Women and Writing Virginia Woolf

Family origin

Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on 25 January 1882 at 22 Hyde Park Gate in South Kensington, London,[3] to Julia (née Jackson) and Sir Leslie Stephen. Her father was a writer, historian, essayist, biographer, and mountaineer.[3] She was named after her mother's eldest sister Adeline Maria Jackson[4] and her mother's aunt Virginia Pattle. Because of her aunt Adeline's death the year before Adeline Virginia's birth, the family never used her first name.

The Jacksons were a well-educated, literary and artistic proconsular middle-class family.[5][6] Their side of the family contained Julia Margaret Cameron, a celebrated photographer, and Lady Henry Somerset, a campaigner for women's rights.

In 1867 Julia had married her first husband Herbert Duckworth, a barrister,[7] but within three years she was left a widow with three infant children:[8] George, Stella, and Gerald.

Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen, was born in 1832 in South Kensington to Sir James and Lady Jane Catherine Stephen (née Venn), daughter of John Venn, rector of Clapham. The Venns were the centre of the evangelical Clapham Sect. Sir James Stephen was the under secretary at the Colonial Office, and with another Clapham member, William Wilberforce, was responsible for the passage of the Slavery Abolition Bill in 1833.[3][10]

As a family of educators, lawyers, and writers, the Stephens represented the elite intellectual aristocracy. A graduate and fellow of Cambridge University, Leslie renounced his faith and position to move to London where he became a notable man of letters.[11] He was described as a "gaunt figure with a ragged red brown beard...a formidable man."[b][12]

In 1867 he wed Harriet Marian ("Minny") Thackeray, youngest daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray. They had a daughter, Laura,[13] but Harriet subsequently died in childbirth in 1875. Laura was born prematurely at 30 weeks, and was developmentally disabled, eventually being institutionalised.[14][15]

The widowed Julia Duckworth knew Leslie Stephen through her friendship with Minny's elder sister Anne (Anny) Isabella Ritchie and had taken interest in his agnostic writings. Both were preoccupied with mourning, and they formed a close friendship and intense correspondence.[c][16][17] Leslie proposed to Julia in 1877, and they were married on 26 March, 1878. Julia was 32 and Leslie was 46.[18] They had four children together: Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, and Adrian.

22 Hyde Park Gate (1882–1904)

1882–1895

Virginia Woolf was born at 22 Hyde Park Gate and lived there until her father's death in 1904.[19][d] She was, as she describes it, "born into a large connection, born not of rich parents, but of well-to-do parents, born into a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth century world."[25]

It was a prominent family consisting of Virginia's two half brothers and a half sister (the Duckworths, from her mother's first marriage), another half sister, Laura (who lived with the family until she was institutionalised in 1891), and her three full siblings.[26]

The house was described as dimly lit, crowded with furniture and paintings.[27] Within it, the younger Stephens made a close-knit group.[28] Their outdoor activities comprised walks and play in nearby Kensington Gardens, and sailing their boats on the Round Pond.[29] While indoors, activity revolved around their lessons.[3]

Leslie Stephen's eminence as an editor, critic, and biographer, and his connection to William Thackeray, meant his children were raised in an environment filled with the influences of a Victorian literary society. Henry James, George Henry Lewes, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, Edward Burne-Jones, and Virginia's honorary godfather, James Russell Lowell, were among the visitors to the house.

Virginia showed an early affinity for writing. Although both parents disapproved of formal education for females, writing was considered a respectable profession for women. Later, she would describe this as "ever since I was a little creature, scribbling a story in the manner of Hawthorne on the green plush sofa in the drawing room at St. Ives while the grown-ups dined." By the age of five, she was writing letters.

It was her fascination with books that formed the strongest bond between her and her father.[3] For her tenth birthday, she received an ink-stand, a blotter, drawing book, and a box of writing implements.[29]

In February 1891, with her sister Vanessa, Woolf began the Hyde Park Gate News,[30] chronicling life and events within the Stephen family,[31][32] and modelled on the popular magazine Tit-Bits.[29] Virginia would run the Hyde Park Gate News until 1895, the time of her mother's death.[28] The Stephen sisters used photography to supplement their insights.[33] Vanessa Bell's 1892 portrait of her sister and parents in the Library at Talland House (see image) was one of the family's favourites and was written about lovingly in Leslie Stephen's memoir.[34]

In 1897 Virginia began her first diary,[35] which she kept for the next twelve years,[36] and a notebook in 1909.[37]

Talland House (1882–1894)

In the spring of 1881, Leslie came across a large white house[39] in St Ives, Cornwall and took out a lease on it that September.[40] Although it had limited amenities,[f] its main attraction was the view overlooking Porthminster Bay towards the Godrevy Lighthouse,[3] which the young Virginia could see from the upper windows and was to be the central figure in her To the Lighthouse (1927).[41] Each year between 1882 and 1894 from mid-July to mid-September, the Stephen family leased Talland House.[3][42][g] as a summer residence.

