There were already a great many people at 22 Hyde Park Gate in Kensington when Virginia Stephen was born in the big marital bedroom on the first floor. Her parents, Julia and Leslie Stephen, each had children from a previous marriage. Gerald and George were Julia’s sons from her marriage to Herbert Duckworth, away at school for much of the time, but always welcomed home with tearful ceremony. Julia’s daughter Stella, twelve when Virginia was born, was a fixed part of the household and an important figure in the Stephen children’s lives. Then there was Leslie’s daughter Laura, who was a troubling, unknowable presence in the house, chattering wildly, ‘vacant-eyed’,1 a source of painful anxiety to Leslie, who did not know what was wrong with her or how to help. Up in the nursery Virginia was among her siblings: her elder sister Vanessa, born in 1879, her brother Thoby, born in 1880, and Adrian, the youngest of them all, born in 1883. A middle-class family of this size needed servants. There was the family’s long-standing cook Sophie Farrell, and seven maids who had their bedrooms in the attic and a sitting room down in the gloom of the basement.
The narrow building strained to accommodate all these lives, each with its demands and complications. And in this house the strain was especially noticeable because alongside the living there were the letters, mementoes, and memories of all the family’s dead. Virginia was named after Aunt Adeline who had just died, though the ‘Adeline’ was quickly dropped because it made Julia so sad. The happiness of Leslie and Julia’s marriage was founded on their shared sense of lost first loves. They both believed in the art of remembering, and every corner of their house was full of stories.
Looking back, Hyde Park Gate seemed to Virginia ‘so crowded with scenes of family life, grotesque, comic and tragic; with the violent emotions of youth, revolt, despair, intoxicating happiness, immense boredom’ that just to sit and recollect it all seemed suffocating. Everything was so ‘tangled and matted with emotion’.2 Julia’s taste in furnishing emphasized the darkness and fullness: ‘mounds of plush, Watts’ portraits, busts shrined in crimson velvet’.3 The drawing room was sub-divided by black-painted folding doors, which, Virginia remembered, determined the whole rhythm of the house. There might be a crisis on one side of the door and a cheerful Sunday tea on the other. One might be expected to emerge from a painful conversation on the ‘secret’ side and immediately start entertaining the visitors eating buns on the other.4 Everything depended on the effort at containment, but inevitably the mood of one room impinged on the next.
This pattern of things contained or spilling over would keep coming back in Woolf’s fiction right up to her last novel Between the Acts, where a mood is ‘brewed up’ then interrupted and spilled.5 When Woolf wrote about early childhood in The Waves she recorded the intense private perceptions of different children (‘I see a ring’; ‘I hear a sound’; ‘I see a crimson tassel’), but then she recorded the shock of those moments when the envelope of individual consciousness is punctured by sudden awareness of other people: people with secret feelings of their own.6 As a child she was struck repeatedly by this realization of separate, unknown lives. There might be the news that someone had proposed in the garden; or just a look in her mother’s eye that suggested hidden emotion. She would always remember Julia returning from the bedside of a local man she had been nursing: ‘I was playing. I stopped, about to speak to her. But she half turned from us, and lowered her eyes.’7 Virginia did not need to be told that the man had died.
When Virginia Woolf tried to recover distinct images of her mother, the figure was often looking away. But she was nonetheless the central magnetic force in all the children’s lives. Julia Stephen was a gracious, melancholy beauty, the muse of Pre-Raphaelite painters, the white-draped Madonna of Burne-Jones’s The Annunciation (painted in 1879 when she was pregnant with Vanessa), the haunting face in the photographs taken by her aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, who allowed the ink to blur at the edges so that the hooded eyes and high, hollow cheeks seem those of an apparition.8 Julia was the mythologized subject of these Victorian dreams, and at the same time she was a practical and extremely hard-working woman with a large family to look after and a commitment to nursing anyone whose need came to her attention, whether rich or poor, relative or stranger. Not without cause had she warned Leslie when they became engaged that she would devote much of her life to her work. But she was good at entertainment too, and though the Victorian painters were not inclined to show their Madonnas having fun, Julia was responsible for much family merriment. The adult Virginia, whose friends often commented on her wild laughter, thought she had inherited her mother’s hooting laugh.
Because Julia was always busy, Virginia was aware of her more as a ‘general presence’ than a ‘particular person’.9 It was a presence Woolf would feel for the rest of her life, and she would keep trying to understand who this powerful, complicated woman was. Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse creates an atmosphere and a centre of gravity, but though she is meant to be sitting for her portrait, she moves her head to tend to her son and her visitors. It is very hard for Lily Briscoe to paint her.
