246- ] English Literature
Virginia Woolf
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Woolf
was born into an affluent household in South Kensington, London. She was the
seventh child of Julia Prinsep Jackson and Leslie Stephen in a blended family
of eight that included the modernist painter Vanessa Bell. She was
home-schooled in English classics and Victorian literature from a young age.
From 1897 to 1901, she attended the Ladies' Department of King's College
London. There, she studied classics and history, coming into contact with early
reformers of women's higher education and the women's rights movement.
After
her father's death in 1904, the Stephen family moved from Kensington to the
more bohemian Bloomsbury, where, in conjunction with the brothers' intellectual
friends, they formed the artistic and literary Bloomsbury Group. In 1912, she
married Leonard Woolf, and in 1917, the couple founded the Hogarth Press, which
published much of her work. They rented a home in Sussex and permanently
settled there in 1940.
Woolf
began writing professionally in 1900. During the inter-war period, Woolf was an
important part of London's literary and artistic society, and its anti-war
position. In 1915, she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, through her
half-brother's publishing house, Gerald Duckworth and Company. Her best-known
works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and
Orlando (1928). She is also known for her essays, such as A Room of One's Own
(1929).
Woolf
became one of the central subjects of the 1970s movement of feminist criticism.
Her works, translated into more than 50 languages, have attracted attention and
widespread commentary for inspiring feminism. A large body of writing is
dedicated to her life and work. She has been the subject of plays, novels, and
films. Woolf is commemorated by statues, societies dedicated to her work, and a
building at the University of London.
Life
Early life
Virginia
Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on 25 January 1882 at 22 Hyde Park Gate
in South Kensington, London, to Julia (née Jackson) and Sir Leslie Stephen. Her
father was a writer, historian, essayist, biographer, and mountaineer,
described by Helena Swanwick as a "gaunt figure with a ragged red brown
beard ... a formidable man." Her mother was a noted philanthropist, and
her side of the family contained Julia Margaret Cameron, a celebrated
photographer, and Lady Henry Somerset, a campaigner for women's rights.
Virginia was named after her aunt Adeline, but because of her aunt's recent
death the family decided not to use her first name.
Both
of the Stephens had children from previous marriages. Julia, from her marriage
to barrister Herbert Duckworth, had George, Stella, and Gerald; Leslie had
Laura from a marriage to Minny Thackeray, a daughter of William Makepeace
Thackeray. Both former spouses had died suddenly, Duckworth of an abscess and
Minny Stephen in childbirth. Leslie and Julia Stephen had four children
together: Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, and Adrian.
Virginia
lived at 22 Hyde Park Gate until her father's death in 1904. She was, as she
described it, "born into a large connection, born not of rich parents, but
of well-to-do parents, born into a very communicative, literate, letter
writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth century world." The house
was described as dimly-lit, crowded with furniture and paintings. Within it, the
younger Stephens made a close-knit group.
Virginia
showed an early affinity for writing. By the age of five, she was writing
letters. A fascination with books helped form a bond between her and her
father. From the age of 10, with her sister Vanessa, she began an illustrated
family newspaper, the Hyde Park Gate News, chronicling life and events within
the Stephen family, and modelled on the popular magazine Tit-Bits. Virginia
would run the Hyde Park Gate News until 1895, a few weeks before her mother's
death. In 1897 Virginia began her first diary, which she kept for the next
twelve years.
Talland
House
In
the spring of 1882, Leslie rented a large white house in St Ives, Cornwall. The
family would spend three months each summer there for the first 13 years of Virginia's
life. Although the house had limited amenities, its main attraction was the
view overlooking Porthminster Bay towards the Godrevy Lighthouse. The happy
summers spent at Talland House would later influence Woolf's novels Jacob's
Room, To the Lighthouse and The Waves.
Both
at Hyde Park Gate and Talland House, the family socialised with much of the
country's literary and artistic circles. Frequent guests included literary
figures such as Henry James and George Meredith, as well as James Russell Lowell.