Leslie Stephen, who referred to it as "a pocket-paradise",[43] described it as "The pleasantest of my memories ... our summers, all of which were passed in Cornwall, especially to the thirteen summers (1882–1894) at St Ives. There we bought the lease of Talland House: a small but roomy house, with a garden of an acre or two all up and down hill, with quaint little terraces divided by hedges of escallonia, a grape-house and kitchen-garden and a so-called 'orchard' beyond,"[44] a place of "intense domestic happiness."[45]

For the children, it was the highlight of the year, and Virginia's most vivid childhood memories were not of London but of Cornwall. In a diary entry of 22 March 1921,[46] she looked back to a summer day in August 1890. "Why am I so incredibly and incurably romantic about Cornwall? One's past, I suppose; I see children running in the garden...the sound of the sea at night...so much I could never explain".[46][3][47]

Cornwall inspired aspects of her work, in particular the "St Ives Trilogy" of Jacob's Room (1922),[48] To the Lighthouse (1927),[41] and The Waves (1931).[49][50]

While Cornwall was supposed to be a summer respite, Julia Stephen soon immersed herself in the work of caring for the sick and poor there, as well as in London.[42][43][h]

Both at Hyde Park Gate and Talland House, the family socialized with much of the country's literary and artistic circles.[22] Frequent guests included literary figures such as Henry James and George Meredith,[52] as well as James Russell Lowell. The family did not return following Julia Stephen's death in May 1895.[43]

1895–1904

Julia Stephen fell ill with influenza in February 1895, and never properly recovered, dying on 5 May,[53] when Virginia was only 13. It was a pivotal moment in Virginia's life.[3] Essentially, her life had fallen apart.[54]

The Duckworths were travelling abroad at the time of their mother's death, and Virginia's half-sister Stella returned immediately to take charge and assume her role. That summer, rather than returning to the memories of St Ives, the Stephens went to Freshwater, Isle of Wight, where some of their mother's relatives lived. [53]

George Duckworth took it upon himself to bring the girls out into society.[54] First Vanessa, then Virginia, but it was not a rite of passage that resonated with either girl. Virginia: "Society in those days was a very competent machine. It was convinced that girls must be changed into married women. It had no...understanding of any other wish..."[55][56] Her priority was her writing.[54]

Stella Duckworth, who had only recently married Jack Hills on 10 April 1897, died on 19 July 1897, after a long-lasting illness.[57][58]

In April 1902, their father became ill. Although he underwent surgery later that year, he never fully recovered, dying on 22 February 1904.[59]

Woolf described the period following the deaths of Stella and her father as "1897–1904 – the seven unhappy years."[60][54]

Education

In the late 19th century, education was sharply divided along gender lines. Boys were sent to school, and in upper-middle-class families such as the Stephens, it involved private boys schools, often boarding schools, and universities.[61][62][63]After public school, all the boys in the family attended the University of Cambridge.

Girls, if they were afforded the luxury of education, received it from their parents, governesses, and tutors.[64] Virginia was educated by her parents: Julia taught the children Latin, French, and history, while Leslie taught them mathematics. They also received piano lessons.[65]

Supplementing their lessons was the children's unrestricted access to Leslie Stephen's vast library, exposing them to much of the literary canon.[6] This resulted in a greater depth of reading than any of their Cambridge contemporaries.[66] Later, Virginia recalled:

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...were to be had without asking.[67]

Another source was the conversation of their father's friends, to whom they were exposed. Leslie Stephen described his circle as "most of the literary people of mark...clever young writers and barristers, chiefly of the radical persuasion...we used to meet on Wednesday and Sunday evenings, to smoke and drink and discuss the universe and the reform movement".[12]

Later, between the ages of 15 and 19, Virginia was able to pursue higher education. She took courses of study, some at degree level, in beginning and advanced Ancient Greek, intermediate Latin and German, together with continental and English history at the Ladies' Department of King's College London between 1897 and 1901.[j] She studied Greek under the eminent scholar George Charles Winter Warr, professor of Classical Literature at King's.[69]

In addition, she received private tuition in German, Greek, and Latin. One of her Greek tutors was Clara Pater (1899–1900), who taught at King's.[70][68][71] Another was Janet Case, who involved her in the women's rights movement, and whose obituary Virginia would later write in 1937. Her experiences led to her 1925 essay "On Not Knowing Greek."[72] Her time at King's also brought her into contact with some of the early reformers of women's higher education such as the principal of the Ladies' Department, Lilian Faithfull (one of the so-called steamboat ladies), along with Pater.[71]