While Julia was supporting the panoply of family life, or out on exhausting rounds of visiting, Leslie Stephen was in his study at the top of the house. Here he wrote the books that made him a major figure of nineteenth-century culture: literary criticism, philosophy, history, biography. In the year of Virginia’s birth he exchanged the editorship of the Cornhill Magazine for an even larger project, The Dictionary of National Biography, a monumental record of the nation’s great public figures. He had to organize the work of more than 600 contributors, and he himself researched and wrote 378 of the entries. It was an enormous strain. He was seized with anxiety and couldn’t sleep at night; during the day the children would hear loud groans from his study, and when he emerged his mood could be foul. Too often he called in aid a certain nineteenth-century cult of male genius which allowed for fits of rage and inspiration. Nevertheless, when he paused from work he could be delightful and attentive to his children, helping them to catch butterflies in the garden, telling them about his energetic Alpine expeditions, reading aloud to them, or asking after their own reading.
His was ‘only a good second class mind’, he ruefully told his clever young daughter.10 But she would go on admiring what he wrote and respecting the free-thinking intellectual integrity that made him speak out as an atheist and a rationalist. Reading his books, as she did at intervals right up to her death, gave her a way of continuing her relationship with him. Julia, by contrast, had left nothing so solid and reliable behind. Who was she then? Did it matter that she left so little physical trace? This is one of the questions that keeps being asked in To the Lighthouse. What will last? For Virginia Woolf, writing was a counter to transience. If you wrote something down, you could make it stay put.
She felt this from very early on, and there was certainly a good deal of writing being done up in the nursery. Every Monday without fail from 1892, when Virginia was ten, she and Vanessa, sometimes Thoby too, delivered to their parents the Hyde Park Gate News. This illustrated newspaper (now collected and published) records the competitive, industrious life of the Stephen children.11 Everyone had a gamut of nicknames and roles to play. There were fierce debates over domestic occurrences, and no visitor to the house escaped without having been privately assessed and caricatured.
Sir Leslie Stephen by G. F. Watts, 1878. This melancholy and distinguished portrait, commissioned by Leslie as an engagement present for Julia, was part of the atmosphere of Hyde Park Gate. (G.F. Watts, Portrait of Sir Leslie Stephen, 1878. National Portrait Gallery, London)
Twice a day the children were taken for an airing in Kensington Gardens. This grew understandably tedious, though Virginia was wide awake and noticed everything: the old woman at the Queen’s Gate who sold nuts and boot laces, the little ribbed shells along the Flower Walk. There was usually something newsworthy to report, and when there wasn’t Virginia would write a story. Because she had a lot to say, it would often be a very long story, issued in weekly instalments.
What were these ambitious editors of the Hyde Park Gate News going to do with their lives? The future that Julia Stephen envisaged for her daughters was one of distinguished domestic activity. They would be wives, mothers, supports, carers. Traditional in her thinking about women’s roles and firmly opposed to women’s suffrage, Julia saw no need for her daughters to have a formal education. In this she was not especially conservative: with a few rare exceptions, girls in the 1890s simply did not go out to school. Leslie might have allowed his children to be the rare exceptions, but instead he accepted his wife’s judgment on the matter. So Thoby and Adrian went off to school and later to Cambridge. Vanessa and Virginia remained at home.
Their parents made a huge and sustained effort to provide the tuition and encouragement the children needed. Julia sat them down for lessons when she could, but she had other demands on her time. Leslie taught them maths, introduced them to the classics, and supplied books from his library. Both were principled and capable educators, but they could not give the structure and consistency available at school. Nor could they provide the sociable company of peers. The sisters kept company with each other.
Virginia seems always to have known that she was going to be a writer. And Vanessa knew she was going to be a painter.12 This was sorted out very early on, and they proceeded to train themselves competitively in their chosen arts. For years Virginia persisted in using a writing table so high that she had to stand up. This gave a formality and seriousness to what she was doing, and it put her on an equal footing with Vanessa, who would be standing at her easel. So the two girls stood, hour after hour, in their room on the third floor of the house. They were absolutely determined: they were going to make their way.
For nine months of the year London was the backdrop to Virginia’s life. But when the adult Virginia Woolf thought about her childhood, what she often thought of before anything else was a garden by the sea. It was a garden of intense sensory experience, of voices in the dusk and hedges you could peer though to the world beyond: ‘through the pear-shaped leaves of the escallonia, fishing boats seemed caught and suspended’.13
This is the garden of Talland House in St Ives, where Virginia Stephen spent her first thirteen summers. Leslie had found the house, with its pretty trelliswork, tall windows, and views to the sea, while on a walking trip in Cornwall. He immediately rented it for family holidays, despite the difficulties of getting three babies and a whole household down there each year. Still, in a letter of 1884 we hear the voice of a proud, excited father. He was enchanted by the garden with its flowering hedges and ‘remote nooks’ and ‘high banks, down which you can slide in a sitting posture’. It was, he thought, ‘altogether a pocket-paradise with a sheltered cove of sand in easy reach (for ’Ginia even) just below’.14 And he was right. His daughter would remember and write about it as a kind of paradise for the rest of her life.
