Virginia Woolf: A Portrait

THE adolescent bicycling down the streets of London is a ghost, unless, flesh and blood, she is moving among fantasies. She lives between two worlds, each of which destabilizes the other. She struggles in these Victorian times, clings to details, to the everyday, takes note of it; she is afraid of horses, of the accidents they cause in the city thoroughfares, where she notices the dangers everywhere. Dressmakers terrify her, with their fittings, make her want to stab them with their own scissors (she is joking here, she is not mad). Books reassure her; she consumes them one after another, devours them. She …

She has lost her mother.

Her mother is a depraved dead woman. Elusive in her lifetime. Like everyone else, you say? Yes, but she is dead. It was two years ago; her daughter was thirteen years old. The other six children …

Her mother’s words to her before she died: “Hold yourself straight, my little Goat.”¹

Her mother’s death portends other deaths to come.

After the death that followed her mother’s, the daughter remembers saying to herself: “But this is impossible; things aren’t, can’t be, like this.”²

And we have seen that, at fifteen years old, she wrote: “How is one to live in such a world?”³ (she is fifteen years old here, on this page). Her name is Virginia.

Her mother, who is dead, was named Julia. She was named Julia Jackson, Julia Duckworth, Julia Stephen, over the course of her birth, her marriages, time. Julia Jackson and Julia Stephen are dead. Julia Duckworth as well, and Stella Duckworth, her daughter from a first marriage, would soon be dead. Virginia’s half-sister. Two years after their mother. She was twenty-eight years old.

“The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?” It would descend again and Virginia Woolf would describe Virginia Stephen: “my wings still creased, sitting there on the edge of my broken chrysalis.”⁴

1895. With Julia, Virginia lost what she never had: her mother, elusive. When she was not dead, Julia Stephen was absent. If present, she was unavailable. “Can I remember ever being alone with her for more than a few minutes?”⁵ her daughter would sigh. Dead or living, she slipped away, became the very essence of lack, the mark of absence. But how to intercept that absence (and with her death, the absence of that absence), how to seize hold of it? How to bring back to life what never was? How to safeguard it? How even to evoke it?

Virginia would struggle her entire life to define, to discern the absence that she had lost. To safeguard, recover, restore it. Forty-four years later, in 1939, World War II was approaching and Virginia was still searching for that perpetually lost mother. Virginia had already written in 1907: “How difficult it is to single her out as she really was; to imagine what she was thinking, to put a single sentence into her mouth! I dream; I make up pictures of a summer’s afternoon.” The following year, in 1940, under bombardment and a few months before her death: “What would one not give to recapture a single phrase even! or the tone of the clear round voice.”⁶

Thirteen years earlier, To the Lighthouse had appeared, those pages haunted by Julia Stephen, alias Mrs. Ramsay, who is able to capture the excitement, incorporate it, offer it to her eight children, to friends invited to her enormous seaside summer home, all of whom depend upon the meaning she gives to them, as Mr. Ramsay depends on it, her tormented, begging husband. All of whom are drawn to her, the woman who asks herself, facing the long dinner table where the residents gather and while she fills their plates: “But what have I done with my life?”⁷

Mrs. Ramsay, whose weaknesses we can guess: her taste for power, her desire to seduce, her capacity to withdraw, her emotional rapaciousness, and the disarray beneath her many, delightful, slightly faltering perfections. Mrs. Ramsay, whose death is going to ravage a world nevertheless unchanged but whose survivors will suffer “the old horror”: “to want and want and not to have.”⁸

Her illusion: Virginia believed that through the Ramsays she had overcome that horror, exorcised the haunting, absent mother and father, and with them, their defection that “wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again.”⁹ But Mrs. Stephen escapes forever, even from Mrs. Ramsay. To the Lighthouse exorcised nothing. The memory remains incarcerated in the desperate waiting for what was (or what never was) in a world forever on hold, where things and beings become signs of what can only be called absence.

Here, a mother’s absence seals shut her past and leaves no smiling image of her.

But being dead, it seems (it seems to me) that Julia does laugh sometimes, now settled in, and that accurate memories of her do not dare surface. The day that Virginia received the 1928 Femina-Vie Heureuse Prize for To the Lighthouse, for instance, Elizabeth Robins, formerly a great Ibsen actress, told her during the reception that her mother was not at all like the dying swan of the sublime photos taken by her aunt, Mrs. Cameron, the famous pioneering photographer, nor like Leslie Stephen’s languorous memories, and “she [Julia] would suddenly say something so unexpected, from that Madonna face, one thought it vicious.”¹⁰

The face of a madonna. So much beauty. Mrs. Cameron’s photos, which seem dated today, testify to it. Julia Jackson, then Julia Duckworth, perfection itself. A little too smooth, according to Leonard Woolf, who considered the famous splendor of the Pattle family women, of whom Julia’s mother was one, too feminine and not female enough. He preferred the Stephen side in Virginia and Vanessa, tougher, more masculine, which gave them character in addition to harmony, according to him.

Before her premature death, her premature aging, Julia (now) Stephen’s face hardened, as if shattered, and she had an air of utter hopelessness and spite, even beyond the personal resentment that she seemed to embody in many of her earlier photos. She died at forty-nine years old and looked more like seventy. Such a discrepancy between the dazzling, youthful ingénue and the same woman in her mature years, suddenly aged, savage, disappointed, even vindictive. In the last photos, surrounded by her family, she seems not to be there and, more than ever, not to want to be there.

Julia, who signed petitions against the suffragettes, was nonetheless often freed from her Victorian Angel in the House duties, from her house at least, to embody another cliché of the era, going about doing good in the community “as a sister of mercy,”¹¹ according to Leslie Stephen. She felt equally called to all suffering, the bedside of her sick parents, death watches over relatives, troubled friends in need of consolation, London slums, Cornwall paupers. She rushed from one to the other, sometimes traveling long distances for some days.

“When she had saved a life from the deep waters, that is, she sought at once for another person to rescue, whereas I went off to take a glass with the escaped,”¹² recalled Leslie, her husband.

Stella, the oldest, still a child, thus took charge of the house, the family, colds, meals, lessons, while Julia devoted herself to the passion that was her ruin and rushed off in all directions to care for the sick and afflicted, who were tactful enough to suffer bad health—even to die—a good distance away: from her husband and eight children, seven of which are hers.

Seven children. And what monopolized her, held her captive, simultaneously paralyzed and impassioned her—what, behind the “very quick; very definite; very upright” woman made her “the sad, the silent” absorbed woman—was the memory of her first three children’s father, the unique, incomparable Herbert Duckworth, whose accidental death four years into their marriage seemed somehow to have killed Julia too. At twenty-four, she would spend hours prostrate on his grave, pregnant with their third child. She announced, “All life seemed a shipwreck,” and she was tempted to let herself founder. A fascination with water, its tragic promises. Virginia saw her mother as “an exhausted swimmer, deeper and deeper in the water.”¹³

So many images that would not leave her alone.

Julia Duckworth pulled herself together. She had lost her faith and “flung aside her religion.”¹⁴ In a state of vengeance. In a state of fury. Unexpressed resentment. Deliberate absence.

Rejecting those who had a claim on her, offering herself to those who expected nothing from her, because such devotion took on meaning as a vocation stemming from her grief, an edifying response to her broken life, a corollary to the tragedy of Herbert Duckworth, that is to say, a permanent tie to him. She would nevertheless live out the rest of her life fully and tenaciously … even as she turned away from it.

The care she so unsparingly lavished upon others is all the more striking for being unexpected; almost public, even showy, it conferred upon her an air of altruism, provided her her own domain. Gave her the right to be unavailable; never “more than a few minutes”¹⁵ reserved for Virginia, who early on sensed Herbert’s presence when her mother, often so distant, so sad and absorbed, seemed to be dreaming of him. And Virginia dreamed with her.

Julia’s magic spells. And, not the least of them, reticence. Leslie Stephen claimed to have loved even her reticence when he went on about her, subjecting the dead woman’s children to endless babble about their mother’s love for him, a love she rarely demonstrated while alive, trying to persuade them, and himself, through his excessive theatrical grieving, which would lead him to reveal more intimate facts about their marriage than Julia would ever have tolerated.