The family did not return after 1894; a hotel was constructed in front of the
house which blocked the sea view, and Julia Stephen died in May the following
year.
Sexual abuse
In the 1939 essay "A Sketch of the Past"
Woolf first wrote about experiencing sexual abuse by Gerald Duckworth at a
young age. There is speculation that this contributed to her mental health
issues later in life. There are also suggestions of sexual impropriety from
George Duckworth during the period that he was caring for the Stephen sisters.
Adolescence
Julia
Stephen fell ill with influenza in February 1895, and never properly recovered,
dying on 5 May, when Virginia was 13. This precipitated what Virginia later
identified as her first "breakdown"—for months afterwards she was
nervous and agitated, and she wrote very little for the subsequent two years.
Stella
Duckworth took on a parental role. She married in April 1897 but moved to a
house very close to the Stephens to continue to support the family. However,
she fell ill on her honeymoon and died on 19 July 1897. Subsequently George
Duckworth took it upon himself to act as the head of the household, and bring
Vanessa and Virginia out into society. This was not a rite of passage that
resonated with either girl; Virginia's view was that "Society in those
days was a very competent, perfectly complacent, ruthless machine. A girl had
no chance against its fangs. No other desires—say to paint, or to write—could
be taken seriously." Her priority was her writing; she began a new diary
at the start of 1897 and filled notebooks with fragments and literary sketches.
Leslie
Stephen died in February 1904, which caused Virginia to suffer another period
of mental instability from April to September, and led to at least one suicide
attempt. Woolf later described the period of 1897–1904 as "the seven
unhappy years".
Education
As
was common at the time, Julia Stephen did not believe in formal education for
her daughters. Virginia was educated in a piecemeal fashion by her parents:
Julia taught her Latin, French, and history, while Leslie taught her
mathematics. She also received piano lessons. She also had unrestricted access
to her father's vast library, exposing her to much of the literary canon. This
resulted in a greater depth of reading than any of her Cambridge
contemporaries. Later, Virginia recalled:
Even
today there may be parents who would doubt the wisdom of allowing a girl of
fifteen the free run of a large and quite unexpurgated library. But my father
allowed it. There were certain facts – very briefly, very shyly he referred to
them. Yet "Read what you like", he said, and all his books...were to
be had without asking.
Another
source was the conversation of their father's friends, to whom she was
exposed.[citation needed] Leslie Stephen described his circle as "most of
the literary people of mark...clever young writers and barristers, chiefly of
the radical persuasion...we used to meet on Wednesday and Sunday evenings, to
smoke and drink and discuss the universe and the reform movement".
From
1897 Virginia received private tuition in Latin and Ancient Greek. One of her
tutors was Clara Pater, and another was Janet Case, with whom she formed a
lasting friendship and who involved her in the suffrage movement. Virginia also
attended a number of lectures at the King's College Ladies' Department.
Although
Virginia could not attend Cambridge, she was profoundly influenced by her
brother Thoby's experiences there. When Thoby went to Trinity in 1899, he
befriended a circle of young men, including Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey,
Leonard Woolf (whom Virginia would later marry), and Saxon Sydney-Turner, to
whom he would introduce his sisters at the Trinity May Ball in 1900. These men
formed a reading group they named the Midnight Society, which the Stephen
sisters would later be invited to.
Bloomsbury
(1904–1912)
Gordon
Square
After
their father's death, Vanessa and Adrian decided to sell 22 Hyde Park Gate in
South Kensington and move to Bloomsbury. This was a much cheaper area—they had
not inherited much and were unsure about their finances. The Duckworth brothers
did not join the Stephens in their new home; Gerald did not wish to, and George
got married during the preparations, leaving to live with his new wife.
Virginia lived in the house for brief periods in the autumn – she was sent away
to Cambridge and Yorkshire for her health – and settled there permanently in
December 1904.