Talland House was the scene of what Virginia Woolf described in 1939 as her ‘most important memory’. It was the memory, she felt, on which all her others were built:
It is of lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery at St Ives. It is of hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach; and then breaking, one, two, one, two, behind a yellow blind. It is of hearing the blind draw its little acorn across the floor as the wind blew the blind out. It is of lying and hearing this splash and seeing this light, and feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive.15
This is a memory of being safe and still, while acutely aware of the great world beyond. Familiar surroundings seem for a moment to be almost miraculous. The rhythm here is the rhythm that sounds through The Waves and through Woolf’s greatest writing. Nothing outward happens: no one standing at the nursery door and observing the scene would have known its importance. It is one of those hidden revelations that Woolf’s fiction would propose as the structuring principles of our lives.
The long summers at St Ives, which lasted from August to October, yielded many of these intense moments of private sensation and lone adventure. There was a circle of safety, and there were exciting, frightening explorations beyond it. Little Jacob in Jacob’s Room finds himself lost on the beach all alone, and everything looks enormous. He sees two large red faces staring up at him from the sand. ‘Jacob stared down at them. Holding his bucket very carefully, Jacob then jumped deliberately and trotted away very nonchalantly at first’, but then ‘faster and faster’, towards safety.16 Bernard and Susan in The Waves are ‘discoverers of an unknown land’ as they peer over a wall to see the white house between the trees.17 They look in awe, stowing away an image they will keep, before scrambling in terror back within bounds.
At Talland House, the garden itself was a busy place, and mapped out accordingly. By common consent there were social areas and romantic corners. A game of cricket was usually underway on the lawn, continuing late into the dusk with a fluorescent ball that could just about be seen against the dark hedge. (Virginia’s childhood passion for cricket anticipated her adult addiction to bowls.) There was a special system for meeting visitors:
The Lookout place was a grassy mound, that jutted out over the high garden wall. There we were often sent to stand to look out for the fall of the signal. When the signal fell it was time to start for the station to meet the train. It was the train that brought Mr Lowell, Mr Gibbs, the Stillmans, the Lushingtons, the Symondses.18
Virginia and Vanessa Stephen at St Ives, 1894. A great deal of cricket was played in the garden at Talland House, and Virginia was notorious as a bowler. Later, she and Leonard would regularly play highly competitive bowls. (Private Collection)
In 1894 a hotel was built in front of Talland House, blocking the view to the sea. In September the Stephens packed up their holiday home for the last time, though they didn’t know it. That autumn Julia became ill with rheumatic fever. She was only forty-eight, but in photographs from that last year she looks drawn and exhausted. The expert on sickbeds was herself now in need of nursing. In To the Lighthouse the narrative lingers over the empty holiday house where draughts creep in and lift the edges of possessions left behind: a cloak, a child’s bucket. And then two sentences in brackets report what has happened far away:
[Mr Ramsay stumbling along a passage stretched his arms out one dark morning, but Mrs Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, he stretched his arms out. They remained empty.]19
There is no report of what the children felt.
Julia Stephen died in London on 5 May 1895. The elaborate routines of Victorian mourning began. ‘Rooms were shut’, Virginia remembered. ‘People were creeping in and out.’20 Flowers piled up ‘reeking’ in the hall. Stella, at twenty-six, began stoically to take control. Letters were written on black-edged paper. Leslie sat distraught and groaning in the dark sitting room where thick creeper grew over the windows and kept out the light.
All her life Virginia would try to find ways to express what she felt through all this. In her 1937 novel The Years, she took the perspective of the bereaved daughter Delia, who sees that people have started to kneel reverentially at the bedside and that even the nurses are crying.
Ought I to kneel too? she wondered. Not in the passage, she decided. She looked away; she saw the little window at the end of the passage. Rain was falling; there was a light somewhere that made the raindrops shine. One drop after another slid down the pane; they slid and they paused; one drop joined another drop and then they slid again.21
In this series of detached, mechanically registered impressions, the raindrops are suggestive of tears. But importantly they are not tears. The most distressing thing about this time was that Virginia Stephen could not feel what she thought she was meant to be feeling. Though she whispered like the others, on the inside of all this conventionalized public mourning was a numbness potentially more troubling than expressible grief. ‘I said to myself as I have done at moments of crisis since, “I feel nothing whatever.”’22 She was indistinctly aware of a mismatch between outer expectation and inner experience. Not until much later could she articulate it. ‘It made one hypocritical and enmeshed in the conventions of sorrow’, she wrote in her memoir ‘Sketch of the Past’. ‘We were made to act parts that we did not feel; to fumble for words that we did not know.’23
In her fiction she would find ways to break open those conventions. She would insist that the moment of importance comes not ‘here’ where society demands it, but ‘there’ when we least expect it. We do not feel things on time, to order. Woolf would license numbness, and she would acknowledge the strange, indirect ways in which people respond to events; she would give credence to the individuality of experience. But at thirteen she found herself hemmed in and overwhelmed.