Julia’s ambiguities. Despite her deficiencies or because of them, they left Virginia with dazzling, delightful images. For example, the image of Julia finally nabbed by Virginia, descending the stairs with her, arm in arm, laughing, or letting her choose among her jewelry which to wear one evening. Julia, always on the stairs. Virginia asks her how Leslie courted her, and she doesn’t answer. And the sound of silver bracelets, and the voice at night that sometimes suggested, before sleep, that she think of shining things, “rainbows and bells.”¹⁶

And then Julia, the “omnibus expert,” sitting in her “shabby cloak” near the driver, indignant that the bus company did not provide him straw to keep his feet warm. “Your feet must be cold.” Julia accompanying Stella to dances, she herself surrounded by the suitors of the daughter she was chaperoning, whose successes, whose wooers “excited many instincts long dormant in her mother.” She loved the young men confiding their secrets to her … and it was Stella, she complained, who “would insist upon going home, long before the night was over, for fear lest she should be tired.” Stella, who worshipped her, always in her mother’s shadow, “that passive, suffering affection,” Virginia would write. A mother who did not like Stella and who called her “Old Cow,” this girl almost as beautiful as she had once been, a little plainer perhaps, and who bore for her an “almost canine” devotion. Before their marriage, Leslie would try to call Julia’s attention to her harshness toward her daughter, in vain. He would not insist.¹⁷

Julia’s sly humor, sending Virginia to go “tease” Leslie, too attentive to a seductive American, Mrs. Grey, having her whisper in his shocked ear to stop flirting “with pretty ladies.” And Julia’s austere grace “as she came up the path by the lawn of St Ives; slight, shapely—she held herself very straight,” remembers Virginia, who adds: “I was playing. I stopped, about to speak to her. But she half turned from us, and lowered her eyes. From that indescribably sad gesture I knew that Philips, the man who had been crushed on the line and whom she had been visiting, was dead. It’s over, she seemed to say. I knew, and was awed by the thought of death. At the same time I felt that her gesture as a whole was lovely.” The gesture indicating death.¹⁸

Virginia no longer distinguished Julia’s beauty from these details, mixed emotions, contradictory sides. Beauty that she accepts “as the natural quality that a mother … had by virtue of being our mother. It was part of her calling.”¹⁹ And that was enough for childhood, for that time to unfold happily, dynamically, even jubilantly, under the maternal aegis, no matter how capricious the mother. Julia’s swings were undoubtedly noticed and distressing, especially after their tragic interruption, which rendered every missed opportunity poignant, irreversible.

A before. An after. The big, dark house at Hyde Park Gate, in an elegant London neighborhood, seems at first like a nest where brothers and half-brothers, sisters and half-sisters comfortably nestle. Life was more serious and studious there than at Talland House, the summer home rocked by the waves, “one, two, one, two,” a bright, sparkling spring surrounded by flowers, scented with every youthful joy under the Cornwall sun of St. Ives. Virginia the cricket champion writes: “Vanessa and I were both what was called tomboys; that is, we played cricket, scrambled over rocks, climbed trees.” Every moment something fun; The Hyde Park Gate News kept by the family, its only readers: chronicles of everyday life, recorded especially by Thoby and Virginia, soon primarily Virginia, and her first thrill as author when Julia notices one of her entries and gives it to a friend to read: “It was like being a violin and being played upon.”²⁰

And then … the whip struck for the first time. “The greatest disaster that could happen.”²¹

The lips, still warm, that one night pronounced: “Hold yourself straight, my little Goat.” Addressing a child brought to see her mother alive for the last time; and at dawn, the cold face, of which touching cold metal would always remind her, the dead face that Virginia kissed before going to the window, saying to herself that she didn’t feel anything except the desire to laugh because one of the nurses was pretending to cry, while she watched Dr. Seton head down the street and Stella caressed her mother’s cheek and opened a button on her nightgown: “She always liked to have it like that.” Passing her widowed father stumbling, distraught, from the death chamber. Virginia reaching out for him and being pushed away. The father wrapped hastily in big towels, given a few drops of brandy in milk. And the pallid Stella watching over them all, considered as slow as she was beautiful, but showing true genius when Virginia, distraught, confessed to her that she saw a man sitting beside the dead woman. Stella, a bit frightened herself, saying after a moment: “It’s nice that she shouldn’t be alone.”²²

And all that could no longer not have been.

But all that had been, where had it come from? How had this family come about? How had Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, Adrian come to exist? How had Leslie Stephen married the eternally shipwrecked Julia and usurped Herbert Duckworth, the eternal prince charming?

And who was Leslie Stephen, minor philosopher, highly respected intellectual, surrounded by writer friends, among them Thomas Hardy, William Meredith, and Henry James? A former priest of the Anglican Church, he was one of the first English mountaineers, loved the Alps, and helped to found the famous Alpine Club.

And where did Virginia’s mute fury toward him come from? Her desperate resentment and rage, as well as her equally desperate attachment? They surface in her diary and especially in Moments of Being, a posthumous work that includes, most importantly, two notebooks of memories recorded many years later by a Virginia forever ravaged by the eros of childhood and its libidinous currents; by urges and desires, frozen by grief, crushed by the living, yet emerging alive in these impatient pages from the past.

Two times, thirty years apart, Virginia revived and rehearsed the same history, the same scenes from her childhood and adolescence, and sounded the same complaint. Nothing had healed her. Not age, not the work, not her varied, intense, and often rich life, not even her hardships had diverted her from the original mysteries, parental figures, major suppressions. Time, work, their passions had only nurtured and intensified the original pain. Virginia Stephen, at twenty-five years old, in Reminiscences, and then Virginia Woolf, at fifty-seven years old, in Sketch of the Past, returned powerless, ecstatic, and horrified to the time of plenitude and its interruption, then to death and incest. To the crudeness and savagery of an existence that appeared to be utterly civilized.

Her project, four months before her suicide: “I think of taking my mountain top—that persistent vision²³—as a starting point”; a week before her death, she writes again to Lady Tweedsmuir: “All this afternoon I’ve been trying to arrange some of my father’s old books.” For months, she has been absorbed in Leslie’s books, papers, letters, while around her unfolds that war whose end she will not witness.²⁴

Thus, on June 20, 1940, John Lehmann met them for lunch and, deathly white, “his pale eyes paler than usual,” announced that France had stopped fighting. “Whats to become of me?” writes Virginia that evening in her diary. And two days later, on June 19, she notes down the circumstances under which she is recording old memories: “Today the dictators dictate their terms to France.” In what will posthumously become Sketch of the Past—an immersion into her troubled youth, troubled especially by Leslie Stephen—she writes of an organ grinder in the square, the heat, a man selling strawberries. Virginia goes on: “I sit in my room at 37 M[ecklenburgh S[quare] and turn to my father.”²⁵

Recalling how for a long time, until the publication of To the Lighthouse, she would catch herself moving her lips and silently laying into him, arguing, silently unleashing her rage toward him, revealing to herself what she did not say to him, what “was impossible to say aloud” and what she was finally trying to write here, at fifty-eight years old, but does not formulate, would never formulate, not even for her eyes alone, not even in thought: “How deep they drove themselves into me, the things it was impossible to say aloud.”²⁶

Like no one else, Virginia Woolf knew how to delineate, to capture and convey all those things still marked by what forbids them; but these things no one would hear, not even she who harbored them, knew them, did not say them; did not say them to herself, identify them, or free herself from them. Lurking in the shadows but felt, they would not leave her, linked to the livid hell that Hyde Park Gate became once Julia was dead and yet endlessly, obsessively invoked, harped on by Leslie. Who henceforth made this mother, undoubtedly elusive but lively and captivating while alive, into the dead object of his insatiable, unquenchable sexual desire.

Grief foundered at Hyde Park Gate, monopolized by the father’s anguish alone, obsessed as he was by his wife, a fetish bordering on necrophilia, which he imposed upon Julia’s children, forbidden to grieve with him around their shared memories and their shattered life, which together they could have mourned. Around a collective wound. Maimed children faced with the passionate instincts of a personally and physiologically frustrated man; children struggling with their urgent, insatiable plea for what, they knew, would never be again.

Emphatic to the point of obscene, Leslie dispossessed Julia’s sons and daughters of their grief—those who were adults and already orphans, Herbert’s children: George, Stella, and Gerald Duckworth, twenty-seven, twenty-six, and twenty-five years old; those from his own marriage: Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, and Adrian Stephen, sixteen, fifteen, thirteen, and twelve years old. All were overwhelmed by Leslie’s exhibitions of need for their mother, the missing object of his libido and not the beloved being, mourned by each of them, whose absence they all shared.

Leslie would make this loss the excuse for horrid scenes, sordid hours, an insidiously incestuous atmosphere. Misfortune was converted into the worst calamity.

“Quite naturally unhappy,” Virginia and her siblings came to “almost welcome” “the sharp pang” that was “recognizable pain,” even to take a kind of comfort in that inexorable but identified, anticipated distress, compared to the dubious atmosphere surrounding them that “hideous as it was, obscured both living and dead; and for long did unpardonable mischief by substituting for the shape of a true and most vivid mother, nothing better than an unlovable phantom.”²⁷

Damaged: both the memory and the mourning; with his shameless contortions of widowhood, Leslie Stephen discredited them.

In the last photographs of the couple, he and Julia both look extremely old and seem to compete for moroseness; both appear sullen and severe with their young band of children (whose sour-tempered grandparents they could be, exhausted by life). It’s hard to imagine Leslie ever capable of infatuation. His frustration? It dated back a long time! The merciless shock, the wound of grief must have reawakened it, renewed the awareness of an older deprivation, habitually hidden until then and suddenly freed by a horrible jolt. Shaken loose was his long-buried sexual, sensual life, his paralyzed urges. What he lamented, through the wife he memorialized under all his talk, was also his inability to claim what he must have felt ready for again, open to again, although it was too late: a whole sexual arena, which seemed foreclosed to him.

His recourse? For the philosopher, writing is a weapon. He undertook the Mausoleum Book sixteen days after Julia’s death, to her glory and to be read by her children. There he revives the time of feelings and puts Julia on display, anxious to convince them (and convince himself) that his “noble wife”²⁸ to him (as to Herbert Duckworth), even though he never got her to say it, he admits, loved him.

Wild passion is notably absent in his letters to his living wife, in which he describes not the state of his soul but rather that of his intestines.

