different, more fluid meal times, less-formal furnishings, and a reduced focus on such conventions as dressing for dinner. Already, Bloomsbury was an area with a number of artistic connections. There was the Slade School of Art. The painter Walter Sickert had rooms and a studio in Fitzroy Square. The novelist Dorothy Richardson lived in rooms in Woburn Place across from those of William Butler Yeats. Certainly, this milieu appears to have influenced Woolf in her determination to write. It supplied sources for many of her characters, settings, and ideas. However, as some critics point out, despite their creative energies and support, many members of the Bloomsbury Group were capable of exhibiting a rampant antifeminism. The other members of this circle seem less important to present-day readers. After describing Woolf's fiction as a type of forerunner to the later chiefly French nouveau roman—an experimental phase of the novel challenging conventional character and structures—Bernard Bergonzi concludes that “Virginia Woolf is the one Bloomsbury figure who now looks like a major modern writer. …”³⁷

The move of the Stephens did not represent any complete severance with their upbringing and their past, however traumatic they may have been. In their new home they marked the occasion with a lavish dress party for family and friends, serving lobster and champagne. Nonetheless, they were young people pursuing their own new lifestyles. At Thoby's “at home” Thursday evenings the debates over beauty, art, meaning, and a more open sexuality would have shocked their upper middle-class parents. The effect and brilliance of this conversation can be exaggerated, for, as Woolf herself comments in Walter Sickert: A Conversation (1934), “Though talk is a common habit and much enjoyed, those who try to record it are aware that it runs hither and thither, seldom sticks to the point, abounds in exaggeration and inaccuracy, and has frequent stretches of extreme dullness.”³⁸ By all accounts, Bloomsbury did have its scintillating moments. It helped shape opinion in the arts and beyond. Significantly, it was after this initial period and before her marriage that Woolf read Principa Ethica (1903), a philosophical work by G. E. Moore, who taught some of the Bloomsbury men at Cambridge. Woolf was not impressed, finding the book unpalatable. Recently, many critics have said that Leonard Woolf was simply inaccurate in citing Moore's book as a major influence on his wife or her writing and in fact was voicing his own perceptions of Bloomsbury.

In early 1905 Virginia Woof was offered the chance to review books for The Times Literary Supplement, a journal owned by a family friend, Leo Maxse. She also worked occasionally as a part-time teacher at Morley College, an adult evening institute where she was to meet the types characterized in the character Septimus Smith. In this period Woolf traveled to most of the locations of her future work, in summer 1905 spending two months with her siblings in the Cornwall areas remembered from childhood. Vanessa launched a Friday Club in October of that year to discuss fine art, and that same month the Stephens journeyed through the Continent to Greece and Turkey. Just like one of his fictional counterparts, the protagonist of Woolf's third novel, Jacob's Room (1922), Thoby died after this trip, on 20 November 1906. He suffered from initially undiagnosed typhoid, like their traveling companion Dickinson, who recovered.

Vanessa agreed to marry Clive Bell, which was a shock to Woolf and the cause of the rivalry described in The Voyage Out. After Vanessa's wedding in February 1907, Woolf moved with her surviving brother, Adrian, the model for James Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, to Fitzroy Square, near the Regent's Park setting of Mrs. Dalloway. The Bloomsbury gatherings continued intermittently.

After this period of independent living, early Bloomsbury, traveling, and journalism, Virginia married Leonard Woolf in 1912. He had attended Cambridge with Thoby and had been part of the Stephens' set before taking up a post as a colonial administrator in Ceylon. Almost immediately, Virginia suffered a massive and violent breakdown. She had to be nursed and guarded constantly during a period that lasted several years. She was obscene, delusional, dangerously aggressive, and estranged from all those around her. It was feared at several points that she might be incarcerated permanently. The experience of these years, the prior example of Laura, and the depressive nature of so many in her family conspired to leave Virginia Woolf ever after fearful of any such episodes. Together with Leonard, she monitored her stresses, headaches, tensions, and moods with the sense of someone aware that she might experience an uncontrollable episode from which she might never recover. Her diaries are full of such reflections and fears.

