IX

WHILE THE BOOK was still simmering in the literary journals, they went to Cambridge together. Virginia was giving at Girton College the second of two lectures, which she turned into A Room of One’s Own. It was overtly feminist, and it became for a time, especially for Americans, the bible of the feminist movement. It stated the case with overwhelming force, grace and humor. Since the book originated as lectures, its style was conversational, more like her letters than her diary. As Quentin Bell said of it, “In A Room one can hear her speaking. In her novels she is thinking.” But, strangely, he thought her tone too mild, too conciliatory, while to me it is fierce beyond reasonableness. She upbraids the male sex for its love of war and making money. She dwells on the disadvantages that women have endured, particularly as writers. They did not have a chance. If Shakespeare had had an equally brilliant sister, not a word of what she wrote would have survived—if she had been allowed by her parents or husband to write any words at all. Even Jane Austen was obliged to hide her manuscripts from prying eyes: “There was something discreditable in writing Pride and Prejudice,” Virginia said, ignoring the fact that Jane’s father had urged her to publish it. If she covered up her manuscript when someone entered the room, so did Virginia, because until a book is published, it is the most intimate of secrets. Was it really necessary for a woman to have a room of her own before she could write a line? Virginia herself chose the busy stockroom in Tavistock Square, when the upper floors of the house contained several rooms where she could have found peace. Her claim that in the nineteenth century women of genius were stifled by men sits oddly beside the achievements of Austen, the Brontës, Gaskell and George Eliot, and even in Shakespeare’s day they were not hammered into insignificance, if we take Portia, Olivia and Desdemona as representatives of contemporary women of mettle.

A Room of One’s Own was in part a polemic, in part a fantasy. The mood of Orlando was still upon her. She was having fun, but the fun was soured by a note of real bitterness. “Why did men drink wine and women water?” she asked again. In Bloomsbury both sexes drank wine. And was not Virginia herself, by her conduct and achievements, proof that women of her class were already emancipated? She was not thinking of classes other than her own. Among her friends, only Ethel Smyth considered that her career had been thwarted by masculine presumption. When, a few years later, Virginia wrote an introduction to a collection of reminiscences by working women (Life As We Have Known It), she was appalled by their conventionality. They thought it vulgar for a woman to smoke a pipe or read detective novels. “I don’t think they will be poets or novelists for another hundred years or so,” she told Margaret Llewellyn-Davies.

Vita was at a loss how to deal with the book in one of her broadcasts on current literature, for she disliked its stridency as much as she disliked Three Guineas ten years later for the same reason. She commended A Room to her listeners for its “common sense,” when common sense was the last quality that Virginia had envisaged. It was not her style. What could Vita have thought, sitting in the lecture hall at Girton, when she heard Virginia declare, “Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves,” as if there had been no improvement since then, no acts of Parliament giving women political equality with men, and, for that matter, no Girton? She made great play, in the most famous passage of the book, with the contrast between men’s and women’s colleges. At King’s she had lunched superbly off sole, partridge and a sugary confection, flavored with red wine and white. At Newnham (another women’s college) the menu for supper was soup, beef, prunes and custard, and for drink, “the water-jug was liberally passed round.” How could conversation flourish, how could genius take root, on such a diet? She did not mention that the lunch was given in his own rooms at King’s by one of the fellows, George Rylands, and at Newnham the supper was in hall with the students. It was undergraduate fare.

Two incidents occurred at this time to test Virginia’s beliefs. First there was The Well of Loneliness, a novel by Radclyffe Hall which dealt openly with the subject of lesbianism. As soon as it was published, the press attacked it for indecency. The editor of the Sunday Express wrote, “I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel.” The publisher, Jonathan Cape, voluntarily submitted it to the judgment of the home secretary, who declared it obscene, and it was withdrawn from circulation. This act of censorship aroused the fury of Bloomsbury, although their common opinion was that the book was bad and its author conceited. E. M. Forster took the lead in organizing a petition to reverse the home secretary’s ban, and persuaded Virginia to sign a letter to the Nation pleading that, although lesbianism was “uninteresting and repellent to the majority,” it was a fact of life and therefore a legitimate subject for literature. Forster was himself homosexual, but during a visit to the Woolfs in Sussex he declared, according to Virginia’s diary, that “he thought Sapphism disgusting; partly from convention, partly because he disliked that women should be independent of men.” She seems to have taken this provocative statement calmly. She continued to support Forster and Hall, and offered to give evidence, presumably of literary merit, on behalf of the book, though Leonard advised her not to become personally involved, in case she came to be regarded as a mouthpiece for lesbianism and blacken the fair name of Bloomsbury. She persisted, attending the court with a galaxy of other intellectuals, but their claim that The Well of Loneliness was a serious work of art was declared irrelevant by the magistrate, and the novel remained on the index of banned books till 1949.