If Julia laughed, embarrassed and a little shocked, at Virginia’s questions on her courtship, the Mausoleum compensates—oh how it compensates—for that reserve and broadcasts with great emotion the intimacy of the couple and the couples they had each been part of during their successive marriages. Leslie’s intimacy with his two “darlings,” first with Minny, that is “my darling Minny,” Thackeray’s youngest daughter, with “her beautiful bronze hair, brilliantly white teeth and delicate complexion one minute with the soft tint of the china rose and then again white as a lily…. One day she would look like the young girl she really was and, on the next, twenty years older, so varying were her moods and expression … she was sincere almost to bluntness.” Though elsewhere he calls her not very pretty,²⁹ sweet and gay, hardly brilliant: “She was a poem, though not a poetess.”³⁰

This sweet, gay poem, also in love with the Alps, would play with their baby Laura for a few summers in the Grindelwald meadows, never anticipating that their laughter, the looks exchanged between them, would be the last signs of kindness Laura would experience. Minny would die unsuspecting of her daughter’s future difficulties, her abominable fate.

Laura, “Her Ladyship the Lady of the Lake,” as the other children nicknamed her, “backward,” in the words of her father, would be no more than an unseemly, disagreeable problem that had to be rectified. Scolded, punished, roughly handled, but most importantly, barely, grievously loved by Leslie alone, who was ravaged with pity, impatience, anger, and consternation, she would be permanently ruined in a time when nothing was known about such marginal cases, forced to fall into line regardless. Today she would be treated very differently. Ignorance, cruel as it was, thus incited cruelty; Laura would be lost among the three Duckworth children, more or less her contemporaries, and the four Stephens, born one after the other, whom she destabilized. As she did Julia.³¹

Virginia would flee her memory all her life. Nevertheless, indignant and terrified, she mentions that “besides the three Duckworths and the four Stephens there was also Thackeray’s grand-daughter” (and not the daughter of her own father), “a vacant-eyed girl whose idiocy was becoming daily more obvious, who could hardly read, who would throw the scissors into the fire, who was tongue-tied and stammered and yet had to appear at table with the rest of us.”³²

Leslie, often wildly angry and distressed at his daughter’s limitations, which he considered a “perversity,”³³ worked desperately to teach her to read and succeeded, but to whose benefit? Laura got to the end of Aladdin at eleven years old; at fourteen, she read Robinson Crusoe and at sixteen, Alice in Wonderland.

Pedagogical harassment, strictness, outbursts of rage followed by remorse were the extent of interactions with Laura. The distance and confusion grew. The anomaly was reinforced, the gap widened. A little kindness would no doubt have improved her life, allowed her a place in this already “blended” family, instead of a steady withdrawal from their life and her perceptions of it, unknown to them. Incongruous. At those rare times when someone reached out to her, like Minny’s older sister, her Aunt Anny, Laura ran happily into their open arms, laughing with delight at their embrace. Those were the exceptions: Aunt Anny had her own life to lead; such “moments of being” were sporadic at best.

No longer quietly sequestered with her widowed father, Laura weighed on Hyde Park Gate, as Leslie’s worries and remorse weighed on Julia, and this thankless cause, this heavy burden, excited her far less than others that drew her elsewhere. As she sent Virginia to distract Leslie from the beautiful Mrs. Gray, this time she undoubtedly drafted her son George Duckworth, a favorite with her husband. Leslie records this incident with feeling in his Mausoleum Book:

After having been increasingly isolated and confined to one part of the house, she was sent away to special schools. Then, at nineteen, she was institutionalized, perhaps wrongly and certainly for life. She would live seventy-five years, abandoned in an asylum for nearly sixty of them, where her condition deteriorated completely.

After Stella and Leslie died, no one visited her, or only very infrequently, a distant relative perhaps, like a certain Dorothea Stephen who, during a visit with Virginia, spoke to her of Laura: “the same as ever, and never stops talking, and occasionally says, ‘I told him to go away,’ or ‘Put it down, then,’ quite sensibly; but the rest is unintelligible.”³⁵

The only time Virginia really includes her in her family is when, in “Old Bloomsbury,” she mentions saying good-bye to Hyde Park Gate, where “not only had the furniture been dispersed. The family which had seemed equally wedged together had broken apart too,” and she includes in that family a half-sister, “incarcerated with a doctor in an asylum.” But that was a long time ago.³⁶

Twelve years younger than Laura Stephen, Virginia Woolf died four years before her, and her every hour was lived simultaneously with those of that wasted life, discarded alive. A suppression perpetuated in the Woolfian opus, where she is practically omitted—we have just read one of the very rare passages mentioning her, a half dozen, including the following one—where Virginia willingly opts to leave her out of the biography of their father that Fred Maitland is preparing: “The history of Laura is really the most tragic thing in his [Leslie Stephen’s] life I think; and one that one can hardly describe in the life.”³⁷ Nevertheless, we will see how their brief cohabitation and her suppressed memory haunted Virginia. Her determination to forget it, to elude it, to erase all record of it may serve as proof of that.

She had witnessed Leslie’s other daughter alienated, and thus rejected, despised, roughly handled, powerless. Locked up. Laura held Virginia spellbound, horror stricken and terrified. Laura’s terrible difficulties with reading would drive Virginia to books as a child, to flaunting the incredible list of thick volumes she consumed. She knew that if you were called mad, you were at the mercy of a father, or a husband. And how not to think of the Great Lady of the Lake when Virginia ends up at the bottom of the River Ouse? Who was waiting for her there? Who would she go to rejoin?

Laura’s would be a substantial legacy, growing from an initial investment that would have time to yield a profit. Leonard, widowed … would claim Virginia’s share; to no avail. He was the one who remarked—on one of those rare occasions when Virginia mentioned this half-sister—that she was “the one we could have spared.”³⁸

Laura’s mother’s death: a disaster infinitely worse for her than Julia’s death was for Julia’s children. She was five years old when Minny was abruptly seized with convulsions one night and died the next day. It was Leslie’s birthday (he would never celebrate it again). He was forty-three years old.

Now it was on the eve of this drama that Julia happened to appear in his life, when, as a young widow grieving for five years, she paid a neighborly visit to the Stephen couple, but found them to be so happy that she felt out of place, even sadder than usual, and she departed almost immediately. Only to return the next day to comfort Leslie, now the grief-stricken widower. Three years later, they were married. Twenty years later and Leslie relives this same drama, plunged into grief this time over Julia, who had become for him that “strange solemn music”³⁹ in which he had immersed himself. But also Julia Stephen, discretely elusive, impenetrable, and reticent, whom he now pursued posthumously, harassing her as he harassed their children.

The Mausoleum Book includes a litany on the intimacies of both marriages of both parents, Leslie the sole survivor among them. An exhibition of the conjugal feelings of the dead procreators, Herbert, Julia, Minny. Only Laura, in the asylum, will be spared word of the happiness her father provided his dear Minny. As for Herbert, he elicits some jealousy: “There is a touch of pain—I cannot deny it—in the clear consciousness … that my darling Julia owed her purest happiness to another man.” Yet Leslie thanks his gallant posthumous rival for the “unqualified happiness,” the “perfect happiness,” he bestowed upon “my darling,” who “made a complete surrender of herself in the fullest sense: she would have no reserves from her lover.”⁴⁰

Leslie paws through their personal lives, puts parental agonies and ecstasies on display. The Mausoleum Book is always proper and nevertheless oozes impropriety, especially since it was meant for children, fragile and grieving for their mother, a mother thus exposed, and for the Duckworths, exposed not by a father but by a second husband. Its sentimentality camouflages (or accentuates) the insinuated indecency. It flaunts a parental web permeated with tacit lusts, implicit omissions. Hyde Park Gate resounds with virtuous words, displays of remorse, sweet memories derived from the dead, aroused by her and behind which throb passions and desires that are very simply (and legitimately) sexual. But made mawkish, concealed under the dripping words of Victorian Anglicanism, they weigh even more heavily, equivocal, hybrid, in an atmosphere thick with cleverly circumvented prohibitions, furtively transgressed limits, with a licentiousness capable of transforming what would have been inevitable sexual deprivation, legitimate sexual urges, into depravity.

It is not Leslie’s actions that are being questioned here, but the lugubrious, suspect atmosphere that he established, that he exuded, and his appetites masked under his lamentations; “in those days nothing was clear,” writes Virginia. A lascivious, poisonous fog in which brothers and sisters struggled, that “choked us and blinded us,” she recalls. An insidious permissiveness that would lead to incest but without coitus, as Lytton Strachey used to say. A groping, suspended kind of incest experienced openly and overtly and nevertheless unacknowledged.⁴¹

A long chapter in the life of Hyde Park Gate, which had become a trap. Stella’s trap. The naturally and essentially submissive, devotedly self-sacrificing, malleable, and very beautiful Stella Duckworth, who could only accept Leslie Stephen as the sacred charge handed down from her mother. And who would henceforth provide him “any comfort, whatever its nature,” according to Virginia. Who continues: “Whatever comfort she had to give. But what comfort could she give?” before noting “suddenly she was placed in the utmost intimacy” with this elderly man of letters, although, despite their long cohabitation, they hardly knew each other.⁴²

He would descend upon this stepdaughter who so strangely resembled his “darling Julia” at the time of her beauty; he would depend upon her to such an extent that all she could absolutely depend upon was that dependence. Soon “she found that she had completely pledged herself to her stepfather; he expected entire self-surrender on her part,” notes Virginia, who read the Mausoleum Book and knows the meaning Leslie gave to that expression.⁴³

In Moments of Being, what is “impossible to say aloud,”⁴⁴ what is never said, surfaces: Virginia Woolf speaks about it, but without ever pronouncing it. For Virginia, nothing seemed to exist unless she wrote it down, she confided to Nicolson before writing it in her diary.