Despite the breakdown that followed her marriage to Leonard and the traumatic completion of her first novel, published in 1915 as The Voyage Out, eventually the making of the shared household gave Woolf a level of stability of sorts. The couple decided not to have children because of her mental condition and the medical advice they received (although some critics claim that Leonard manipulated this situation to his own ends). This decision caused Virginia Woolf a great deal of anguish. She remained jealous of Vanessa's relationship with her children, offsetting this by calculating her relatively more-successful financial rewards, and pondering in her diary in poignant fashion the children she might have had. Certainly, Leonard shepherded his wife's writing and her health. He became notorious for fussing over her. Certain friends regarded Leonard as overly controlling in this supervision, but he was seen by others as his wife's savior. This reflects roughly the division of critical response to this notable and yet curious relationship. Certainly Woolf appears to have derived a sense of an emotional safety net from her husband's interventions. She seems rarely to have resented his schedules, restraints, or reminders. Whatever the truth, which remains difficult to recover, Leonard was a pivotal figure in her life, and she was dependent on him. Virginia Woolf had a tendency to create relationships that were almost infantile (a characteristic she shared with Katherine Mansfield). In this she was indulged by those closest to her. This may have resulted from a combination of the early loss of her mother and the sexual abuse that stunted the growth of her adult desires and libido.

On her recovery, Woolf survived the bombings of World War I chronicled in The Years and continued to write with greater confidence (not something she felt consistently). Gradually influenced by her reading of numerous writers from Dickens to Joyce and by the example of other women writers, such as Dorothy Richardson (about whose work she was ambivalent), she responded to the challenge of modernist ideas. In so doing she gradually found her own influential voice. An essential part of Leonard's help and influence was his part in jointly establishing the Hogarth Press in Richmond. In 1917 the couple bought a small press, tools, and type, initially as a therapeutic task for Virginia. Within a year, after printing copies of individual stories, they produced 170 copies of Kew Gardens, Woolf's first fully modernist piece, with its impressionistic switch of narrative viewpoints. They next published Mansfield's Prelude, also in 1918. By 1919 the Woolfs had published Eliot's Poems and a story by E. M. Forster. As the press developed, so did Virginia's writing. Owning her own publishing house enabled her to forge closer friendships with a range of modernist writers, including Mansfield and Eliot. However, she had no room for those merely wishing to write without either vision or talent. Woolf was always harsh in her view of other writers, admitting in her diaries her jealousy of some. This applied to Mansfield in particular. In Night and Day the portrayal of Mr. Rodney's aspirations to write demonstrate that Woolf rejected aesthetic and social aspirations based on a quasi-Victorian view of the arts as precious and divine. Rodney is described in the narrative as he reads his paper:

By profession a clerk in a Government office, he was one of those martyred spirits to whom literature is at once a source of divine joy and of almost intolerable irritation. Not content to rest in their love of it, they must attempt to practise it themselves, and they are generally endowed with very little facility in composition. They condemn whatever they produce. Moreover, the violence of their feelings is such that they seldom meet with adequate sympathy, and being rendered very sensitive by their cultivated perceptions, suffer constant slights both to their own persons and to the thing they worship.³⁹

The sale of Woolf's books increased. Bloomsbury became a cultural reference point and was covered by the press throughout the world. By the middle of the 1920s Woolf was a public figure in her own right. She became wealthy. The Woolfs traveled extensively through the Continent, England, and Ireland over the years until World War II. During this period Virginia maintained a high level of privacy and resisted the award of nearly all honors. She developed several close relationships with women later in life. She had a physical passion for the aristocratic lesbian writer Vita Sackville-West, whom she met through the Hogarth Press. Typically, Woolf was periodically jealous because of Vita's far greater success. Later, Woolf had an intense friendship with the composer and former suffragette Ethel Sands. This relationship proved stormy and at times even debilitating. Woolf appears to have found it difficult to balance the demands of friendship and to keep such intimacies at an agreed-upon level. She wrote almost daily, apart from times of illness, and spent most of her adult life committed to writing journalism, reviews, and fiction. Her diaries chart her existence by recording creative ideas and social engagements, as well as a few public events, such as her lecture to the women scholars of Cambridge. Woolf described in detail the various processes of the writing and publishing of her books.