Her sister Vanessa also enrolled at the Ladies' Department (1899–1901). Although the Stephen girls could not attend Cambridge, they were to be profoundly influenced by their brothers' experiences there. When Thoby went to Trinity in 1899, he befriended a circle of young men, including Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf (whom Virginia would later marry), and Saxon Sydney-Turner, whom he would soon introduce to his sisters at the Trinity May Ball in 1900.[k][75] These men formed a reading group they named the Midnight Society.[76][77]

Relationships with family

Although Virginia had only turned thirteen when her mother died, she was influenced by her mother throughout her life. She famously stated that "we think back through our mothers if we are women",[78] and invoked the image of her mother repeatedly throughout her life in her diaries,[79] her letters[80] and a number of her autobiographical essays, including Reminiscences (1908),[20] 22 Hyde Park Gate (1921)[21] and A Sketch of the Past (1940),[22] frequently evoking her memories with the words "I see her ...".[81]

She also alludes to her mother in her fictional writing. In To the Lighthouse (1927),[41] the artist, Lily Briscoe, attempts to paint Mrs Ramsay, a complex character based on Julia Stephen, and repeatedly comments on the fact that she was "astonishingly beautiful".[82] Her depiction of the life of the Ramsays in the Hebrides is a thinly-disguised account of the Stephens in Cornwall and the Godrevy Lighthouse they would visit there.[83][16][84] Woolf's understanding of her mother and family evolved considerably between 1907 and 1940, in which the somewhat distant, yet revered figure, becomes more nuanced and complete.[85]

While her father painted Julia Stephen's work in terms of reverence, Woolf describes her degree of sympathy, engagement, judgement, and decisiveness, and her sense of both irony and the absurd. She recalls trying to recapture "the clear round voice, or the sight of the beautiful figure, so upright and distinct, in its long shabby cloak, with the head held at a certain angle, so that the eye looked straight out at you."[86]

Julia Stephen dealt with her husband's depressions, nursed her parents in their final illness, and had many commitments outside the home. In considering the demands on her mother, Woolf described her father as "difficult, exacting, dependent on her" and reflected that it was at the expense of the amount of attention she could spare her young children.[87][88]

She reflected that she rarely ever spent a moment alone with her mother: "someone was always interrupting."[89] In To the Lighthouse, she describes it as "boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent."[90] At the same time, she admired the strengths of her mother's ideals.

Julia Stephen greatly admired her husband's intellect, yet, as Woolf observed, "she never belittled her own works, thinking them, if properly discharged, with a firm sense of what was important, and valuing devotion, of equal, though other, importance with her husband's."

The children had to deal with Leslie Stephen's temper.[91][92] Virginia had a deep emotional attachment as his literary heir, writing about her "great devotion for him." Yet, like Vanessa, she also saw him as "victimiser."[93]

She had a lasting ambivalence towards him through her life, albeit one that evolved. As she grew older, she began to realise how much of him was in her: "I have been dipping into old letters and father's memoirs....so candid and reasonable and transparent—and [he] had such a fastidious delicate mind, educated, and transparent"[94] she wrote 22 December 1940.

She was in turn both fascinated and condemnatory: "She [her mother] has haunted me: but then, so did that old wretch my father...but he was an adorable man, and somehow, tremendous."[l][3][96]

Sexual abuse

Against a background of over-committed and distant parents, suggestions that this was a dysfunctional family must be evaluated. These include evidence of sexual abuse of the Stephen girls by their older Duckworth half-brothers, and by their cousin, James Kenneth Stephen (1859–1892).[m]

Woolf stated that she first remembers being molested by Gerald Duckworth when she was six years old, and recounted being continually sexually abused during the time that she lived at 22 Hyde Park Gate. Stella and Laura are also thought to have been abused.

Bloomsbury (1904–1940)

Gordon Square (1904–1907)

On their father's death 22 February 1904, the Stephens' first instinct was to escape from the house of yet more mourning, and this they did accompanied by George Duckworth, travelling to Manorbier, on the coast of Pembrokeshire. There, they spent a month, then spent April in Italy and France.[97] At that time, Virginia suffered her second "nervous breakdown" and made a first suicide attempt.[98]

Before their father died, the Stephens had discussed the need to leave South Kensington.[99] George Duckworth was 35, his brother Gerald 33. The Stephen children were now between 24 and 20. Virginia was 22. Vanessa and Adrian decided to sell 22 Hyde Park Gate in South Kensington and move to Bohemian Bloomsbury, which, with its leafy squares, seemed sufficiently far away, geographically and socially, and was a much cheaper area. They had not inherited much and they were unsure about their finances.[100] Then Lady Margaret Herbert[n] appeared on the scene; George proposed and they married in September, leaving the Stephens to their own devices.[101]