She gives explanations and finds excuses for what was merely suggested. Because Stella lacked self-confidence, “she gave indiscriminately, conscious that she had not the best of all to give.” Being alone and unadvised, her stepfather considered it “his right.” And Stella, who “could not give him intellectual companionship, … must give him the only thing she had.” Virginia does not say what that was.⁴⁵

But it is certainly what Virginia would have wanted both to reveal and to keep hidden in 1940, swept up in her memories: what alone was tangible: the suspicion. The suspense, the threat, the imprint of that which had not taken place.

Because there is nothing definite to say about that incest floating about Hyde Park Gate after Julia’s death, in the form of fantasies. On Leslie’s part, there were apparently only vague impulses, a duplicity paired with repression, and that repression oddly exhibited. What Virginia insinuates remains vague, but nevertheless seems relegated to the realm of the virtual: forbidden gestures would certainly be sidestepped, hardly hinted at; they would no doubt be avoided, like all overtly improper situations. Leslie Stephen was too attached to his illusions to shatter them so. To his image and his convictions as well, to his own self-regard, his need to believe in his own innocence. But he and Stella knew what boundaries were crossed.

Under the guise of paternal duty and a passion devoted exclusively to Julia, Leslie hoped to be understood without risk, but here is a confession that, moreover, includes its retraction, as well as contrition, desire, a pathetic attempt to maintain the ambiguity of an equivocal—and now impossible—relationship. This is not a matter of a single, unusual outburst, but of a final effort to continue that morbid, covert game, played daily until now with his stepdaughter; a subterfuge aimed at maintaining it, which he knew to be in vain. With regard to his troubled relations with Stella, this is indeed his swan song.

Leslie was reminding the newly married wife of Jack Hills; he had already said such things to her, without saying what had to be kept quiet but that Stella understood, since she knew that she could not listen to her stepfather were he to express himself otherwise. Stella knew and he knew it, and she knew that he knew she was aware of the profaned memory of her mother, used to hide the meaning of tortuously convoluted behavior. They both knew what Leslie was trying to pull, and that it couldn’t succeed. The others knew it as well. They were all ashamed—above all, of knowing.

Virginia is quick to excuse her half-sister … of what she does not specify. But does she see Stella’s role as so clear and simple? A certain rancor comes through, a certain irony. An unasked question is left hanging: how did the reserved, humble, inexpressive Stella position herself in relation to their mother? And to this stepfather? In this dark period, beneath her passiveness, beyond the pain of her abiding grief and the now definitive absence of her mother, was she taking revenge in some timid, confused, covert way (no longer the “Old Cow”), or seeking a deeper intimacy with the maternal idol? Or even just fulfilling a sacred mission, Julia’s legacy … or all those things combined with, especially (or perhaps simply), a permanently masked and vanquished repulsion for her stepfather’s theatrics, at once chaste and perverse? Stella, so pale and growing ever paler in her mourning dress, whom Virginia often caught in tears, though she would immediately hide them, her face turning suddenly serene. Stella, whom Virginia also caught (“often one would break in upon a scene of this kind”) throwing her arms around a wailing Leslie.⁴⁷

Stella Duckworth. Virginia Stephen. Perhaps Virginia harbored a feeling of being usurped by Stella, who always protected her, of being wronged by the daughter of Herbert, who had always kept this other father in his place until then, a father easy to love, unquestionably commended.

And who was now only a poor widower, an amorous old man, as incapable of disguising it as of accepting it: only capable of creating the libidinous space that would close with the two letters he sent to Stella after her marriage.

An excerpt from the second letter, written three days later, to say that he had nothing to say and that he no longer wanted to divulge his feelings:

Nothing would “peep out” before that summer morning in London during the war when, with France defeated, Virginia turned toward a father not entirely capable of holding his tongue about what was “impossible to say aloud” regarding Stella, and for which “one of the consequences was that for some time life seemed to us in a chronic state of confusion.”⁴⁹

And when in 1940 she groped about in that difficult past and tried to record what could be said aloud, what she and Vanessa could still discuss regarding the terror, frustration, and rage caused by their father, her avoidance was still so strong that she altered the dates, shifting them forward so that Stella no longer played any part in what made Leslie suspect to his daughters. Virginia begins with their indignation over Stella’s death; Stella Hills, dead three months after her marriage.

And the whip had struck for the second time.

Virginia writes that she and Vanessa found themselves alone, facing their father, “fully exposed without protection to the full blast of that strange character.”⁵⁰ Aware that the terms “exposed” and “strange character” are loaded, she promises to explain them, but moves on to another topic without doing so.

The weight of the words remains. Like the weight of “illicit,” which she uses to explain the violence of Leslie’s weekly rages against Vanessa when she presents him with the house accounts, for which she is responsible following Stella’s death. According to Virginia, these rages came from an “illicit⁵¹ need for sympathy, released by the woman, stimulated,” which, when refused, “stirred in him instincts of which he was unconscious. Yet also ashamed.”⁵²

The violence, the seriousness of the reminiscences and the reactions prompted by Leslie do not square with their pretexts. Virginia locates the horror of those “unhappy years”⁵³ in a minor conflict and thus hides the seriousness of the trouble caused and experienced by a man successively in love with a mother and daughter. The daughter now dead, Virginia removes her from the scene and focuses on other situations and events, involving a different sister, as the source of her own fury, indignation, and obsessive rage.

In particular, one weekly domestic scene: each Wednesday, Vanessa, supposedly replacing the dead Stella who herself replaced the dead Julia, came to give her father the house accounts and unleashed his fury. But unlike Julia, who conspired with the cook to falsify those accounts, or Stella, who was no doubt terrified, “Nessa,” as her family called her, would not tolerate those demonstrations that, Virginia emphasizes, echoed “other words of the same kind, addressed to the sister lately dead, to her mother even.” Implacable, she remained impassive, unperturbed by her father’s anger, which further exasperated Leslie, who erupted hysterically, proclaimed himself ruined, alone, misunderstood, and, red-faced, veins bulging, worked himself up into “an extraordinary dramatisation of self pity, horror, anger,” beating his breast, roaring: “Have you no pity for me? There you stand like a block of stone,” before signing the check with a flourish, with trembling hand, and collapsing, a prostrate spectacle, while Virginia gritted her teeth, powerless and mute, stifling her “unbounded comtempt.”⁵⁴

Chauvinist, Victorian, but most of all ridiculous, these rages of Leslie Stephen are straightforward, routine, and long familiar: those of an anxious man who fanatically imagines himself on the edge of ruin. Even in Minny’s time, his conflicts with Anny Thackeray, who lived with the couple and kept the house accounts, often verged on high drama, as did their disagreement over Minny’s estate after she died. When she watched over Leslie, stricken with cancer, for the two long years of his decline, Virginia would again write: “I hope as the weakness increases he will worry less about money.”⁵⁵

Trying ordeals, indeed, those Wednesdays, but stripped of troubling innuendos, there was nothing “illicit”⁵⁶ about them. They could arouse indignation, fear, outrage, but they do not correspond to the feelings of intense threat and convulsive panic Virginia records, the memory alone making her recoil, suffocated, ravaged by the horror, decades later—and less than six months before her death.

They are a kind of memory screen: they cover another memory tied to what is “impossible to say aloud.”⁵⁷ Thus diverted, the masked distress can, through other memories, emit its cry, as the complaint that escapes from Virginia Woolf more than forty years later.

Leslie’s pretentious displays of anger, suffered by his daughter over domestic problems, ward off the memory of his more shameful behavior toward his stepdaughter. And Virginia would be able to transfer to those scenes inflicted upon Vanessa all the rage and frustration aroused by Leslie’s suspect behavior toward Stella, allowing her to remain silent, to insist, even to herself, that nothing happened, that Stella was not the object of “illicit” desires that created a “chronic state of confusion” never to be resolved.⁵⁸

The spectacular hysterics to which Vanessa was subjected provide a screen for other quieter, intensely secret scenes bordering on illegal and vastly more disturbing, pernicious and furtive, of which Stella was the object. It is very much those scenes and that “strange” father whom we discover lurking beneath Leslie Stephen’s displays of miserliness, playing the wounded patriarch, imploring the aid of his stepdaughter—“whatever its nature,” that would haunt Virginia long afterward, unbidden.⁵⁹

Let us watch her once again, searching for the right word to best express the turbulent scenes suffered by Vanessa. She crosses out the word “violent,” which is appropriate, to substitute the term “illicit,” which does not correspond, and describes the feelings aroused in her as she is writing, not by those Wednesday scenes but by the ones they screen out.⁶⁰

“Illicit”: what is forbidden by law, accomplished or attempted in an insidious way; what Leslie coveted, acknowledged to be impossible, experienced as taboo, a wild dream, but which he approached and aped to the point that the prohibition he tested threatened to appear in all its crudeness.