From
March 1905 the Stephens began to entertain their brother Thoby's intellectual
friends at Gordon Square. The circle, who were largely members of the Cambridge
Apostles, included Saxon Sydney-Turner, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell and Desmond
MacCarthy. Their social gatherings, referred to as "Thursday
evenings", were a vision of recreating Trinity College. This circle formed
the nucleus of the intellectual circle of writers and artists known as the
Bloomsbury Group. Later, it would include John Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, E.
M. Forster, Roger Fry, Leonard Woolf, and David Garnett.
Virginia
began teaching evening classes on a voluntary basis at Morley College and would
continue intermittently for the next two years. This work would later influence
themes of class and education in her novel Mrs Dalloway. She made some money
from reviews, including some published in church paper The Guardian and the
National Review, capitalising on her father's literary reputation in order to
earn commissions.
Vanessa
added another event to their calendar with the "Friday Club",
dedicated to the discussion of the fine arts. This introduced some new people
into their circle, including Vanessa's friends from the Royal Academy of Arts
and Slade School of Fine Art (where she had been studying), such as Henry Lamb
and Gwen Darwin, and also the eighteen-year-old Katherine Laird
("Ka") Cox, who was about to attend Newnham College, Cambridge. Cox
would become Virginia's intimate friend. These new members brought the
Bloomsbury Group into contact with another, slightly younger, group of
Cambridge intellectuals who Virginia would refer to as the
"Neo-Pagans". The Friday Club continued until 1912 or 1913.
In
the autumn of 1906, the siblings travelled to Greece and Turkey with Violet Dickinson.
During the trip Vanessa fell ill with appendicitis. Both Violet and Thoby
contracted typhoid fever; Thoby died on 20 November.
Two
days after Thoby's death, Vanessa accepted a previous proposal of marriage from
Clive Bell. As a couple, their interest in avant-garde art would have an
important influence on Woolf's further development as an author.
Fitzroy Square and Brunswick Square
After
Vanessa's marriage, Virginia and Adrian moved into 29 Fitzroy Square, still
very close to Gordon Square. The house had previously been occupied by George
Bernard Shaw, and the area had been populated by artists since the previous
century. Duncan Grant lived there, and Roger Fry moved there in 1913. Virginia
resented the wealth that Vanessa's marriage had given her; Virginia and Adrian
lived more humbly by comparison.
The
siblings resumed the Thursday Club at their new home, while Gordon Square
became the venue for a play-reading society. During this period, the group
began to increasingly explore progressive ideas, with open discussions of
members' homosexual inclinations, and nude dancing from Vanessa, who in 1910
went so far as to propose a libertarian society with sexual freedom for all.
Virginia appears not to have shown interest in practising the group's free love
ideology, finding an outlet for her sexual desires only in writing. Around this
time she began work on her first novel, Melymbrosia, which eventually became
The Voyage Out (1915).
In
November 1911 Virginia and Adrian moved to a larger house at 38 Brunswick
Square, and invited John Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant and Leonard Woolf to
become lodgers there. Virginia saw it as a new opportunity: "We are going
to try all kinds of experiments", she told Ottoline Morrell. This
arrangement for a single woman living among men was considered scandalous.
Dreadnought
hoax
Several
members of the Bloomsbury Group attained notoriety in 1910 with the Dreadnought
hoax, in which they posed as a royal Abyssinian entourage (with Virginia as
"Prince Mendax") and received a tour of the HMS Dreadnought by
Virginia's cousin Commander Fisher, who was not aware of the joke. Horace de
Vere Cole, who had been one of the masterminds of the hoax along with Adrian,
later leaked the story to the press and informed the Foreign Office, leading to
general outrage from the establishment.
Virginia
Woolf's participation, dressing with a blackened face and beard, was a
startling testament to her alienation from the whole business of war expressed
in the inspection of the latest killing machine.