Vanessa found a house at 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, and they moved in November, to be joined by Virginia, now sufficiently recovered. At Gordon Square the Stephens began in March 1905 to entertain brother Thoby's intellectual friends. The circle, which largely came from the Cambridge Apostles, included writers (Saxon Sydney-Turner, Lytton Strachey) and critics (Clive Bell, Desmond MacCarthy) with Thursday evening "At Homes" that became known as the Thursday Club, a vision of recreating Trinity College ("Cambridge in London"[102]).[103]

This circle formed the nucleus of the intellectual circle of writers and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group.[76][77][104] Later, it would include John Maynard Keynes (1907), Duncan Grant (1908), E. M. Forster (1910), Roger Fry (1910), Leonard Woolf (1911), and David Garnett (1914).[o][106][107]

In 1905, Virginia and Adrian visited Portugal and Spain. Virginia began teaching evening classes at Morley College and Vanessa added another event to their calendar with the Friday Club, dedicated to the discussion of and later exhibition of the fine arts.[76][108] This introduced some new people into their circle, including Vanessa's friends from the Royal Academy and Slade, such as Henry Lamb and Gwen Darwin (who became secretary),[109] but also the eighteen-year-old Katherine Laird ("Ka") Cox (1887–1938), who was about to go up to Newnham College, Cambridge.[p][113] Ka and others brought the Bloomsbury Group into contact with another, slightly younger, group of Cambridge intellectuals to whom the Stephen sisters gave the name "Neo-pagans". The Friday Club continued until 1913.[114]

In 1906, Virginia's cherished brother Thoby, who was only 26, died of typhoid.

Vanessa accepted Clive's proposal,[115][116] and they were married in February 1907. As a couple, their interest in avant-garde art would have an important influence on Woolf's further development as an author.[117]

Fitzroy Square (1907–1911)

With Vanessa's marriage, Virginia and Adrian needed to find a new home.[118] Virginia moved into 29 Fitzroy Square in April 1907, a house formerly occupied by George Bernard Shaw. It was in Fitzrovia, immediately to the west of Bloomsbury but still relatively close to her sister at Gordon Square. The two sisters continued to travel together, visiting Paris in March.

Adrian was now to play a much larger part in Virginia's life, and they resumed the Thursday Club in October at their new home, while Gordon Square became the venue for the Play Reading Society in December. During this period, the group began to increasingly explore progressive ideas, first in speech, and then in conduct, Vanessa proclaiming in 1910 a libertarian society with sexual freedom for all.[119] Meanwhile, Virginia began work on her first novel, Melymbrosia, that eventually became The Voyage Out (1915).[120][118]

Vanessa's first child, Julian was born in February 1908, and in September Virginia accompanied the Bells to Italy and France.[121]

It was while she was at Fitzroy Square that the question arose of Virginia needing a quiet country retreat, a place of her own, like St Ives, but closer to London. In December, she and Adrian stayed at Lewes and started exploring the area of Sussex around the town. She soon found a property in nearby Firle (see below), maintaining a relationship with that area for the rest of her life.[122][123]

Dreadnought hoax 1910

Several members of the group attained notoriety in 1910 with the Dreadnought hoax, which Virginia participated in disguised as a male Abyssinian royal. Her complete 1940 talk on the hoax was discovered and is published in the memoirs collected in the expanded edition of The Platform of Time (2008).[124]

Brunswick Square (1911–1912)

In October 1911, the lease on Fitzroy Square was running out and Virginia and Adrian decided in favour of a different living arrangement, moving to a four-storied house at 38 Brunswick Square in Bloomsbury proper[q] in November.

Virginia saw it as a new opportunity: "We are going to try all kinds of experiments", she told Ottoline Morrell.[123] Adrian occupied the second floor, with Maynard Keynes and Duncan Grant sharing the ground floor.[128] This arrangement for a single woman was considered scandalous. The house was adjacent to the Foundling Hospital, much to Virginia's amusement.[125]

Marriage (1912–1941)

Leonard Woolf was one of Thoby Stephen's friends at Trinity College, Cambridge, and noticed the Stephen sisters in Thoby's rooms there on their visits to the May Ball in 1900 and 1901. He recalls them in "white dresses and large hats, with parasols in their hands, their beauty literally took one's breath away". To him, they were silent, "formidable and alarming".[129]

Woolf did not meet Virginia formally till 17 November 1904 when he dined with the Stephens at Gordon Square, to say goodbye before leaving to take up a position with the civil service in Ceylon. In 1909, Woolf proposed, but received no answer. In June 1911, he returned to London on a one-year leave,[130] but he did not go back to Ceylon and renewed his contacts with family and friends. Three weeks after arriving he dined with Vanessa and Clive Bell at Gordon Square on 3 July, where they were later joined by Virginia and other members of what would later be called "Bloomsbury", and Leonard dates the group's formation to that night.[131] In September, Virginia asked Leonard to join her at Little Talland House at Firle in Sussex for a long weekend and they began seeing each other.[132]

On 4 December 1911, Leonard moved into the ménage on Brunswick Square, occupying a bedroom and sitting room on the fourth floor, started to see Virginia constantly.[133] On 11 January 1912, he proposed to her; she asked for time to consider, so he asked for an extension of his leave and, on being refused, offered his resignation on 25 April, effective 20 May.[134] He continued to pursue Virginia, and in a letter of 1 May 1912 (which see)[135] she explained why she did not favour a marriage.