With that term, linked to his “dependence on women,” and his need for them “to sympathise with him, to console him,” Virginia Woolf introduces Stella Duckworth, in pages meant to exclude and cover only the seven years after her death.⁶¹

Thus what is silenced emerges in silence: the insidious threat of incest suffered by Stella when she was alive, which Virginia had guessed. It is that memory, unacknowledged, that produces “the horror, the recurring terror” felt by Virginia Stephen when Leslie vented his rage at Vanessa. “It was like being shut up in the same cage with a wild beast.”⁶²

It was not the father objecting violently to the kitchen accounts that alarmed Virginia, whose “next victim” she feared becoming, along with Vanessa, as they recalled how he had “tasked Stella’s strength, embittered her few months of joy.” No. They feared the man in love with a mother and her daughter, their half-sister, both of whom were now dead. That man forced to circumvent an “illicit” path in the lifetime of the timid, devoted Stella, and to become the humble, humiliated, deceitful creature who overshadowed the proud father of the past. The hypocritical roles that they all had to play at Hyde Park Gate. And the suspicions, the uncertainty, the silence and its cesspools: that code of silence Virginia Stephen would never break. Nor would Virginia Woolf.⁶³

Here she is at fifty-eight years old; the war is on, Leonard has persuaded her to commit suicide with him if the Nazis invade England, and two days ago France was defeated. We know the scenario: an organ-grinder in a London square, a man selling strawberries, and Virginia, at her worktable, turns toward her father and sees herself again, fantasizes herself at fifteen, shut up in a cage with him: “He was the pacing, dangerous, morose lion; a lion who was sulky and angry and injured; and suddenly ferocious, and then very humble, and then majestic; and then lying dusty and fly pestered in a corner of the cage.” Here she is, hardly a year before her death, facing the memory of a defiled, undisciplined father, at once terrifying and discredited, stripped of prestige and threatening.⁶⁴

A father immediately defined as extremely imprudent, who “had so ignored, or disguised his own feelings that he had no idea of what he was; … he was uncivilized in his extreme unawareness. He did not realise what he did.”⁶⁵

So many substrata, so many secrets throughout the years, so many mysteries and hidden elements. Nothing is certain; everything trembles, furtive, is hidden or hardly shows, hesitates around Virginia, and it is that trembling that she must capture, that reveals the disgrace suffered by a father and the unspeakable shame of having detected him. As if it were a matter of a shameless vision, even a violation perpetrated on a parent.

To a large extent, the most enduring difficulties arise from the coexistence of that corrupt father and the one so admired and respected, because Leslie Stephen remained intact, unscathed, pursuing his serious friendships, his life of writing and books; he forever remained the naïve, austere, honest intellectual, often full of wit, reverently surrounded by the thinkers of his day, even if he suspected himself of mediocrity.

Leslie was also that unequivocal father, passionate about his children, faithfully sharing their daily lives, walks, sports, thoughts: the one who for a long time drew and cut out paper animal chains for them; read out loud to them at night from Tennyson, Wordsworth, Scott, Meredith, and so on; made them debate freely, form judgments, indignant if they preferred a bland hero to some more captivating villain. He was truly “in league”⁶⁶ with childhood, with all his children. Up to a point: Laura was the exception.

Even with her humiliating memories, Virginia does not forget how she always admired, how she still admires “his honesty, his unworldliness, his lovableness, his perfect sincerity,” as well as “his attractiveness … his simplicity, his integrity, his eccentricity…. He would say exactly what he thought, however inconvenient; and do what he liked.” And that was true … as a rule.⁶⁷

Most importantly, he always encouraged Vanessa and Virginia in their vocations: Vanessa in pursuing her painting classes, Virginia in immersing herself in his vast library, accompanying her in her reading, without censorship.

How to reconcile all that with Hyde Park Gate in mourning, dominated by this same father who, at Julia’s death, had “replaced the beauty and merriment of the dead with ugliness”? How to reconcile the deception and betrayal with those “shocks of sharp pleasure” when Leslie happened to fix his “very small, very blue” eyes on her with this message: we are “in league,” the two of us. That writer and her.⁶⁸

Here begin Virginia’s experiences as the future writer, by way of the child hungry for books, which she devoured one after another, guided by the father who supplied her: “I remember his pleasure, how he stopped writing and got up and was very gentle and pleased, when I came into the study with a book I had done; and asked him for another.” There she found him, smoking his pipe, rocking in his rocking chair where he always sat to work. “Slowly he would unwrinkle his forehead and come to ground and realize with a very sweet smile that I stood there. Rising he would go to the shelves, put the book back, and ask me gently, kindly; ‘What did you make of it?’” And his daughter left the study “feeling proud and stimulated, and full of love for this unworldly, very distinguished and lonely man, whom I had pleased by coming.”⁶⁹

The young Stephens rediscovered their father’s unconventional free spirit when he showed them the way to pursue their previous life and render it even more meaningful by using their sorrow to intensify everything. “Beautiful he was at such moments; simple and eager as a child; and exquisitely alive to all affection; exquisitely tender …—but the moment passed.”⁷⁰

Nine years later, mourning Leslie, Virginia wrote to her comforter Violet Dickinson: “It was a most exquisite feeling to be with him, even to touch his hand—he was so quick, and that one finds in no one else.”⁷¹

It was this conflict that tore her apart. Leslie was a composite, as each of us is, of so many portraits, facets, ghosts, so many various beings—or not. It is Virginia Woolf who asks, “Do we then know nobody? Only our versions of them, which as likely as not, are emanations of ourselves.”⁷²

Who was Leslie Stephen apart from his daughter’s memories?

A daughter forever tortured by the ambivalence of her feelings for her father; by the repression that paralyzed her, prevented her from either blaming or reconciling with him.

After all, Leslie Stephen faltered just once, and without overstepping the bounds. He deviated momentarily before entering a solitary old age; the hope of escaping or at least delaying it had seized him, instinctively, hope of overcoming a wife’s absence through the grace of Stella. A crisis. A crisis of aging and grief. But one that would compromise, if not Virginia’s life, at least what lay hidden there: her memory, which would henceforth become a prison, marked by a fatal wound that would not heal.

Incest: Stephen did not physically practice it (his denunciatory letters to Stella seem to prove that), he only overtly fantasized it, verged on it with Stella Duckworth and hopefully her alone; in this sense, his daughters had nothing to fear from him. Nonetheless, the foul atmosphere of Hyde Park Gate, which had become a crypt, had penetrated its inhabitants, and it was an atmosphere of incest.

We will not go into the question posed by Virginia in the name of one of her novel’s inhabitants: “Do I love my father sexually?” Quite a rational question, after all. But when Lytton Strachey brought her reports from the “British Sex Society’s” discussion on incest between parents and children when they were both unconscious of it, Virginia’s reaction was: “I think of becoming a member.”⁷³

While we are digressing, let us add, without comment, some strange signs involving a gesture with which we are already familiar.

We will remember Leslie Stephen, arms extended, staggering out of the room where Julia had just died. In some of the most beautiful pages of To the Lighthouse, some of the most beautiful Virginia Woolf wrote, she manages to write the impossible (but an “impossible” vanquished this time): a whole section of the work is devoted solely to the house deserted by the Ramsays (“the thing that exists when we aren’t there”), throbbing with emptiness, out of time and entering the vibrant inertia of its abandonment, the rare echo of events. Someone dies at the Ramsays’. Each time, two cold lines punctuate the loss. And the first of those losses, like the others, appears in brackets: “[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]”⁷⁴

Elsewhere, in The Years, Colonel Pargiter also leaves a deathbed, but the one of a wife he does not love. He staggers out of the room, arms extended in front of him, passing his daughter Delia, who thinks: “You did that very well, Delia told him as he passed her. It was like a scene in a play.”⁷⁵

But when little Rose Pargiter, hardly more than a baby, sneaks out of the house and finds herself alone in the night, frightened, facing a man who “leered at her,” he extends his arms “as if to stop her” and she runs, takes refuge in a shop; coming back, he is still there, grimacing, and this time, we read in The Years, “he did not stretch his hands out at her; they were unbuttoning his clothes.”⁷⁶

End of parentheses. Let us leave the substrata, the underground places of the unspoken, their hell. Let us return to the adolescent still filled with trepidation, crossing the London streets on her bicycle, and who does not know, will never know, that she is overwhelmingly beautiful, and who is struggling to master everyday life, to move through it day after day, determined. Resigned to continue. Disciplined.

On the surface, the Stephens’ life unfolds courageously, energetically, in another kind of hell—the hell of monotony, a routine that Virginia nevertheless needed, revolving around a network of stable, traditional occupations, a conventional course providing a structure that could alleviate their grief and its aggressions.

“Life goes on,” we say, even if it doesn’t exactly go on and the life of those repeating that refrain won’t either, one day.

