In the months after her mother’s death Virginia Stephen was extremely nervous and agitated. Her pulse raced; Leslie and Stella worried about her and consulted doctors. She was told to stop her lessons and rest, but the resting was restless and the tension went on and on. Writing much later, near the end of a life punctuated by intervals of illness, Virginia Woolf identified this episode of 1895–6 as the first of her ‘breakdowns’.1 Her work would help to redefine what that word meant.
What struck her most forcefully, looking back, was that for those two years after Julia’s death she read and read but did not write. ‘The desire left me; which I have had all my life, with that two years break.’2 There would be other periods when she could not write. When her voluble and amazingly energetic diary goes silent, as it does for months at a time, it is because she was unable – or was not allowed by her doctors – to record her usual flights of imaginative response to the world. Since she wrote very little during her breakdowns, our sense of what she experienced comes mostly from the reports of others and from the way she wrote about mental illness in her fiction.
Most, though not all, of her symptoms were those of manic depression, now also known as bipolar disorder.3 There were moments of vivid, ecstatic perception, overwhelming emotions that could change very quickly, a great fear of public exposure, and the exhaustion of overspent nervous energy. This was the illness which would become part of her life: watched for, scrutinized, darkly fascinating to her, hated, and battled through. Today millions of people are taking mood-stabilizing drugs to help limit the extremes of mania and depression. In 1896 all that could be prescribed was rest and sedatives (which may well have made things worse). There were frightening things in store if she did not improve; her half-sister Laura would spend most of her life undiagnosed in a series of asylums. Madness was close to home and absolutely terrifying. Virginia Stephen did not want it, and she felt for her own ways of surviving.
One of the signs of her recovery was that in the New Year of 1897, just before her fifteenth birthday, she started to keep a journal. It is the most fully recorded year of her childhood, a day-by-day account of the routine pleasures and trials of Hyde Park Gate. The most frequently repeated words in the diary are ‘Nessa went to drawing.’ This is how she starts her entry for each of the days on which Vanessa went off to her morning classes at art school. Virginia chronicled her own life at this lonely time in relation to her sister’s absence. Her brothers were away at school and she was the one left behind. But she had her own work to do.
Virginia was allowed to take lessons again and now had private tuition in Greek. In the mornings, between ten and one, she sat up in her room reading books lent to her by her father from his library. Leslie was consciously guiding her towards his own profession as a historian and biographer, so the reading list was full of Froude and Macaulay and Carlyle. She went through all these at rapacious speed, daily returning to her father for another volume, sometimes being sent back upstairs to slow down and read yesterday’s book again.
In the afternoons there would be errands and excursions in London with Stella or Vanessa, and often a stop for buns at an abc teashop. It was an 1890s upper-middle-class childhood of visits and chores and small entertainments. But in every spare moment Virginia Stephen read. As well as the ten-to-one morning books, there were ‘supper and odd moment books’, even designated hair-brushing books.4 Last thing at night she would take a book to bed with her, though this was not strictly allowed. Her ‘nightly forbidden reading’ had to be furtive; she squirrelled the volume away when she heard anyone approaching.5 This secrecy was all part of the literary seduction.
And seduction it was. She loved the feel of books – their bindings and typefaces. Once one got between the covers, whole new adventures in feeling were begun. She read on her own, but her passion for reading was part of her passion for other people. So when Leslie gave her for her birthday a ten-volume Life of Walter Scott, she was in thrall to its beauty and all it signified about her father’s respect for her. Reading was also, quite practically and literally, a means of survival. Virginia learned how to use it to stabilize herself when she felt the ‘agitation’, the ‘fidgets’, and mood swings that were a part of her illness.6 She learned this out of necessity during these difficult years.
In April 1897 Stella married her long-time admirer Jack Hills. Leslie was aghast at the idea that she might leave home, seeing quite rightly that the house would fall apart without her. In the end, she moved a few doors down the street so that she could continue as the central support for the Stephen children. But even this carefully negotiated arrangement, which was very trying for Stella, could not protect the Stephen family from disaster. Stella returned seriously ill from her honeymoon and within three months she was dead. The children were again left without a maternal figure. Leslie was again left without the female help and sympathy that he seemed uncontrollably to need.