Virginia had done her best for a woman writer whom she did not much like. Then another situation arose which concerned her more personally. Vita had acquired a new lover after Mary Campbell. She was Hilda Matheson, talks director of the BBC. They had gone on a walking tour in France, and Virginia was openly jealous, accusing Vita, with some justice, of having concealed this holiday from her. It was not simply that Hilda seemed to have supplanted her: Virginia disliked her for other reasons. She was a woman of real ability and determination. She had gained a high position in the BBC, and had persuaded eminent men and women, including Wells and Shaw, to broadcast on subjects of their own choice. Virginia herself had contributed to a discussion with Leonard, but the experience only added to her dislike of Hilda. She had never met a woman like her before. She thought her pushing. “Her earnest aspiring competent wooden face appears before me,” she wrote in her diary. “A queer trait in Vita—a passion for the earnest middle-class intellectual, however drab and dreary.” This description of Hilda was unfair. She fought valiantly for high standards in broadcasting which are still valid today. As her biographer, Michael Carney, has written, “She was a genuine creative spirit, an administrator and programme-maker of genius.” But Virginia could not bring herself to admire an ambitious woman who fought her corner in a man’s world. She had as instinctive a dislike for organizing women as she had for organizing men. She told Vita that Hilda “affects me as a strong purge, as a hair-shirt, as a foggy day, as a cold in the head.” When Hilda Matheson died in 1940, she was still unreconciled: “I didn’t get on with her: she seemed so dried, so official,” but that was not true of Hilda, whom I had come to know well and love.

The Matheson affair marked a decline in the Virginia-Vita relationship. They remained friends until Virginia’s death, and in the early years of World War II something of their early intimacy revived. But when in January 1929 they met in Berlin, where Harold was now counselor in the British embassy, the visit was a failure. Leonard refused to attend a lunch party of German politicians which Harold had arranged in his honor, and Virginia, hating Berlin and the trappings of diplomacy as much as Vita did, was miserable. One day, when they lunched alone together, Virginia attempted to restore their old relationship only to be met with unexpected coolness. Then there was an incident that involved myself. The party, which included Vanessa and Duncan, went to a controversial film titled Sturm über Asien, and I, aged eleven, was refused admission. Vita was enraged by this display of pre-Hitler puritanism, and took me back to my father’s flat through snow-slushed streets. I remember the gloom of the occasion, the anger, the incompatibility, which Vanessa’s contempt for Vita’s distress did nothing to allay.

Virginia returned from Berlin in a state of collapse, due partly to the “rackety” life she had endured there, and partly to a pill which upset her more than the seasickness it was intended to cure. She was bedridden for a month. Her main correspondent was still Vita (“Have you any love for me, or only the appreciation which one member of the PEN has for another?”), and when she recovered, her time was occupied by two major novels, Vita’s The Edwardians, which the Hogarth Press published, and her own masterpiece, The Waves.

The Edwardians, like Orlando, was about Knole and the Sackville family. It was a romantic story—and Vita could tell a story well—in which she tried to reconcile her love of tradition with her conviction that the values of Edwardian society were false. It was a best-seller, the choice of the Book Societies both in Britain and America, and the Hogarth Press, with its wholly inadequate staff, handled the rush of business with success, as they did with Vita’s next book, All Passion Spent, which was also a best-seller. It was Vita’s finest novel, the reflections of an old woman, Lady Slane, on how convention had denied her any freedom of action or expression. Virginia liked it more than The Edwardians, and was impressed by Vita’s declaration that she didn’t care a scrap for her novels. She wished to be remembered as a poet. She wrote fiction only in order to pay the school bills for Ben and me. She had written them at speed.

The Waves, on the other hand, was the product of intense thought and labor. It was so original a book that only a few grasped its purpose. In outline, it was the outcome (“story” is not a word that one can use in this connection) of six friends soliloquizing about their lives from childhood to middle age. Their individual contributions were separated by lyrical passages describing the rising and setting of the sun over the sea. When she began it in 1929, she told her nephew Quentin that it was to be “an entirely new kind of book,” and when it was published in 1931, she replied to an ecstatic letter from Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, “I did mean that in some vague way we are the same person, and not separate people. The six characters are supposed to be one.” This gives an indication of the complexity of the book. It was a rainbow of different colors forming a single arc, the most poetic of her novels. It made every reader feel inadequate. Yet it sold 6,500 copies in three weeks.