He decides upon a serious “breakdown” suffered by Virginia at her mother’s death, “madness” that he admits leaves no trace and that no one remembers! It “must have” come over a young girl of thirteen, whose mother had just died suddenly.⁷⁷

Here is what Quentin Bell gives (or rather doesn’t give) as proof of these bizarre allegations, and here is the terrifying use he makes of them:

The first “breakdown,” or whatever we are to call it, must have⁷⁸ come very soon after her mother’s death. And here we come to a great interval of nothingness, a kind of positive death which cannot be described and of which Virginia herself probably knew little—that is to say could recall little—and yet which is vitally important to her story. From now on she knew that she had been mad and might be mad again.⁷⁹

Where did he get all that? It’s a mystery. From what evidence, what document, what testimony? None. A description? Impossible, he admits. She herself says nothing of it? That’s because she forgot it! But who remembered it? Silence. And nevertheless …

And nevertheless Bell declares “vitally important” the version he advances, totally arbitrarily, in this first biography of Virginia Woolf, which becomes her effigy. Invigorated by the certitudes he has just advanced, listen to what he dares to assert next: “To know that you have had cancer in your body and to know that it may return must be very horrible; but a cancer of the mind, a corruption of the spirit striking one at the age of thirteen, and for the rest of one’s life always working away somewhere, always in suspense, a Dionysian [sic] sword above one’s head—this must be almost unendurable.” And in conclusion: “So unendurable that in the end, when the voices of insanity spoke to her in 1941, she took the only remedy that remained, the cure of death.” And there you have it!⁸⁰

Leonard’s version is established.

Nevertheless, a mystery remains: between the ages of thirteen and fifty-nine, her mind ravaged by cancer, her spirit thoroughly corrupted, Virginia Woolf really did write a few pages (one wonders how!), but the real question is: why the hell did she wait so long to do herself in?

Of course, it would have been abnormal for Virginia at thirteen not to go through extreme states following the disruptive death of her mother, but no trace of that remains. Agitation? Dejection? Denial? Shattered nerves? We can imagine them all, but there is not a single bit of evidence. Even if she had gone through some very bad periods, even if she had suffered delirium or hallucinations, they would not have warranted Quentin Bell’s definitive diagnosis. A child’s sadness over her mother’s death, whatever her reaction’s magnitude and manifestations, would not have been a matter in itself of “madness,” especially in the sinister, simplistic, rigid sense that Quentin Bell uses the term. But more importantly, nothing attests to such behavior on Virginia Stephen’s part after Julia’s death. And still more importantly, Bell knows it!

Furthermore, Virginia herself, who never recoils from the idea of “madness,” who would never have hesitated to mention and even to comment on such episodes if they had taken place, never refers to them anywhere, not even when she reconsiders (as she often does) this period of her past. And no one else alludes to them, not Leslie in his letters, not Vanessa later, no one close to her; not, through hearsay, a single acquaintance. Only Leonard, in his autobiography, speaks (obviously he doesn’t remember) of a first serious crisis and a suicide attempt following Julia’s death: at thirteen, Virginia supposedly threw herself out a low window without doing herself much harm. An actual event, but one that took place nine years later, at Violet Dickinson’s house and after the death of … Leslie, whom Leonard confuses with Julia!

It is 1896. Julia has been dead for a year. The Stephens and Duckworths are on vacation. Jack Hills has come by bicycle to dine with them. Stella takes him to see the garden. It is a “black and silver night,” as experienced by an ardent Virginia. A moonlit night. From the garden, the young Stephens see the couple pass by, disappear, pass by again; for a moment they hear the rustling of a dress, a whisper, then nothing more. They imagine that Jack and Stella have gone back into the house, return to join them, but find Leslie alone, agitated, crossing and recrossing his legs, watching the clock, fidgeting. A strange tramp enters the grounds; he is hungry; Thoby chases him off (!) with much commotion and the others are a bit afraid, “for it was no ordinary night, and ominous things were happening.” It is getting later, Leslie is pacing back and forth on the terrace; someone shouts: “Stella and Mr Hills are coming up the path together!” and Stella, usually so pale, arrives “blushing the loveliest rose colour,” to say “she was engaged.” Under her breath Virginia asks her: “‘Did mother know?’” and Stella “murmured, ‘Yes.’”⁸¹

Breakfast. Adrian, the youngest Stephen, is crying. He was Julia’s favorite child, she called him “My Joy,” and the others have always kept him a little at a distance. His father prefers Thoby. Adrian is all alone and Stella, his refuge, is going away. Leslie gently lectures him: they must all share the fiancée’s happiness … although he complains to her a moment later that “the blow was irreparable.” He will prolong the couple’s wait, delay the wedding as long as possible. This engagement? Ten months of “clumsy, cruel, unnecessary trial” imposed by the moralist.⁸²

Stella’s life goes on, still burdened with the lives of others, with Virginia always at her side, whom she protects; just a few additional purchases for Jack, like the chocolate éclairs for his tea, a few more things to mend. Stella often visits him; he dines every evening at Hyde Park Gate.

In her diary, which never mentions her mourning or her mother, Virginia reports on the uniformity of the days, takes pains to enter the events, to feel what they mean, but as though at a distance. She seems to mimic what should be felt, or else to violently reject some detail, only to embrace it immediately afterward, resigned. She struggles to merge her own presence into the world’s or to integrate the world’s presence, which shrinks away, except when she is reading, insatiably addicted to the authors whose works she devours like a glutton, dissolving into them, enchanted. Alive. Approaching the edge of herself.

Nevertheless, Hyde Park Gate grows lighter, the future suddenly has a place there, the color seems to return as much to Stella’s cheeks as to her eyes, now “bluer,” to the “incandescence [that] was in Stella’s whole body.” “Something of moonlight” seems to emanate from her now. Filled with wonder, Virginia compares the love of these two young people to a ruby. Young people? Stella is twenty-eight, Jack, thirty-one.⁸³

By way of the approaching marriage, Virginia enters into the—now welcome—banality of the elite, not quite aristocratic, society; rituals are performed, related to the moment at hand, the upcoming wedding: rituals of a formidably conventional environment, which the two Stephen sisters will escape.

Ceremony unfolds according to protocol. Gifts pour in; invitations, dressmakers, hairdressers. Even Leslie, muttering that any old clothes will do just fine, orders himself a new suit. Stella takes Adrian along to buy him one as well. Ecstasy over the opal and diamond necklace Gerald gives his betrothed sister, as prelude to his promised wedding present. Presents flood in from everywhere. A dismayed Virginia shares the role of maid of honor with Vanessa. The banns are read, as they had to be then, as part of a religious service. And the family, solidly agnostic, searches everywhere for a few prayer books. During the ceremony, they don’t know when to kneel, and Virginia refuses to do so.

The house is no longer so much under the yoke of the past. Hyde Park Gate looks toward the future, busying itself with the classic preparations for a conventional Victorian wedding. Leslie is surprised at no longer being able to delay the union: “I could do perfectly well without Jack—Why should not she?”⁸⁴ he writes to an old friend, Charles Norton. Unimpeachable logic!

But the day comes. The moment arrives.

Leslie appears with Stella on his arm, “very white and beautiful”; what he is feeling then, no one will ever know. She moves forward, she walks “in her sleep—her eyes fixed straight in front of her.” And what she is feeling—but this is true for every event in her life—will also remain unknown. It all seems to be a strange dream, a vision. “It was half a dream, or a nightmare. Stella was almost dreaming, I think; but probably hers was a happy one.” The evening before, she had lost an opal ring that Jack had given her.⁸⁵

The newlyweds depart for Italy. “Mr and Mrs Hills!”⁸⁶ exclaims Virginia.

The next day George Duckworth takes Gerald and the young Stephens to place the wedding flowers on their mother’s grave in the Hydegate cemetery.

Virginia had behind her an entire body of work, fifty-eight years of life; she had six more months to live, and here we find her again, in 1940, in the midst of war, sounding this cry, repeating the same unanswerable question, from which she cannot get free.

Forty-three years earlier, Stella had returned from her honeymoon ill. It was thought to be an intestinal flu. A nurse stayed with her. The nightmare began again, “everyone getting miserable. Everything as dismal as it well can be.”⁸⁸ The whip was going to strike once more. Everyone feared or sensed it.

Stella was in pain. Dr. Seton made some “frightening” remarks. More nurses were called. The sign of grave illness: straw spread in the street to lessen the noise of the car wheels and horses’ hooves. “No getting rid of the thought.” No mention of Julia’s death, which loomed. Virginia took refuge in her beloved “Macaulay, which is the only calm and un-anxious thing in this most agitating time.”⁸⁹

The next day, Stella improved, was no longer in pain. The doctor declared her out of danger. Until the end, Seton said he was “pleased,” “delighted,” “perfectly happy,” “still more satisfied,” “most cheerful,” and “very cheerful.” He would recommend eating ices for the peritonitis, avoiding cherries and chocolate. Stella was pregnant, he said.⁹⁰

Three months of fluctuations, of relapses and remissions: “Now that old cow is most ridiculously well & cheerful—hopping about out of bed etc,” ventured Virginia; once Stella came for lunch at 22 Hyde Park Gate and she and Virginia sat together in the park for a while, chatting as in the old days. “Mr. Henry James” met them; they ran into Leslie; the two men headed off together into the gardens. Stella could soon return to the London streets with Virginia; then the nurses returned, the doctor three times a day, the pain, the panic, the improvement; calm settled in from time to time, uneasiness remained.⁹¹