Later in life, the apparently apolitical Woolf often attended Labour Party conferences because of her husband's political affiliations and activities. She argued with him over the General Strike of 1926, not being as enthusiastic as he for the cause of the trade unions. However, from 1931 she showed a greater awareness in her diary entries of the deteriorating international situation. Often she was disturbed and bemused by developments. Throughout 1934 she was perturbed by the German influence in Austria, and she reflected on the growing political involvement of members of the younger generation, including her nephew Julian Bell. Woolf was beginning to feel out of touch, doubting her idea of an art form that could resolve issues by heightening aesthetic perception and debate. Bloomsbury came under increasing attack for elitism or simply for being out of touch.

In April 1935 the Woolfs were visited by an official from the Foreign Office, who advised them on their intended trip to Germany. Somewhat improbably, during a drive through Bonn the Woolfs were caught up in front of a procession for Hermann Goering. They were cheered by the crowds as Virginia raised a mock Nazi salute. They encountered banners bearing sentiments such as “The Jew is our enemy.” In her diary Virginia described how she and Leonard, himself a Jew, became angry at the docility and stupidity of the masses. This bafflement and frustration returned to Woolf in her remaining years as she watched the deteriorating world situation. With horror, having seen London bombed twenty years earlier, she knew that England was headed for war. She had inside information from such influential friends as John Maynard Keynes and was aware of the aggression of Adolf Hitler from friends who had observed him on diplomatic visits to Berlin. When war broke out, she knew that both she and Leonard would be on any Nazi list of subversives if invasion came. This seemed increasingly likely with the military action around Rodmell, Sussex, the site of Monk's House, a country retreat the Woolfs had bought in 1919.

Trying to place her emotions in a creative context, Woolf wrote a draft of Between the Acts, which was to be her final novel, published posthumously in 1941. But she felt it inadequate to the general situation with the continuation of the war. Despite this retreat to writing, a practice that had sustained her through earlier attacks, Woolf felt depression and breakdown coming on. This episode felt worse than any she had previously suffered and indicated the likelihood of permanent hospitalization. Laura was still incarcerated and Woolf may have been unconsciously reminded of her half sister's fate. On 28 March 1941 Woolf drowned herself, after a failed attempt at suicide the previous week, by filling her raincoat pockets with heavy stones and immersing herself in a flooded river close to her home. Her body was found days later.

Leonard was left alone. His role has come under greater scrutiny and caused controversy. Yet, despite her love affair with Sackville-West, Virginia exhibited both a curious joy and dependency in her relationship with her husband. Developing the Hogarth Press did not hamper her work; since they used their country as well as city home as a retreat, Leonard was able to monitor her levels of stress and activity closely. Together they managed to create an environment that was suited to writing and its demands. Writing and her Bloomsbury friends formed the greater part of Virginia Woolf's life. On an emotional level, she stayed close to Vanessa and was thoroughly satisfied with Leonard as an apparently asexual partner. In October 1937, twenty-five years after their marriage, she made the following remarks in her diary, during the period when she was attempting to console Vanessa over the loss of Julian: “Waking at 3 I decided I would spend the weekend in Paris. Got so far as looking up trains, consulting Nessa about hotel. Then L. [Leonard] said he wd. rather not. Then I was overcome with happiness. Then we walked round the square love making—after 25 years cant bear to be separate. Then I walked round the Lake in Regents Park. Then … you see it is an enormous pleasure, being wanted: a wife. And our marriage so complete.”⁴⁰ For some biographers and critics, Leonard has become the villain of the piece, but clearly, despite the disagreements Virginia recorded in her diaries, she found her own kind of love and contentment in their relationship.