However, on 29 May, Virginia told Leonard that she wished to marry him, and they were married on 10 August 1912 at the St Pancras Register Office.[136][137] The Woolfs continued to live at Brunswick Square until October 1912, when they moved to a small flat at 13 Clifford's Inn, further to the east.[138] The couple shared a close bond...in 1937, Woolf wrote in her diary: "Love-making—after 25 years can't bear to be separate ... you see it is enormous pleasure being wanted: a wife. And our marriage so complete."[139]

In October 1914, Leonard and Virginia Woolf moved away from Bloomsbury and central London to Richmond, living at 17 The Green, a home discussed by Leonard in his autobiography Beginning Again (1964).[140] In early March 1915, the couple moved again, to nearby Hogarth House, Paradise Road,[141] after which they named their publishing house.[126]

Virginia's first novel, The Voyage Out[120] was published in 1915, followed by another suicide attempt. Despite the introduction of conscription in 1916, Leonard was exempted on medical grounds.[126][142] Leonard and Virginia employed two servants at the recommendation of Roger Fry in 1916; Nellie Boxall would stay with them for eighteen years. Virginia Woolf had regretted that there were no maids in her father's Dictionary of National Biography when she wrote Three Guineas; Boxall would be included in the successor to her father's work, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.[143]

Between 1924 and 1940 the Woolfs returned to Bloomsbury, taking out a ten-year lease at 52 Tavistock Square,[144] from where they ran the Hogarth Press from the basement, where Virginia also had her writing room, and is commemorated with a bust of her in the square (see illustration).[145]

1925 saw the publication of Mrs Dalloway[146] in May followed by her collapse while at Charleston in August. In 1927, her next novel, To the Lighthouse,[41] was published, and the following year she lectured on Women & Fiction at Cambridge University and published Orlando[147] in October.

Her two Cambridge lectures then became the basis for her major essay A Room of One's Own[148] in 1929.[144] Virginia wrote only one drama, Freshwater, based on her great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, and produced at her sister's studio on Fitzroy Street in 1935.[149] 1936 saw another collapse of her health following the completion of The Years.[150][144]

The Woolf's final residence in London was at 37 Mecklenburgh Square (1939–1940), destroyed during the Blitz in September 1940; a month later their previous home on Tavistock Square was also destroyed. After that, they made Sussex their permanent home.[151] For descriptions and illustrations of all Virginia Woolf's London homes, see Jean Moorcroft Wilson's book Virginia Woolf, Life and London: A Biography of Place (pub. Cecil Woolf, 1987).[152]

Hogarth Press (1917–1938)

Virginia had taken up book-binding as a pastime in October 1901, at the age of 19,[154][155] and the Woolfs had been discussing setting up a publishing house for some time, and at the end of 1916 started making plans. Having discovered that they were not eligible to enroll in the St Bride School of Printing, they started purchasing supplies after seeking advice from the Excelsior Printing Supply Company on Farringdon Road in March 1917, and soon they had a printing press set up on their dining room table at Hogarth House, and the Hogarth Press was born.[155]

Their first joint publication was Two Stories in July 1917, inscribed Publication No. 1, and consisted of two short stories, "The Mark on the Wall"[156] by Virginia Woolf and Three Jews by Leonard Woolf. The work consisted of 32 pages, hand bound and sewn, and illustrated by woodcuts designed by Dora Carrington. The illustrations were a success, leading Virginia to remark that the press was "specially good at printing pictures, and we see that we must make a practice of always having pictures." (13 July 1917) The process took two and a half months with a production run of 150 copies.[157] Other short short stories followed, including Kew Gardens (1919)[158] with a woodblock by Vanessa Bell as frontispiece.[144] Subsequently, Bell added further illustrations, adorning each page of the text.[159]

The press subsequently published Virginia's novels along with works by T.S. Eliot, Laurens van der Post, and others.[160] The Press also commissioned works by contemporary artists, including Dora Carrington and Vanessa Bell.