Whether Stella was doing well or poorly, Virginia’s distress never left her, though she hid it, and her terror of the city and its traffic knew no bounds: “Hyde St even more diabolical than usual—the horses in a most wicked & rampant condition.” Accidents occurred one after another, which she kept watch for obsessively. The same month: “I managed to discover a man in the course of being squashed by an omnibus, but, as we were in the midst of Piccadilly Circus, the details of the accident could not be seen”; three days later she “had the pleasure of seeing a cart horse fall down.” There were nothing but mad horses escaping into the crowds, car collisions, an overturned hansom, a crushed cyclist—the surprise of being right about the danger of crossing the streets on foot and finding oneself at home, safe and sound. The daily carriage outings with Stella, convalescing from a bad bout, and Virginia daily gritting her teeth, in a panic.⁹²

Chaos on the streets, the chaos of those weeks. The pretense of leading a normal life, even a little festive: visits with friends, mad laughter, tears of hysterical laughter, concerts, boating, and ice cream orgies; at dinner, Gerald told funny stories,⁹³ “indecent” ones, actually; other evenings, the guests listened with delight as Leslie recited Tennyson’s Maud or Macaulay’s The Armada. Nessa, wearing a gown by the famous Mrs. Young, made a magnificent entrance into society—and Stella in seventh heaven, playing the proud mother’s role, though from her bedroom. She takes three steps into the street, goes out in the park in a wheelchair, then relapses and remains bedridden, then improves and can be up in her dressing gown, improves some more, returns to an almost normal, slow-paced life, goes through a crisis, is in pain—perhaps from having eaten three cherries, pronounces Dr. Seton, who fails to understand the problem. Sometimes he claims to have prevented or impeded the development of peritonitis.

No one acting. Everyone waiting.

Volumes flowed through Virginia’s hands: Pepys in four volumes and all of dear Macaulay; Carlyle’s Cromwell in a matter of weeks, three volumes; the letters of William Cowper; a work by Leslie Stephen: Life of Henry Fawcett; Lady Burton’s memoir, two volumes; George Eliot’s Adam Bede; Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley; a History of Rome by Arnold, followed by one of England by Froude … twelve volumes! Books were “the greatest help and comfort.” Virginia raced through each work more quickly than the last, impatient to choose another recommended by an impressed, almost worried father—“’Ginia is devouring books, almost faster than I like.”⁹⁴

Stella was struggling, but who knew against what? Is it absurd to write this? Julia seemed to be lurking. As for Jack, he was sad, no question. Stella still played (she had to play) the role of protectress, responsible party. Leslie kept his distance, rediscovered his rightful place; he seems to have been indifferent to Stella’s illness. At her death, everyone would notice his detachment, Jack with indignation. The reaction of jealousy appeased? Dare we say of old passion avenged? Or perhaps, more than resigned: satiated?

Virginia, however, spent her time at Stella’s house, would not leave her alone. We can sense her panic, silent, petrified. Her terror. In the midst of a suffocating heat wave. One cousin thought it “so bad for Stella to have Ginia always with her.” Another day, Virginia grumbles about “that old shop keeper Mrs Hills,” Jack’s mother, who turned her out of her daughter-in-law’s house after five minutes.⁹⁵

But Virginia came back, she returned every day; she clung, she hung on. The nightmare vaguely continued, without tragic moments, without remitting. The flail threatened. Ups and downs succeeded one another, and that disparity itself made the days around Stella all seem alike. Virginia does not say it, but knows them to be almost over.

The whip would strike for the second time, and it was the memory of the first time that was on everyone’s mind for weeks, especially Virginia’s.

Beginning July 10, the diary is abandoned, until July 27. Stella died on July 19. From memory, the adolescent filled in the gaps. And gradually the portrait of the dying Stella emerges … at Virginia’s bedside.

His daughters would accuse Leslie of having worn out first Julia and then Stella, of having broken them, killed them under the weight of his demands and managerial tasks … surrounded by seven servants. We know that the truth with regard to Stella, or rather the trouble, had nothing to do with overwork.

Everything was going wrong. Jack was suffering from an abscessed leg. Gerald had fallen ill. Stella arranged for their care. On July 11, it was Virginia’s turn to feel sick with rheumatism, and to seek out Stella who, stretched out on a sofa, was taking tea with Jack close by in a “big chair.” Virginia sat at their feet, and Jack soon left the room. “We talked together,” Virginia writes contentedly. The next day, she managed to impose upon them for the entire day: Stella would not let her leave, the rheumatism was too painful. Thanks to which, she took Jack’s place in the “big chair.”⁹⁶

She was simply regressing, like a weak, plaintive, defeated child. And dependent, demanding. Desperate.

July 14: at Stella’s house, she declares herself worse, with a mild fever, and achieves her goal: Dr. Seton sends her to bed … at the Hills’, in Jack’s dressing room, across from their bedroom. And Stella sits with her for a long time. The next day, after refusing to see her in the morning, Stella spends the afternoon with her, brings her tea … before going to prepare tea for Leslie, next door at 22! At the end of the day, Virginia suffers from “the fidgets,” nervous agitation, and Stella rubs her forehead until she calms down … till eleven o’clock at night.

The next morning: “She came in to me before breakfast in her dressing gown to see how I was. She only stayed a moment, but then she was quite well. She left me, & I never saw her again.”⁹⁷

Stella takes a turn for the worse and is in pain. No one tells Virginia, to whom Stella often calls through the open doors to ask how she is doing. July 17: Virginia is sent home by a doctor, in the arms of George, wrapped in Stella’s fur coat, and as they passes her room, Stella calls good-bye to her. July 18: an operation is scheduled for that evening. July 19 at 3 a.m.: George and Nessa come to announce to Virginia that Stella Hills is dead.

No one in the family attends the burial. Five days later, Jack takes Virginia and Nessa to the tomb, beside Julia’s, “near you as you go in.”⁹⁸

We have nothing to add.

Leslie would be next on the list of the dead. Seven years later, intestinal cancer. Virginia would care for him day after day, for two years. She would often be eager for the end to come, and with his death, the waiting was over. Guaranteed remorse! That would haunt her for the rest of her life.

Vanessa continued to detest their father and kept her distance.

Since we have already confronted the question of incest between Leslie Stephen and his stepdaughter, Stella Duckworth, hardly detected until now, it is time to consider the Duckworth brothers, George and Gerald, whose incestuous misdeeds are much better known. They are both considered, George in particular (the two sisters saw to that), to have ruined Virginia’s life.

Virginia would hardly mention the horrible manual exploration of her “private parts”⁹⁹ by Gerald, when he was seventeen and she was five years old, and her sharp awareness of the shame and the seriousness of the offense. But at fifty-nine years old, she would tremble with shame again, three months before her death, at the memory of that violation, which she had almost left unrecorded.

George, on the other hand, would become the target for the two sisters, delighted to divulge his infamy throughout Bloomsbury. Virginia would devote a bitter, hilarious session of the Memoir Club to him. Together Vanessa and Virginia took great pleasure in ridiculing him when their paths crossed (less and less often) as he aged, gracelessly, according to them, increasingly trapped in his conventional shell and his self-importance, whereas they would free themselves from whatever or whomever resembled him.

George’s misdeeds? Unconscious hypocrisy regarding limits. Familiarity, affectionate gestures deviating toward more amorous ones, leading to sensual bordering on sexual relations. He made demonstrative public displays, infuriating Vanessa by “whispering encouragement, lavishing embraces which were not entirely concealed from the eyes of strangers.”¹⁰⁰

Their senior by fourteen and twelve years, he used his prestige, his charm, and Julia’s memory (who would have encouraged him to fulfill his role as brother and “launch” the two young women into society) to persuade them in turn to accompany him to those London dinners and elegant dances he adored. He dragged Vanessa to them and when she had had enough, he took Virginia. Trophies. Each exceptionally beautiful, but Virginia more timid, still shy and reticent. In the end, she decided they were failures, as she wrote to Emma Vaughan of the 1901 London Season: “Really, we can’t shine in Society. I don’t know how it’s done. We aint popular—we sit in corners and look like mutes who are longing for a funeral.”¹⁰¹

The eldest Duckworth must have often been dismayed, as, for instance, when Virginia, gripped with remorse, finally decided to “shine” and chose to address the Victorian elite on Plato over the course of a grand dinner. The agonized George would remind her on the way home of what young women were customarily allowed to say: nothing.

But here it is, described twenty years later for the Memoir Club, the younger sister coming home from a dance with this older brother so universally admired for his brotherly protection of the two motherless girls. Here he is entering Virginia’s bedroom, where Virginia is already in bed: “‘Don’t be frightened,’ George whispered, ‘And don’t turn on the light, oh beloved. Beloved—,’ and he flung himself on my bed and took me in his arms.”¹⁰²

“Yes, 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,”¹⁰³ Virginia declares at the end of the meeting, with a sense of her secret effect. But we may doubt that things went so far as her accusation implies.

Or else, why would Vanessa, at twenty years old, travel and stay with George in Paris, and delight in his discoveries, the painters’ studios, the museums she visits? Virginia writes to her “dear old Bar,” one of George’s (or Georgie’s) nicknames, that “Nessa’s letters are frantic with excitement.” When Vanessa returns, her sister thanks him again: she “seems quite intoxicated with all the things she has done and seen … she says she felt like a child, and enjoyed everything like a child…. I had no idea that she would enjoy it all so much. You must have managed everything with the utmost skill and care and I am most grateful to you.” To the point that we will find Vanessa traveling with George again two years later for three weeks, to Rome this time, and then to Florence.¹⁰⁴

Even when the young Stephens were still children, George dreamed up all sorts of small festivities like ice cream feasts, boating, walks in London, riding lessons. In another vein, we have seen him taking them to the cemetery.