Assiduously writing her diary as all this went on, Virginia chose not to pour out her unhappiness. Instead she wrote sharp-witted, opinionated descriptions of her world. It was a way of keeping herself up on the surface of life. The daily round of walks, visits, tea and buns might have been monotonous, but writing it out helped her to ‘plod on’.7 ‘Life is a hard business –’ she reflected in October, ‘one needs a rhinirocerous [sic] skin – & that one has not got.’8 To the end of her life she would be wishing for that tough skin, observing for a pleasing moment in 1937, for example, that reviewers’ comments on The Years affected her no more than ‘tickling a rhinoceros with a feather’.9 Most of the time she felt herself to be porous, tickled by the lightest feather, constantly receiving and responding to jolts.
One of the worst consequences of Stella’s death was the change it brought in the behaviour of her brother George Duckworth, who now, in his early thirties, tried to establish himself as head of the household. He did for the Stephen sisters what he probably thought were the right things: he took them out and showed them off, bought them presents, and made histrionic displays of his affection for them. The affection was not returned in equal measure. Though Virginia felt some fondness for her half-brother (she had grown up with ‘dearest Georgie’ and when he died in 1934 she would feel the ‘glow’ of childhood go with him), she also felt contempt.10 She and Vanessa loathed his stupidity and felt acutely the injustice of being lorded over by a dim-witted social climber who had no understanding of what mattered to them. George tried to make Virginia love him, and then his version of ‘love’ got out of control.
Earlier, when she was six or seven, her other half-brother Gerald had intrusively explored her body. She remembered ‘resenting, disliking it – what is the word for so dumb and mixed a feeling?’11 She associated this with the lifelong shame she felt about her body, and which persisted despite her beauty. She would always feel anxious about mirrors and awkward about clothes. What George did between about 1897 and 1904 was much more sustained than Gerald’s touching. But we do not know what form it took or how often it happened. Least of all do we know how far these violations shaped Virginia’s life and work, though a great deal has been written on the subject.12 We are reliant on accounts she gave at various later stages: in autobiographical sketches from 1908 and 1939, in a few letters, and in two papers read to the Bloomsbury Group’s Memoir Club in the 1920s which were designed to intrigue and entertain. Though ‘Bloomsbury’ came to pride itself on sexual candour, none of these accounts is explicit about what George did when he crept into Virginia’s bedroom and told her not to turn on the light.
She says much more about his stupidity than about his sexuality. The physical intrusion was linked up with a threatened dimming and blunting of her mind. Virginia tried to reduce her horror of George by turning him into a joke with Vanessa, and between them they made him a figure of pitiful fun. He had ‘animal vigour’, Virginia wrote in 1908, but not enough brain to control it: ‘he allowed himself to commit acts which a cleverer man would have called tyrannical; and, profoundly believing in the purity of his love, he behaved little better than a brute.’13 By 1921 she was ending her Memoir Club talk with a provocative flourish: ‘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’.14 What is the tone here? Was the audience meant to laugh at this dramatic ending to a comic paper about George’s snobbery and ridiculousness? Woolf was testing her own reactions too, mastering the different tones in which she could present to others – and to herself – what had happened.
The humiliations in the dark would always be connected for her with the public humiliation she felt when George took her out into the high society he revered. Vanessa had suffered enough evenings on George’s arm and put her foot down. George turned to Virginia, who gave the social round a try. There were balls and dinners, tiaras, titles, all the huge wealth of late-Victorian aristocracy. Her face fitted, but her conversation did not. She was meant to give short, pretty responses to the questions she was asked, but instead she talked about Plato, realized she had broken the code, blushed, shut up, and despaired. Though in her accounts of these parties she says she was hopeless at small talk, it is hard to believe that she could not have pulled it off with cunning aplomb.15 Had she played the prescribed part, this could have been her world. But she was not going to do it.
Thirty years later, when society hostesses like Lady Sibyl Colefax chased the celebrity author for her guest lists, Woolf would play hard to get. It was a pleasing sequel to her embarrassments with George that she was eventually invited, in her own right and on her own terms, to shine centre stage. She would protest about having to waste time at these parties, but there was always, too, something in them that she found alluring. She recorded their rituals with fascination and she grasped the point of the superficiality. Parties made people behave in a way that matched their thin silk dresses, she observed when she was twenty-one: ‘for two or three hours a number of people have resolved to show only their silken side to one another’.16 She could see that beneath this willed coherence parties had their own reality and depth. ‘It was possible to say things you couldn’t say anyhow else, things that needed an effort; possible to go much deeper’, Clarissa thinks in Mrs Dalloway, the novel in which Virginia Woolf paid tribute to the society woman she did not become.17 She saw the composed party as a kind of art. It was not her art, but she would give it its due, while returning at the same time, through the character of Septimus Warren-Smith, to the dreadful feelings of exposure and powerlessness that originated at those parties with George.