Woolf believed that women writers needed a "room of their own" to develop and often fantasised about an "Outsider's Society" where women writers would create a virtual private space for themselves via their writings to develop a feminist critique of society.[161] Though Woolf never created the "Outsider's society", the Hogarth Press was the closest approximation as the Woolfs chose to publish books by writers that took unconventional points of view to form a reading community.[161] Initially the press concentrated on small experimental publications, of little interest to large commercial publishers. Until 1930, Woolf often helped her husband print the Hogarth books as the money for employees was not there.[161] Virginia relinquished her interest in 1938, following a third attempted suicide. After it was bombed in September 1940, the press was moved to Letchworth for the remainder of the war.[162]

Both the Woolfs were internationalists and pacifists who believed that promoting understanding between peoples was the best way to avoid another world war and chose quite consciously to publish works by foreign authors of whom the British reading public were unaware.[161] The first non-British author to be published was the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky, the book Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaiovich Tolstoy in 1920, dealing with his friendship with Count Leo Tolstoy.[155]

Memoir Club (1920–1941)

1920 saw a postwar reconstitution of the Bloomsbury Group, under the title of the Memoir Club, which as the name suggests focussed on self-writing, in the manner of Proust's A La Recherche, and inspired some of the more influential books of the 20th century. The Group, which had been scattered by the war, was reconvened by Mary ('Molly') MacCarthy who called them "Bloomsberries", and operated under rules derived from the Cambridge Apostles, an elite university debating society that a number of them had been members of. These rules emphasised candour and openness. Among the 125 memoirs presented, Virginia contributed three that were published posthumously in 1976, in the autobiographical anthology Moments of Being.[163] These were 22 Hyde Park Gate (1921), Old Bloomsbury (1922) and Am I a Snob? (1936).[164]

Vita Sackville-West (1922–1941)

On 14 December 1922[165] Woolf met the writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West,[144] wife of Harold Nicolson. This period was to prove fruitful for both authors, Woolf producing three novels, To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and The Waves (1931) as well as a number of essays, including "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" (1924)[166] and "A Letter to a Young Poet" (1932).[167][168] The two women remained friends until Woolf's death in 1941.

Virginia Woolf also remained close to her surviving siblings, Adrian and Vanessa.[169]

Sussex (1911–1941)

Virginia was needing a country retreat to escape to, and on 24 December 1910, she found a house for rent in Firle, Sussex, near Lewes (see Map). She obtained a lease and took possession of the house the following month.[s][122][170]

The lease was a short one, and in October, she and Leonard Woolf found Asham House[t] at Asheham a few miles to the west.[171] Located at the end of a tree-lined road, the house was a strange, beautiful, Regency-Gothic house in a lonely location.[151] She described it as "flat, pale, serene, yellow-washed", without electricity or water and allegedly haunted.[172] She took out a five-year lease[171] jointly with Vanessa in the new year, and they moved into it in February 1912, holding a housewarming party on the 9th.[173][174]

It was at Asham that the Woolfs spent their wedding night later that year. At Asham, she recorded the events of the weekends and holidays they spent there in her Asham Diary, part of which was later published as A Writer's Diary in 1953.[175] In terms of creative writing, The Voyage Out was completed there, and much of Night and Day.[176]

Asham provided Woolf with much-needed relief from the pace of London life, and was where she found a happiness that she expressed in her diary on 5 May 1919 "Oh, but how happy we've been at Asheham! It was a most melodious time. Everything went so freely; – but I can't analyse all the sources of my joy".[177] Asham was also the inspiration for A Haunted House (1921–1944),[178][179][172] and was painted by members of the Bloomsbury Group, including Vanessa Bell and Roger Fry.[180]

While at Asham, in 1916 Leonard and Virginia found a farmhouse to let about four miles away, which they thought would be ideal for her sister. Eventually, Vanessa came down to inspect it, and took possession in October of that year, as a summer home for her family. The Charleston Farmhouse was to become the summer gathering place for the literary and artistic circle of the Bloomsbury Group.[181]

After the end of the war, in 1918, the Woolfs were given a year's notice by the landlord, who needed the house. In mid-1919, "in despair", they purchased "a very strange little house" for £300, the Round House in Pipe Passage, Lewes, a converted windmill.[173][174][178] No sooner had they bought the Round House, than Monk's House in nearby Rodmell, came up for auction, a weatherboarded house with oak-beamed rooms, said to be 15th or 16th century. The Woolfs favoured the latter because of its orchard and garden, and sold the Round House to purchase Monk's House for £700.[182][144]

Monk's House also lacked water and electricity, but came with an acre of garden, and had a view across the Ouse towards the hills of the South Downs. Leonard Woolf describes this view (and the amenities)[183] as being unchanged since the days of Chaucer.[184] From 1940, it became their permanent home after their London home was bombed, and Virginia continued to live there until her death. Meanwhile, Vanessa made Charleston her permanent home in 1936.[185]

It was at Monk's House that Virginia completed Between the Acts[186] in early 1941, followed by a further breakdown resulting in her suicide on 28 March 1941, the novel being published posthumously later that year.[144]

The Neo-pagans (1911–1912)

During her time in Firle, Virginia became better acquainted with Rupert Brooke and his social circle, nicknamed the Neo-Pagans, pursuing socialism, vegetarianism, exercising outdoors and alternative life styles, including social nudity. They were influenced by the ethos of Bedales, Fabianism and Shelley.