He loved to be generous. If the Stephens were comfortable, the Duckworths were very well off, and under the same roof they maintained different lifestyles. George was prodigious with gifts. For Vanessa, for example: an Arabian horse; an opal necklace; amethysts; gowns from famous dressmakers, in particular, a certain Mrs. Young; fans; jewelry for her hair; travel … and so on! The manuscript of A Sketch of the Past contains a crossed-out sentence: “He paid for clothes; he bought enamel brooches; to the public he represented the good brother; doing his duty by motherless girls.” And if the young girls rebelled, George appealed to his female admirers, who defended him indignantly: “How could we resist his wishes? Was not George Duckworth wonderful? And anyhow what else did we want?”¹⁰⁵

George, who claimed (Jack Hills quotes him) to be a virgin until his marriage, at thirty-six years old, to Lady Margaret Herbert (look! his father’s first name).

A note: Virginia would describe her moment of sensual delight as a young girl slipping out of her ball gown, letting it slide the length of her naked body upon returning home one evening. And that memory resembles the scene in which she undresses after the dance the night that George bursts into her room.

But about this George who so resembles his father, the marvelous Herbert, about whom Virginia, like her mother, seems to have once dreamed. In the Mausoleum Book, Leslie draws a (generous) portrait of his posthumous rival and addresses Herbert’s son: “I vividly remember his smile, for I often see it on the face of his son George. I might have spared any attempt at description by saying to you, my dear George, and to your brothers and sisters, that you are strikingly like your father.” (But Leslie cannot resist adding: “I think that he was a little heavier of build and slower of mind.”)¹⁰⁶

Whatever the facts may be, George left a harmful, not to say disastrous (but especially ridiculous) mark in the memories of Virginia corroborated by Vanessa. And that is what matters here, but it does not render completely repellent (unlike his brother Gerald) this Duckworth of very average intelligence, the most conventional mind, who was no doubt himself lost in the uneasy maelstrom of his strangely blended family and his own griefs, the weight of which he had not the means to measure. He seems to have hoped to become his family’s benefactor, consoling and restoring his own, as Julia, his mother, had loved doing elsewhere, among others. And like her, he hoped to be recognized in this gratifying role. But his bursts of enthusiasm went awry and came to exceed the good ends he had in mind, when he confused erotic desire with family ties and, thus absolved, gave way to his impulses. His desires.

George? Virginia never tired of denouncing him, as she did eleven years later to Elena Richmond, “that gigantic mass of purity,” whose husband ran the Times Literary Supplement and who admitted to her: “I am going to be perfectly frank about your brother—your half brother—and say that I have never liked him. Nor has Bruce [Richmond, Elena’s husband].” Henceforth the Richmonds would have a thousand reasons to like him even less. And Virginia, delighted, to Vanessa: “Dont you think this is a noble work for our old age—to let the light in upon the Duckworths—and I daresay George will be driven to shoot himself one day when he’s shooting rabbits.”¹⁰⁸

The Duckworths … Duck, and that word or that creature punctuated Virginia’s life in a significant way. Two examples among many others: at seventeen, she works on a story with revealing content, published posthumously as “A Terrible Tragedy in the Duck Pond”; and she vomits for the first time in her life when Leonard forces her to “eat an entire cold duck.”¹⁰⁹

The “Terrible Tragedy” recounts at great length, in a parodic and pontificating style, the triple drowning of Adrian and Virginia Stephen and a friend in the pond covered with a “carpet of duckweed,” “the green shroud alas of three young lives”: “The angry waters of the duck pond rose in their wrath to swallow their prey—& the green caverns of the depths opened—& closed…. Alone, untended, unsoothed, with no spectator but the silver moon, with no eye to weep, no hand to caress, three young souls were whelmed by the waters of the duck Pond.” Then follows a “Note of Correction & Addition to the above by one of the Drowned”: “The corpses, however, emerged from their watery grave, & the corpse who writes this note can testify that her first impulse when she reached the shore was to sink upon its muddy bosom.”¹¹⁰

There is humor here, but also a fatal submersion, no doubt long imagined, in that angry water, the domain of ducks and covered by duckweed: “I sank & sank & sank, the water creeping into ears mouth & nose, till I felt it close over my head. This, methinks, is drowning, I said to myself. It seemed an age passed under water.” And it is the struggle between the desire to live or die, and finally, salvation, but “hair & body covered with innumerable bits of duckweed.” One of the first signs (not the first) of an obsession with water, a fascination for drowning. One of the first steps toward the River Ouse. Here, the pond of the Duck(worth)s.¹¹¹

The Duckworths and Stephens would part ways after Leslie’s death, encountering one another less and less. Still, Gerald would be Virginia’s first editor, and George would lend the Woolfs his luxurious country house during one of Virginia’s convalescences. A strange choice for Leonard, aware of the past.

Despite that past, or because it existed and was also shared by their mother and Stella, as well as Thoby, and their father, a faint complicity would remain between George and the two sisters, based on shared memories and griefs. One day in 1930, when Virginia was working on a caricature of the aging George, now Sir George, more pompous and self-satisfied than ever, she concluded pensively, “Still some sentiment begins to form misty between us. He speaks of ‘Mother’. I daresay finds in me some shadowy likeness—well—& then he is not now in a position to do me harm. His conventions amuse me…. He preserves a grain or two of what is me—my unknown past; my self; so that if George died, I should feel something of myself buried.”¹¹²

When he died, four years later, the Woolfs were vacationing in Kerry and read the announcement in the Times only later, and Virginia asked Nessa: “Did you go to the funeral? I’ve just with great labour composed a letter to Margaret [his widow]. Now suppose this had happened 30 years ago, it would have seemed odd to take it so calmly…. I hope to goodness somebody went to the service—I wish I had been able to.” Three days earlier in the diary, she described the childhood that was disappearing with him, “the batting, the laughter, the treats, the presents, taking us for bus rides to see famous churches, giving us tea at City Inns, & so on—”¹¹³

Afterward, she would not hesitate to vilify him as before, but for the moment he was once again the George she had described when, at twenty-seven, she had decided to record Vanessa’s childhood for her newborn nephew Julian Bell: “He had been once, when we were children, a hero to us; strong and handsome and just; he taught us to hold our bats straight and to tell the truth, and we blushed with delight if he praised.”¹¹⁴

She describes him as “a stupid, good natured young man, of profuse, voluble affections,” but whose characteristics had nothing simple about them, “modified, confused, distorted, exalted, set swimming in a sea of racing emotions until you were completely at a loss to know where you stood … [he] proved more and more incapable of containing them … profoundly believing in the purity of his love, he behaved little better than a brute.” He alternately elicited confidence and suspicion, spent vacations with the family, took his stepfather on walks, listened to and worried about Vanessa’s problems, arranged “little plans for our amusement.”¹¹⁵

Nonetheless, in the eyes of their half-sisters, George and Gerald would share the role of the more or less unconscious perverts who ravaged Virginia’s life.

A question: what about Laura? What about the child, then the young girl, completely defenseless, a half-sister as well, introduced at eight years old—the same age as Gerald—into the Duckworths’ world? What about Laura Stephen at Hyde Park Gate, the Great Lady of the Lake, Leslie’s “backward” daughter, the completely vulnerable Laura, at the mercy of all eventualities?

Is there some reason for recalling here the single, recurrent intelligible sentence of the institutionalized Laura: “I told him to go away”?¹¹⁶ Not in reference to George, the more sophisticated one, attracted by the beauty of his almost sisters turned young women, and who seems to have made his incestuous advances in a sentimental mood, no doubt less extreme, perhaps less repulsed than Virginia proclaimed. But what of Gerald, capable at seventeen of obscenely fondling a little girl of five: Virginia?

Whereas Virginia makes George her primary target. But did he really ruin her life?

She went on at such length about all his deeds and misdeeds, spoke so much of them, told them so often, commented on them, she avenged herself so thoroughly, mocked him, denounced him, endlessly accused him, ridiculed him with Vanessa, vilified him in public and “aloud,”¹¹⁷ so that what had happened must have been largely exorcised; it had not been repressed, in any case, and those memories, whatever their degree of accuracy, were not ruined over time; were not deceitfully undermined.

These too seem rather to have served as memory screens, for what it was “impossible to say aloud”¹¹⁸ and what was not clearly conveyed: the ambiguities, the thick atmosphere of Hyde Park Gate, its libidinous secrets, its sexual and virtual, mawkish gibberish between generations, and especially the discovered shame of a father. Of a father in all his states. And then the death of Stella, for which no one could be accused, without turning to the supernatural. And nevertheless Julia and her hold, haunting them beyond the grave, and nevertheless Leslie….

So many thoughts, so many words that remained forbidden, so many emotions closed to analysis, even to enunciation: “impossible” to give voice to. Even the voice of one who knows how to talk so well!

To talk. But to speak? Speaking is another matter.

Which could explain the still mysterious last line of the last page of the last book Virginia wrote. The announcement, which she will not survive, of an imminent transgression, of a liberation about to occur: the announcement of a voice finally about emerge, but in tandem and in the night and within a silence that it will not interrupt: