The house in Gordon Square was large and bright. With no figure of authority to set out the rules, it seemed that new patterns of life could be invented here. Thoby and his friends from Cambridge sat up late in the drawing room; Vanessa was revelling in the sense of liberation. The scene was set for the sexual, social, and artistic freedoms that would become associated with ‘Bloomsbury’. Virginia would later enjoy talking about this great moment of release. Gordon Square was ‘the most beautiful, the most exciting, the most romantic place in the world’, she told the Memoir Club in the 1920s, doing her bit to establish the cultural legend: ‘everything was going to be new; everything was going to be different. Everything was on trial.’1
At the time, however, she was not so sure about it. She walked sadly around Regent’s Park, comparing it with Kensington Gardens. She was not convinced about the new friends either. They seemed rather silent, and when they talked it was all very abstract. They were easy to satirize: Virginia noted that ‘occasionally they escape to a corner and chuckle over a Latin joke’.2 She felt herself to be different from them, but she caricatured herself as well. ‘I went to a dance last night,’ she told Violet in January 1906, ‘and found a dim corner where I sat and read In Memoriam.’3 It was her wry shorthand for her sense of being at odds with a world she was meant to be enjoying, a comically morose figure still mired in Victorian mourning and very much aware of the ironies.
Vanessa Bell, The Bedroom, Gordon Square, 1912. When the Stephens moved to Bloomsbury they felt that ‘everything was going to be different’. New ways of living developed in tandem with new forms of art. (Vanessa Bell, The Bedroom, Gordon Square, 1912. Photo Anthony d’Offay Gallery © Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy Henrietta Garnett)
She tested her responses to other people, working out how far she wanted company and how often she wanted to be alone. Going back to St Ives with her siblings in the summer of 1905, she was reclaiming, with them, the emotions of a family childhood. But her strongest feelings on that trip came from being alone on solitary tramps of the kind her father always loved. She was taking possession, by herself, of a place she needed. ‘The beautiful sights are often melancholy & very lonely’, she wrote.4 She wondered why the group excursions she planned with her siblings to famous beauty spots did not move her so much; she realized that, for her, the really ‘special sights’ were ‘sudden, unexpected, secret’.5
For Virginia the first years in Bloomsbury were characterized by plain hard work. She was lecturing at Morley College (then housed at the Old Vic near Waterloo), where she taught history and composition to adults. Nervous about teaching subjects she knew back to front, and never complacent about anything, she expended great effort on preparing her lectures. She didn’t much enjoy it though, and it was her journalism that really took off. Word got around that she was a skilled reviewer, and by mid-1905 she was totting up in her journal the large number of articles she had written: pieces on Gissing, James, Thackeray, Dickens, women, ‘street music’, the art of the essay.6
Her longer-term ambition was still to write history, like her father, and her encouraging aunt Caroline suggested a life of Henry VIII. Virginia would look back on the idea with laughter but it wasn’t so very far off the mark. What would that unwritten book have been like? Perhaps Orlando gives us a clue. In the end she would choose fiction, but all her books explore different ways of writing the past.
Her feeling for history was at its most intense on some of the ambitious journeys abroad that she undertook with friends and family. At Mycenae with her siblings and Violet, her imagination worked archaeologically, digging through strata. In flashes, the ancient world opened up to her. ‘I did see, for a second, as through a chink, down, down, for miles beneath my feet.’7 This trip would become a sad marker in her personal history too. When the party of five arrived back in England, three of them were already seriously ill. Violet went home with typhoid. The Gordon Square house became a domestic hospital, with Thoby and Vanessa upstairs in bed under constant supervision. As the nurses came in and out, Virginia talked anxiously with them in a language of enemas and bedpans. Thoby, it finally emerged, had typhoid too.