Although she had some reservations, Woolf was involved with their activities for a while, fascinated by their bucolic innocence in contrast to the sceptical intellectualism of Bloomsbury, which earned her the nickname "The Goat" from her brother Adrian.[u]

While Woolf liked to make much of a weekend she spent with Brooke at the vicarage in Grantchester, including swimming in the pool there, it appears to have been principally a literary assignation.

Mental health

Much examination has been made of Woolf's mental health (e.g., see Mental health bibliography). From the age of 13, following the death of her mother, Woolf suffered periodic mood swings.[188][114] However, as Hermione Lee points out, Woolf was not "mad"; she was merely a woman who suffered from and struggled with illness for much of her life, a woman of "exceptional courage, intelligence and stoicism", who made the best use, and achieved the best understanding she could of that illness.

Her mother's death in 1895, "the greatest disaster that could happen",[189][190] precipitated a crisis for which their family doctor, Dr Seton, prescribed rest, stopping lessons and writing, and regular walks supervised by Stella.[191] Yet just two years later, Stella too was dead, bringing on Virginia's first expressed wish for death at the age of fifteen. This was a scenario she would later recreate in "Time Passes" (To the Lighthouse, 1927).[41][192]

The death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse, on 10 May, when she threw herself out a window and she was briefly institutionalised[26] under the care of her father's friend, the eminent psychiatrist George Savage. She spent time recovering at the house of Stella's friend Violet Dickinson, and at her aunt Caroline Emelia Stephen's house in Cambridge,[193] and by January 1905, Savage considered her cured.[113]

Her brother Thoby's death in 1906 marked a "decade of deaths" that ended her childhood and adolescence.

On Savage's recommendation, Virginia spent three short periods in 1910, 1912, and 1913 at Burley House at 15 Cambridge Park, Twickenham (see image), described as "a private nursing home for women with nervous disorder" run by Miss Jean Thomas.[194][195] By the end of February 1910, she was becoming increasingly restless, and Savage suggested being away from London. Vanessa rented 'Moat House', outside Canterbury, in June, but there was no improvement, so Savage sent her to Burley for a "rest cure". This involved partial isolation, deprivation of literature, and force-feeding, and after six weeks she was able to convalesce in Cornwall and Dorset during the autumn.

She loathed the experience; writing to her sister on 28 July,[196] she described how she found the religious atmosphere stifling and the institution ugly, and informed Vanessa that to escape "I shall soon have to jump out of a window".[3] The threat of being sent back would later lead to her contemplating suicide.[197] Despite her protests, Savage would refer her back in 1912 for insomnia and in 1913 for depression.

On emerging from Burley House in September 1913, she sought further opinions from two other physicians on the 13th: Maurice Wright, and Henry Head, who had been Henry James's physician. Both recommended she return to Burley House. Distraught, she returned home and attempted suicide by taking an overdose of 100 grains of veronal (a barbiturate) and nearly dying.[198]

On recovery, she went to Dalingridge Hall, George Duckworth's home in East Grinstead, Sussex, to convalesce on 30 September,[199] returning to Asham on 18 November. She remained unstable over the next two years, with another incident involving veronal that she claimed was an 'accident', and consulted another psychiatrist in April 1914, Maurice Craig, who explained that she was not sufficiently psychotic to be certified or committed to an institution.

The rest of the summer of 1914 went better for her, and they moved to Richmond, but in February 1915, just as The Voyage Out was due to be published, she relapsed once more, and remained in poor health for most of that year.[200] Then she began to recover, following 20 years of ill health.[201][202] Nevertheless, there was a feeling among those around her that she was now permanently changed, and not for the better.[203]

Over the rest of her life, she suffered recurrent bouts of depression. In 1940, a number of factors appeared to overwhelm her. Her biography of Roger Fry[204] had been published in July, and she had been disappointed in its reception. The horrors of war depressed her, and their London homes had been destroyed in the Blitz in September and October. Woolf had completed Between the Acts (published posthumously in 1941)[186] in November, and completing a novel was frequently accompanied by exhaustion.[205] Her health became increasingly a matter of concern, culminating in her decision to end her life on 28 March 1941.[195]