AWARDS AND RECOGNITION

Woolf was considered a significant author by other writers of her period, if a little difficult to place. Internationally, her works were recognized as significant during her lifetime by literary critics, with studies published by academics and enthusiasts in the United States, France, Argentina, Germany, Italy, and elsewhere long before her death. In France in 1928, Woolf was awarded the only public or literary honor that she accepted, the Vie Hereuse Prize for To the Lighthouse. In part, her blanket rejection of other awards arose from the fact that she avoided public recognition, particularly from universities and official institutions. In February 1932 Woolf wrote in her diary of receiving an offer by letter from the master of Trinity College, Cambridge University, to deliver the six Clark Lectures, which had been given for the very first time by her father in 1883. She declined the offer. In a March 1939 diary entry she recorded having earlier turned down a doctorate from Liverpool University and awards from Manchester University.⁴¹

Notes

1. Rosamond Lehmann, in Recollections of Virginia Woolf, edited by Joan Russell Noble (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1975), p. 81.

2. Herbert Marder, Feminism & Art: A Study of Virginia Woolf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 31.

3. Virginia Woolf, “Leslie Stephen” (1932), in Collected Essays, volume 4 (London: Hogarth Press, 1967), p. 79.

4. John Mepham, Virginia Woolf: A Literary Life (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991), p. 39.

5. Louise A. DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work (New York: Ballantine, 1989), pp. 239, 347. DeSalvo argues cogently that Woolf's life and her fiction were shaped by the experiences of her childhood. DeSalvo maintains, for instance, that Leslie Stephen's great influence on the people he knew constituted a sort of challenge for Woolf, who felt she needed to be equally influential as a woman.

6. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne Olivier Bell, volume 5 (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1985), p. 205.

7. DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf, pp. 116, 117. As DeSalvo points out, much of Woolf's social interactions as a child would have been with the household servants.

8. Noël Annan, Leslie Stephen: His Thought and Character in Relation to His Time (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1951), pp. 29ff.

9. Ibid., p. 39.

10. Judith Ryan, The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 13-14.

11. Woolf, “The Death of the Moth” (1942), in Collected Essays, volume 1 (London: Hogarth Press, 1966), p. 360.

12. Woolf, Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, edited by Jeanne Schulkind, second edition (London: Hogarth Press, 1985), p. 109.

13. Ibid., p. 133.

14. Annan, Leslie Stephen, pp. 3-5.

15. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 5, p. 102.

16. Woolf, Moments of Being, p. 108.

17. Many other Victorian notables can be added to these lists, including John Ruskin, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Thomas Henry Huxley, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Edmund Gosse. The significance for Woolf is that she either encountered or heard firsthand accounts of such great writers and thinkers throughout her life. These connections sometimes intimidated her as a writer but were also useful since they helped her to be taken seriously once her works began to be published.

18. Woolf, Night and Day, edited by Julia Briggs (New York & London: Penguin, 1992), p. 10.

19. Woolf, Moments of Being, p. 91.

20. Ibid., pp. 76-77.

21. Sir Leslie Stephen, quoted in Mitchell Leaska, Granite and Rainbow: The Hidden Life of Virginia Woolf (London: Picador, 2000), p. 30.

22. Stephen to Charles Eliot Norton, 19 March 1894, in F. W. Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (London: Duckworth, 1906), p. 418.

23. Jane Marcus, introduction to New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf, edited by Marcus (London: Macmillan, 1981), p. xviii.

24. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 5, p. 85.

25. Woolf, The Captain's Death Bed and Other Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1950), pp. 74-75.

26. Stephen to Norton, 9 April 1897, in Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen, p. 445.

27. William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (London: Longmans, Green, 1897), pp. viii, 269.

28. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 5, p. 108.

29. Woolf, Moments of Being, p. 114.

30. Ibid., p. 116.

31. Shirley Panken, Virginia Woolf and the “Lust of Creation”: A Psychoanalytic Exploration (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), p. 40.

32. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 5, p. 198.

33. Woolf, Moments of Being, p. 69.

34. Mepham, Virginia Woolf, p. 4.

35. S. P. Rosenbaum, Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press (Austin: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center/University of Texas at Austin, 1995), p. 40.

36. Ibid., p. 4.

37. Bernard Bergonzi, The Myth of Modernism and Twentieth Century Literature (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), p. 8.

38. Woolf, Walter Sickert: A Conversation (London: The Hogarth Press, 1934), p. 5.

39. Woolf, Night and Day, p. 44.

40. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 5, p. 115.

41. Ibid., p. 206.