Virginia had been here before, except that now she was in charge and on her own. She wanted to talk to Violet, still her ‘Mother Wallaby’, but when she wrote to Violet, as she did almost daily, she was writing to a sick woman who needed her to be the strong one. So she sent long, cheerful, practical reports on her patients’ ups and downs, encouraging and nursing Violet too, by post. The fates of the three people closest to Virginia seemed horribly entwined. If one got through, perhaps they all would. If not… But she did not allow herself that possibility.
Thoby died on 20 November 1906, aged twenty-nine. Virginia had to write letters and arrange his affairs; but over the next month she also wrote one of her most extraordinary fictions. In her letters to Violet, Thoby remained alive, eating whey and chicken broth, reading reviews, being visited by friends. She thought the truth would be too much of a blow for the already vulnerable Violet. To save her, and perhaps also to save herself, she kept Thoby alive. There was something else she kept from Violet because she could not let it happen just yet. Two days after Thoby’s death, Vanessa accepted Clive Bell’s proposal of marriage and it was agreed that they would live alone together at Gordon Square. Virginia would need to make another life for herself. All of this was held at bay in the intensely imagined world of the letters. Violet found out eventually and forgave Virginia for the lies. Perhaps the ghostly fiction had got them through. ‘The earth seems swept very bare’, Virginia wrote, with a hint in her image of the Greek tragedies with which she would always associate her lost brother.8
While Vanessa and Clive flourished in their married life, Virginia tried to set up a way of living contentedly on her own. She moved with Adrian to Fitzroy Square, but they had never been close and chose to live as independently as possible. Virginia worked hard at her reviewing and took off regularly on trips to the country, roaming as the fancy took her, writing sensuously about it in journals and letters. Out on the Cornish moors and the Sussex Downs, as much as in the ‘dim corner’ of the party, she was trying out her identity as an eccentric lone thinker. Was that what she wanted to be? She saw a long unmarried future spread before her, the validity of which seemed to depend entirely on her success as a writer. ‘I see how I shall spend my days a virgin, an Aunt, an authoress.’9
With the arrival of Vanessa’s first child, Julian, in February 1908, Virginia felt more than ever an intruder in her sister’s maternal ‘circle of bliss’.10 But as Vanessa devoted herself to her baby, Clive too was feeling left out. A dangerous flirtation developed which might have been disastrous for them all. Though she would look back in horror on this episode, Virginia found it difficult at the time to resist the new power it gave her. She let the flattery go too far, but she did not let it become an affair.
As she drew back she needed to prove her independence a virtue. She spent the summer of 1908 at Manorbier in Wales, alone but not lonely. ‘I end upon the beach generally, – find a corner where I can sit and invent images from the shapes of the waves.’11 She was preparing and focusing herself for an intensive period of work on the novel she was writing, which would eventually become The Voyage Out. ‘I mean to stand at my desk this autumn’, she told Clive, ‘and work doggedly, in the dark.’12
She stylishly played up her role as the mad aunt. At 12.30 on Christmas Eve 1909 she decided to go to Cornwall and made a dash for the one o’clock train. The next day – the day of the year most associated with family – she walked over the hills in the mist and then posted back to London vivid portraits of her triumphantly spontaneous excursion. She wrote to her sister with relish to say that she had run off with ‘no pocket handkerchief, watch key, notepaper, spectacles, cheque book, looking glass, or coat’ and was now sitting happily over the fire in an empty hotel.13 As ever, her reading provided the models against which she measured her own behaviour. That Christmas she was zooming ‘like an express train’ through the multi-volume memoirs of the eccentric Lady Hester Stanhope, who kept forty-eight cats, rode through Syria in trousers, and ‘took herself for the Messiah’.14 Virginia couldn’t help imagining herself for a moment as a modern Lady Stanhope. She fired off to Clive a quick fantasy: ‘Suppose I stayed here, and thought myself an early virgin, and danced on May nights, […] a scandalous Aunt for Julian.’15 So she jokingly, brilliantly weighed future versions of herself.