It was not that everything before Julia’s death was happy and everything after it was not, although this was the broad pattern things took in Virginia Woolf’s memory. She came to regard the period from 1897 to 1904, her whole adolescence from the age of fifteen to twenty-two, as ‘the seven unhappy years’, but there were still some pleasures to be found.18 It was a time of intimacy and shared understanding with Vanessa, which made home life tolerable. It was also a time of making friends. Generous, varied, and passionate friendship is one of the great stories of her life and she began it now by forging intense relationships with women. From her cousins Emma and Madge Vaughan, and from her tutor Janet Case, she won the affection she badly needed. And she gave in return the overwhelming affection she needed to give.
There were still family holidays. Leslie could not bear to see St Ives again after Julia’s death (he could not bring himself to return as Mr Ramsay does, to make the postponed journey to the lighthouse; Virginia Woolf would have to imagine that act of reparation). But each year a house in the country was rented for the summer. Though they never possessed Virginia’s imagination as Talland House did, they would be sensuously remembered. The family Entomological Society (President: Leslie Stephen; Secretary: Virginia Stephen) was still devoted to its twilight work of moth catching. Virginia still felt the magic of torchlit gardens, the rituals of sugaring the branches in expectation, the beauty of the creatures caught momentarily in the light. At Warboys in Cambridgeshire one night in the summer of 1899, the lantern illuminated a Red Underwing and Virginia caught it in her notebook as well as in the sugar:
By the faint glow we could see the huge moth – his wings open, as though in ecstasy, so that the splendid crimson of the underwing could be seen – his eyes burning red, his proboscis plunged into a flowing stream of treacle. We gazed one moment on his splendour, & then uncorked the bottle.19
Alone or with others, there were long cycle rides and skating in winter, and a lot of vigorous walking by which Virginia proved herself the daughter of Leslie Stephen the famously robust Alpine mountaineer. Even during these tense ‘unhappy years’ she was often to be found striding through Kensington Square to her Greek class or writing a wicked mock-eighteenth-century sketch of some visiting dignitary. She was undertaking, day by day and of her own accord, a programme of education that meant she could hold her own with any learned don or literary light who came her way. When Thoby was at home, they talked literature together and she loved it, but then he went away again. She wanted his opinions about Shakespeare, Marlowe, Sophocles, and she wanted to get the better of him. But: ‘Oh dear oh dear – just as I feel in the mood to talk about these things, you go and plant yourself in Cambridge.’20 She carried on without him. At twenty she was absorbed by Greek drama, Renaissance travel writing, and eighteenth-century prose; and she was attending at King’s College Women’s Department as many lectures as she could.
Almost everything she wrote as an adult is shaped in some way by the fundamental fact of her not having been to school or university. She would come to fashion herself defiantly as an ‘outsider’, exploiting the unorthodox vantage points it gave her. She would take the side of the ‘common reader’ while attacking the pomp and exclusivity of academia. In her essays she would develop a style based on informal conversation rather than systematic analysis; she preferred to wander or ‘ramble’ round her subject rather than attack it head-on, and as a literary critic she would more often write about the impressions, tastes, and textures of a book than about its hard facts.21
Thoby Stephen, Virginia’s elder brother, ally, and confidant. His friends at Cambridge would become her friends, and his image would later haunt her novels. He was photographed by George Beresford in 1906 just before leaving for Italy and Greece. (Estate of Professor Quentin Bell by permission of Julian Bell)
This liberated and original voice took time and confidence to develop. Virginia Stephen had first to train herself in literary styles. She set herself exercises, filling notebooks ‘as an artist fills his pages with scraps & fragments’.22 There were cloud studies and portraits of people, views of buildings, scenes at parties. She was desperate for someone to read all this and to love her for it. The person she found was Violet Dickinson, a kind, intelligent, well-connected, extremely tall (six foot two), widely loved, and contentedly unmarried woman seventeen years her senior. Visiting Hyde Park Gate, Violet saw that the Stephen girls needed an older woman to turn to, but it was with Virginia particularly that she made a connection. They were conscious of making up the relationship as they went along, pushing it beyond the close companionship that was very common among women towards something that more resembled a love affair. ‘I cant think how one writes to an intimate friend,’ Virginia protested, but she was not held up for long.23 Through 1902–3 her letters to Violet were alive with sensuality. Often a tranche of her latest writing was enclosed which became part of the love letter. As in all the intimate relationships of her life, she invented animal characters that allowed her an erotic language of nuzzling and cuddling. She took the temperature of Violet’s letters in return and demanded that they get hotter.
Virginia Stephen’s other critical relationship at this time was with her father. Her feelings towards him were extremely strong and conflicted. It was he who understood her intellect and believed seriously in her future as a writer. But since Julia’s death he had been mired in his own grief and prone to self-indulgent outbursts that made Hyde Park Gate feel as claustrophobic as a cage. His deafness exacerbated his sense of isolation and injustice. Something of his mood can be gleaned from the memoir he wrote during these years.24 It was a complex mix of self-reproach, self-justification, and mythologizing of two lost wives. This was all intended for his children as part of their inheritance, though few would have seen this weight of grief and guilt as an heirloom they would want to pass on. The children jokingly christened it the Mausoleum Book. Leslie was diagnosed with cancer in 1902 and spent a long time dying. It seemed to be going on for ever.
And then it all ended in a night when Leslie Stephen died in February 1904. Vanessa was full of relief. Virginia, years later, said it was a mercy he had not lived into old age. ‘His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books; –inconceivable.’25 This was the great release that allowed her a life of her own, but first she nearly died of it. She was dangerously ill from April to September that year. Advised to leave London, she went to live with Violet at Welwyn in Hertfordshire, where she made at least one attempt to kill herself. She raged against Vanessa, whose zest for life seemed callous in the face of Leslie’s death.
Virginia’s way of regaining some stability was not to forget but to think very intently about her father. She was asked to help the historian Frederic Maitland with the research for his biography of Leslie, so she went to Cambridge for the autumn to read and transcribe hundreds of family letters. She also contributed a ‘Note’ to the biography, which absorbed her for weeks as she agonized about getting it right.26 This was an early exploration of the possibility that writing about the past might be a powerful and positive way of setting it to rest.
Meanwhile in London, what had once seemed impossible now happened. Vanessa cleared out thirty years of accumulated family belongings at Hyde Park Gate, the whole archaeology of relics (Herbert Duckworth’s old barrister’s wig; tin boxes of letters; hoards of china), and set up a home for the Stephen siblings at a house she had chosen in Bloomsbury. For an awful moment George decided that he was coming too, but they were saved: George got married and went his way. Virginia came back to London briefly in November, sat at her desk with a big new inkpot, and secured her first commission (through Violet) to write an essay and book reviews for a clerical newspaper called the Guardian. She arranged her new study as she wanted it: ‘all my beloved leather backed books standing up so handsome in their shelves, and a nice fire, and the electric light burning, and a huge mass of manuscripts and letters’.27 This was going to be a writer’s room.
Virginia and Leslie Stephen, photographed by George Beresford in December 1902. Virginia loved, admired, and battled with her father until the end of his life. She kept rereading and rewriting him until the end of hers. (Estate of Professor Quentin Bell by permission of Julian Bell)
The Stephens went in high spirits to Hampshire for a Christmas break. Virginia wrote long, energetic letters, full of the old addiction to language: ‘when I see a pen and ink, I cant help taking to it, as some people do to gin’.28 Then on New Year’s Day 1905 she looked up hopefully at the sky. It was bright and clear, ‘as though we had turned over a new leaf & swept the sky clean of clouds’.29 She could feel herself beginning again; she even persuaded herself she could smell spring in the air. ‘I want to work like a steam engine’, she wrote to Violet.30 She kept using images her father might have used (Leslie likened Carlyle to a steam engine and liked to ‘get drunk intellectually’), and she was going to prove that she too could be a great essayist and thinker.31 A few days later she went back to London to make a start. And on 10 January something satisfying arrived in the post as payment for her first published work: ‘Found this morning on my plate my first instalment of wages – £2.7.6.’32