She also suffered many of ailments such as headache, back-ache, fevers and faints, which related closely to her psychological stress. These often lasted for weeks or even months, and impeded her work: "What a gap! ... for 60 days; & those days spent in wearisome headache, jumping pulse, aching back, frets, fidgets, lying awake, sleeping draughts, sedatives, digitalis, going for a little walk, & plunging back into bed again."[206]

Though this instability would frequently affect her social life, she was able to continue her literary productivity with few interruptions throughout her life. Woolf herself provides not only a vivid picture of her symptoms in her diaries and letters, but also her response to the demons that haunted her and at times made her long for death:[207] "But it is always a question whether I wish to avoid these glooms... These 9 weeks give one a plunge into deep waters... One goes down into the well & nothing protects one from the assault of truth."[208]

Psychiatry had little to offer Woolf, but she recognised that writing was one of the behaviours that enabled her to cope with her illness:[207] "The only way I keep afloat... is by working... Directly I stop working I feel that I am sinking down, down. And as usual, I feel that if I sink further I shall reach the truth."[209] Sinking under water was Woolf's metaphor for both the effects of depression and psychosis— but also for finding truth, and ultimately was her choice of death.[207]

Throughout her life, Woolf struggled, without success, to find meaning in her illness: on the one hand, an impediment, on the other, something she visualised as an essential part of who she was, and a necessary condition of her art.[207] Her experiences informed her work, such as the character of Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs Dalloway (1925),[146] who, like Woolf, was haunted by the dead, and ultimately takes his own life rather than be admitted to a sanitorium.[3]

Leonard Woolf relates how during the 30 years they were married, they consulted many doctors in the Harley Street area, and although they were given a diagnosis of neurasthenia, he felt they had little understanding of the causes or nature. The proposed solution was simple—as long as she lived a quiet life without any physical or mental exertion, she was well. On the other hand, any mental, emotional, or physical strain resulted in a reappearance of her symptoms, beginning with a headache, followed by insomnia and thoughts that started to race. Her remedy was simple: to retire to bed in a darkened room, following which the symptoms slowly subsided.[210]

Modern scholars, including her nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell,[211] have suggested her breakdowns and subsequent recurring depressive periods were influenced by the sexual abuse which she and her sister Vanessa were subjected to by their half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth (which Woolf recalls in her autobiographical essays "A Sketch of the Past" and "22 Hyde Park Gate") (see Sexual abuse). Biographers point out that when Stella died in 1897, there was no counterbalance to control George's predation, and his nighttime prowling. "The old ladies of Kensington and Belgravia never knew that George Duckworth was not only father and mother, brother and sister to those poor Stephen girls; he was their lover also."[212][3]

It is likely that other factors also played a part. It has been suggested that they include genetic predisposition [213] Virginia's father, Leslie Stephen, suffered from depression, and her half-sister Laura was institutionalised. Many of Virginia's symptoms, including persistent headache, insomnia, irritability, and anxiety, resembled those of her father's.[214] Another factor is the pressure she placed upon herself in her work; for instance, her breakdown of 1913 was at least partly triggered by the need to finish The Voyage Out.[215]

Virginia herself hinted that her illness was related to how she saw the repressed position of women in society when she wrote A Room of One's Own.[3][216][217] in a 1930 letter to Ethel Smyth:

As an experience, madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does. And the six months—not three—that I lay in bed taught me a good deal about what is called oneself.[218]

Thomas Caramagno[219] and others,[220] in discussing her illness, oppose the "neurotic-genius" way of looking at mental illness, where creativity and mental illness are conceptualised as linked rather than antithetical.[221][219] Stephen Trombley describes Woolf as having a confrontational relationship with her doctors, and possibly being a woman who is a "victim of male medicine", referring to the lack of understanding, particularly at the time, about mental illness.[222][223]

Death

After completing the manuscript of her last novel (posthumously published), Between the Acts (1941),[186] Woolf fell into a depression similar to one which she had earlier experienced. The onset of the Second World War, the destruction of her London home during the Blitz, and the cool reception given to her biography[204] of her late friend Roger Fry all worsened her condition until she was unable to work.[225] When Leonard enlisted in the Home Guard, Virginia disapproved. She held fast to her pacifism and criticised her husband for wearing what she considered to be "the silly uniform of the Home Guard".[226]

After the Second World War began, Woolf's diary indicates that she was obsessed with death, which figured more and more as her mood darkened.[227] On 28 March 1941, Woolf drowned herself by filling her overcoat pockets with stones and walking into the River Ouse near her home.[228] Her body was not found until 18 April.[229] Her husband buried her cremated remains beneath an elm tree in the garden of Monk's House, their home in Rodmell, Sussex.[230]

In her suicide note, addressed to her husband, she wrote:

Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight it any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.[231][232]