Never had she concentrated so hard on a book. The history of its composition is amazing. She wrote it in manuscript twice over, the second version bearing little relation to the first. We can follow its progress in her diary. It began to torment her. “I write variations of every sentence; compromises; bad shots; possibilities. . . . I wish I enjoyed it more.” She fell ill, but the book continued to ferment like wine in the cask. Each afternoon she typed out what she had written in the morning, altering as she went, and then she had it retyped professionally, and further revised it, then again slightly in proof. “Never,” she wrote, “have I screwed my brain so tight over a book.” She barely mentioned the struggle in her letters. It was an intensely private labor, the printed book the only public declaration of her intent. Years later she wrote to Edward Sackville-West, “It’s the only one of my books that I can sometimes read with pleasure. Not that I wrote it with pleasure, but in a kind of trance into which I suppose I shall never sink again.”

Her distractions were many, because except when she was ill, she never relaxed for a moment her busy social life, her manifold correspondence, or her work for the Hogarth Press reading innumerable manuscripts and “travelling” their books with Leonard to the West Country as far as Penzance. There is something touching about the picture of these two middle-aged intellectuals trying to persuade indifferent, and sometimes downright insulting, booksellers to take their highbrow publications. “It’s becoming too much,” Virginia confessed to Vanessa. But instead of giving up, they enlisted John Lehmann as manager, with the intention of making him a partner after an eight-month trial. He was much more than a manager. He brought them young authors like Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden and Cecil Day-Lewis.

Another person entered Virginia’s life contemporary with her writing of The Waves, who to some extent took Vita’s place as her confidante and correspondent in chief for the next ten years, but without reciprocated love. Although Ethel Smyth undoubtedly loved Virginia with a sick passion, Virginia tolerated her, rather as she tolerated the Hogarth Press, as a diversion, and then a burden which she could not easily shake off. They had many friends in common, Vita among them, and each had long been interested in the other’s books. It was A Room of One’s Own which compelled Ethel to seek a meeting, since Virginia had expressed precisely the grievance that Ethel had nursed for three decades, the unequal struggle of women artists to win recognition in a man’s world. Ethel, now seventy-three years old, was a composer who imagined that only male prejudice had prevented the performance of her works, when in fact it was the other way round. A woman composer was so rare that her very existence excited wonder, and a woman who had added to her reputation in many other ways—by her autobiographies, her friends in high places, her two-month imprisonment as a suffragette—was regarded as a national phenomenon, and her music, like her opera The Wreckers, was performed not only because it was fresh and vigorous, but because it was by Ethel Smyth.

Her pursuit of Virginia soon ran into trouble. “It is like being caught by a giant crab,” she complained to Quentin, but Ethel’s persistence paid off. This is how I described their relationship in the introduction to the fourth volume of Virginia’s letters, of which 130 were written to Ethel herself:

 

Ethel Smyth in about 1930, when she first came to know Virginia, who was “half-amused, half-defensive, referring to ‘this curious unnatural friendship’ . . . but she enjoyed the combat, admired her, respected her. She was a gadfly, and paradoxically a solace.”

Virginia was half-amused, half-defensive, referring to “this curious unnatural friendship,” fearing ridicule, fearing too deep an involvement. She was wary of her. They had both voyaged too far before berthing in the same dock. Ethel took the initiative with a volley of questions to which she seldom awaited the replies even if she could hear them [she was very deaf] but they could be repeated in Virginia’s letters. Reading them, one hears their talk, the gradual unloading of all that cargo, more reticent on Virginia’s side than on Ethel’s, but gradually, under pressure, she yielded, and wrote to Ethel about matters that hitherto she had scarcely mentioned to anyone—her madness [“It’s terrific, I can assure you”], her feelings about sex [“I was always cowardly”] and even her thoughts of suicide that she had confessed to Leonard [“If you weren’t here, I would kill myself”]. She began to teach Ethel the benefits of patience and humility, and Ethel became a little calmer, a little less prone to beat the cymbals. Virginia enjoyed the combat, admired her, respected her. She was a gadfly, and paradoxically a solace.

 

I just remember Ethel. She often came to Long Barn, dressed like a coachman in cloak and tricorn hat, and she was vigorous in a way that didn’t frighten children, bursting through the weeks like paper hoops, a woman whose pertinacity was irresistible. Deafness, which can make people tedious to their friends, was for Ethel an asset. She told us to yell at her, and we yelled with an exuberance unequalled when talking to normal people. Once she insisted, when sitting on our terrace at Long Barn, on hearing a nightingale. A bird sang its heart out in the garden, but not a note penetrated to Ethel until it obligingly perched on the table in front of her and gave her a solo performance. How we cheered! How we adored her!