What she wanted most of all was to finish her novel, but for much of 1910 she was kept away from it. By the end of February, her tension and restlessness was at the dangerous point of tipping over into illness. Dr George Savage advised her to be away from London, and there began a series of trips designed to help her rest. In June, Vanessa rented a house outside Canterbury where she thought she might be able to help her sister recover. But by the end of the month there was no recovery, Virginia felt herself a burden, and Savage prescribed a ‘rest cure’ at Burley Park hospital in Twickenham. Virginia submitted because it would relieve her heavily pregnant sister, and because – just perhaps – it might work. In her letters at least, she was stoically accepting: ‘[Savage] says he wont insist on complete isolation, so I suppose I shant be as badly off as I was before.’16 It was bad nonetheless: she was force-fed, deprived of literature and company, and had no idea of when it might end. She kept testing her brain to see if it was ‘ripe’ like the harvest, and eventually in the late summer she was able to leave.17 There was a careful autumn of convalescence in Cornwall and Dorset before she returned tentatively to London.
She was back in time for the opening of ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’, the exhibition that was absorbing all her friends’ attention. Its organizer was Roger Fry, an ebullient critic with a passion for modern French painting, who had arrived like a whirlwind in Bloomsbury and made painting the central subject of discussion. The exhibition caused a national sensation; Clive and Vanessa were caught up in a ‘sizzle of excitement’.18
Virginia was pleased and interested, and her fiction would in time respond with dazzling originality to these debates about art. But she couldn’t feel the sizzle the painters felt, and for the moment it seemed that the pictures did not have very much to do with her. ‘I dont think them so good as books’, she wrote to Violet.19 And it was an ‘awful bore’ to dress herself up as a Gauguin muse for the benefit of delighted photographers after the Post-Impressionist Ball.20 She was not quite sure how she and her writing fitted in. She enlisted Clive as a critic, while sending kisses via him to Vanessa. Really she wanted the praise of her father. She was making something, she was brimming over with it, but she did not know to whom she could give it. ‘O to whom?’ Rhoda keeps asking in The Waves, walking through the world with flowers she has gathered, which she wants to give away.21
There was huge pressure to marry. Virginia received no fewer than four proposals, but she couldn’t give her life to any of the men who asked. She said ‘yes’ to her friend Lytton Strachey for a rash moment in February 1909, but by the next day both were thinking better of it. She knew people were discussing her sexuality, and she was made to feel self-conscious as the virgin of her milieu. It felt as if everyone was thinking and talking about bodies: sex, secret affairs, babies, homosexuality, more sex. Her difference from the others showed itself in small ways: when she sat to the painter Francis Dodd for a portrait she knew that she could not pose nude, whereas her sister and her artist friends thought nothing of taking off their clothes.
The small things added up. Madge Vaughan suggested that her writing was too dreamy and lacked ‘heart’, which sounded to Virginia like a comment on her virginity. She half made a joke of it: ‘If marriage is necessary to one’s style, I shall have to think about it.’22 She thought very hard. Watching her sister intently, she played out marriage and motherhood in her mind. (‘By the way,’ she wrote fiercely to Vanessa, ‘I have imagined precisely what it is like to have a child.’23) She needed to show she was capable of both, but she wasn’t certain she wanted either. For a long time, all through her mid- to late twenties, everything seemed to be at stake.
She was still inventing new domestic arrangements. Wanting more and more to get into the country to read and write in peace, Virginia rented very cheaply a small house under the Sussex Downs, in a landscape she would love for the rest of her life. It would become the Cornwall of her adulthood, and in tribute she called the first of her Sussex homes Little Talland House. Then in the autumn of 1911, after long conversations about ‘how to live’, she and Adrian exchanged Fitzroy Square for Brunswick Square and set up a kind of lodging house for friends.24 It was all very carefully and democratically organized, with regular meal times (‘trays will be placed in the hall punctually’) and rent payments just sufficient to cover expenses.25 It was also, for these respectable middle-class people, a deeply unconventional way of doing things. Miss Stephen was now the only woman in a house she shared with four men: John Maynard Keynes and Duncan Grant living as a homosexual couple on the ground floor, her brother (who had been Grant’s lover) on the first floor, and, in the cheapest rooms at the top of the house, ‘a penniless Jew’.26 Violet, dismayed, found excuses not to visit. Venerable Stephen relatives were alarmed and looked the other way.
There was one other complication: the top-floor lodger was in love with the landlady. Leonard Woolf had been Lytton Strachey’s best friend at Cambridge, and part of Thoby Stephen’s circle. After university he followed a different course from the others, setting off miserably to Ceylon for a life in the Colonial Service. He disliked the whole system, but he did his work effectively and held on to his imaginative life by writing a novel called The Village in the Jungle. He was well launched on a successful career when he returned to London for a year’s leave in 1911. Leonard had always found Virginia alluring. Now she trusted him enough to read him her novel, and they talked together about what they wanted for their lives. It was clear that Leonard could not take Virginia to Ceylon, but increasingly he realized that he couldn’t leave her behind. If he proposed to her, he would be giving up the only career he knew and taking an enormous risk. And how would she respond?
At first she demurred, but they spent more time together through the spring of 1912, both in London and at Asheham in Sussex, the larger and more appealing successor to Little Talland House. They had found it while out walking together: a remote, romantic Regency house surrounded by downs and peace, and with a rough, sheep-grazed field stretching away in front. ‘The grass of the garden and field seemed almost to come up to the sitting rooms and into the windows’, Leonard remembered.27 They both adored it.
In May, after many careful, exploratory conversations and letters, Virginia told Leonard she loved him. They were extremely honest with each other. Virginia was clear that she was not sexually attracted to Leonard, but she could still imagine their marriage as ‘a tremendous living thing, always alive, always hot’.28 Their affection was empathetic and playful as they planned a life of work, conversation, and freedom. They married in St Pancras Town Hall in August 1912 and quickly set up a routine divided between Asheham and their rented rooms in London, a routine which seemed to both of them ‘ideal’. Virginia wrote to the friends who had been her confidantes through the years of single life and told them calmly how happy she was. She was not passionate about Leonard, but she was very certain about him. ‘It has been worth waiting for’, she told her old teacher Janet Case.29 Not the least of her happiness was this inalienable fact: ‘He has written a novel; so have I.’30
Duncan Grant and John Maynard Keynes in 1912. They lived together on the ground floor at 38 Brunswick Square, with Adrian on the first floor, Virginia on the second, and Leonard Woolf right at the top. (Photograph by Vanessa Bell © Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy Henrietta Garnett)
The novel she had finished, the ‘work of imagination’ that had taken all these years and cost her much agonized revision, was The Voyage Out.31 The ‘voyage’ in question was a journey from England to South America, undertaken by twenty-four-year-old Rachel Vinrace, who is escorted by her aunt Helen away from a narrow domestic life in Richmond into an exotic, unknown terrain. The voyage is also (rather predictably) Rachel’s personal journey into adult life. Coming up against other people’s opinions, she must repeatedly decide for herself what she thinks; and, coming up against male sexuality for the first time, she must try to understand her own desires.
It was not an especially original framework, but in Woolf’s hands this material becomes obscure, slippery, abstract, hinting at things that don’t quite crystallize, refusing to resolve into any solidly discernible shape. Challengingly, the heroine is extremely hard to know, and often infuriating. Most of the time she is so silent and inconclusive that there is a space at the centre of the book where we might expect the heroine to be. Entailed in this silence is Woolf’s furious indictment of the passivity bred in women, but there is no direct channel along which this fury can flow. ‘Doesn’t it make your blood boil?’ Terence asks Rachel, thinking of the unrepresented views of women, but we hear only the uncertain answer Rachel makes in her mind and the few conciliatory remarks she can voice.32 At the end of the novel she contracts a violent fever and dies, which feels like her final and uncontrollably physical statement of something, but there is no saying what. Perhaps, in the tradition of Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, Rachel Vinrace is a dreamer who has to die; perhaps her illness is her paralysed rejection of marriage. Or perhaps it is the arbitrary death which does sometimes come for travellers, which came for Thoby Stephen in Greece, and which was not at all a judgment on the way he had lived his life. It is one of the most audacious things about Woolf’s fiction that not everything has a meaning.
In this first novel Woolf was courting the idea of self-exposure. She was, after all, writing about a woman who leaves behind a claustrophobic home to explore new ways of living, arrives on the verge of marriage, and then falls into a fever that makes her mad. So there was a strange courage in her decision to make Rachel as naive and embarrassing as she is, to write this story about a young woman’s profound social and sexual ignorance, knowing it would be read by a group of urbane, experienced friends. There is no easy self-romanticizing in The Voyage Out, though the plot offered plenty of room for it. Helen chides Rachel in a way that would be mortifying for most women of twenty-four: ‘“Oh Rachel,” she cried. “It’s like having a puppy in the house having you with one – a puppy that brings one’s underclothes down into the hall.”’33 So, though Rachel is a radical thinker, despising the middle-class status quo and wanting to ask big questions, she is not the heroic figure of change Woolf might have chosen. Her bold moves with underclothes are not those of the stylish Bloomsbury iconoclast, but of the unknowing family pet.
Dora Carrington’s letters to Lytton Strachey often came with illustrations. She sent this one while staying at the Woolfs’ Sussex home in January 1917 and added: ‘Asheham as you perceive is surrounded by sunshine.’ (Dora Carrington, Asheham House)
This novel written with keen self-consciousness is deeply concerned with ‘unknowing’. It looks for the value in what is intuitive. If Rachel is ‘like a bird half asleep in its nest’, as Terence suggests, that is perhaps part of her power.34 Her final hallucinations are anticipated by a narcotic atmosphere that characterizes many earlier scenes. Figures loom indistinctly; surface detail evaporates to leave only what Rachel sees: blocks of matter with people moving across them as ‘patches of light’.35 There is a visionary quality about this, and such abstract perception will yield in Woolf’s later novels moments of startling clarity. Here there is a note of apologetic dreaminess, and more confusion than clarity. But confusion, in The Voyage Out, seems a better way to unravel the truth of things than the hard, bright expressions of certainty to which it is constantly being opposed.
To send this novel out into the world was terrifying. This was exacerbated by the fact that the publisher Woolf sent it to was her half-brother Gerald Duckworth. He accepted it, but this proved the beginning and not the end of Virginia Woolf’s publication trials. A year into her marriage – a year which seems to have been happy and productive – she had another breakdown, the first of a series between 1913 and 1915 which were the worst of her life. She went into hospital at Twickenham and longed to get out, but when she got out she got worse. At Brunswick Square in the early evening of 9 September 1913 she took an overdose of Veronal. Geoffrey Keynes, Maynard’s brother, was a surgeon at St Bartholomew’s and drove Leonard fast to the hospital for a stomach pump. Back at Brunswick Square, a team of doctors and nurses worked for hours to save her. That night she could well have died.
She remained very ill all through the following spring. Leonard established and oversaw a quiet routine at Asheham, which Virginia raged against and submitted to by turns. She had the terrible feeling of wasting both their lives. She was ‘grateful and repentant’, she told her ‘dearest Mongoose’.36 She was immensely sad. There were months of patient convalescence, during which she trained her racing mind to settle on slow, repetitive tasks. She did basic typing for other people, she gardened, and she learned to cook. The Voyage Out, so long delayed, was at last published in March 1915. But Virginia’s response to the occasion goes unrecorded. Having suffered, just a few weeks before, the onset of a breakdown more severe than anything she had known, Virginia was too ill to have anything to do with it.
Leonard and Virginia Woolf at Asheham, 1914. ‘He has written a novel; so have I.’ (© Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy Henrietta Garnett)