Asham
House (1911–1919)
During
the latter Bloomsbury years, Virginia travelled frequently with friends and
family, to Dorset and Cornwall as well as further afield to Paris, Italy and
Bayreuth. These trips were intended to avoid her suffering exhaustion from
extended periods in London. The question arose of Virginia needing a quiet
country retreat close to London, for the sake of her still-fragile mental
health. In the winter of 1910 she and Adrian stayed at Lewes and started
exploring the area of Sussex around the town. She soon found a property in
nearby Firle, which she named "Little Talland House"; she maintained
a relationship with that area for the rest of her life, tending to spend her
time either in Sussex or London.
In
September 1911 she and Leonard Woolf found Asham House[d] nearby, and Virginia
and Vanessa took a joint lease on it. Located at the end of a tree-lined road,
the house was in a Regency-Gothic style, "flat, pale, serene,
yellow-washed", remote, without electricity or water and allegedly
haunted. The sisters had two housewarming parties in January 1912.
Virginia
recorded the events of the weekends and holidays she spent there in her Asham
Diary, part of which was later published as A Writer's Diary in 1953. In terms
of creative writing, The Voyage Out was completed there, and much of Night and
Day. The house itself inspired the short story "A Haunted House",
published in A Haunted House and Other Short Stories. Asham provided Woolf with
much-needed relief from the pace of London life and was where she found
happiness that she expressed in her diary on 5 May 1919: "Oh, but how
happy we've been at Asheham! It was a most melodious time. Everything went so
freely; – but I can't analyse all the sources of my joy".
While
at Asham, in 1916 Leonard and Virginia found a farmhouse to let about four
miles away, which they thought would be ideal for her sister. Eventually,
Vanessa came down to inspect it, and took possession in October of that year,
as a summer home for her family. The Charleston Farmhouse was to become the
summer gathering place for the Bloomsbury Group.
Marriage
and war (1912–1920)
Leonard
Woolf was one of Thoby Stephen's friends at Trinity College, Cambridge, and had
encountered the Stephen sisters in Thoby's rooms while visiting for May Week
between 1899 and 1904. He recalled that in "white dresses and large hats,
with parasols in their hands, their beauty literally took one's breath away".
In 1904 Leonard Woolf left Britain for a civil service position in Ceylon, but
returned for a year's leave in 1911 after letters from Lytton Strachey
describing Virginia's beauty enticed him back. He and Virginia attended social
engagements together, and he moved into Brunswick Square as a tenant in
December of that year.
Leonard
proposed to Virginia on 11 January 1912. Initially she expressed reluctance,
but the two continued courting. Leonard decided not to return to Ceylon and
resigned from his post. On 29 May Virginia declared her love for Leonard, and
they married on 10 August at St Pancras Town Hall. The couple spent their
honeymoon first at Asham and the Quantock Hills before travelling to the south
of France and on to Spain and Italy. On their return, they moved to Clifford's
Inn, and began to divide their time between London and Asham. Though Virginia
wanted to have children, Leonard refused, as he believed Virginia was not
mentally strong enough to be a mother, and worried what having children might do
to her mental health.
Virginia
Woolf had completed a penultimate draft of her first novel The Voyage Out
before her wedding but undertook large-scale alterations to the manuscript
between December 1912 and March 1913. The work was subsequently accepted by her
half-brother Gerald Duckworth's publishing house, and she found the process of
reading and correcting the proofs extremely emotionally difficult. This led to
one of several breakdowns over the subsequent two years; Woolf attempted
suicide on 9 September 1913 with an overdose of Veronal, being saved with the
help of Maynard Keynes' surgeon brother Geoffrey Keynes who drove Leonard to St
Bartholomew's Hospital to fetch a stomach pump. Woolf's illness led to
Duckworth delaying the publication of The Voyage Out until 26 March 1915.
In
the autumn of 1914 the couple moved to a house on Richmond Green, and in late
March 1915 they moved to Hogarth House, also in Richmond, after which they
named their publishing house in 1917. The decision to move to London's suburbs
was made for the sake of Woolf's health. Many of Woolf's circle of friends were
against the war, and Woolf herself opposed it from a standpoint of pacifism and
anti-censorship. Leonard was exempted from the introduction of conscription in
1916 on medical grounds. The Woolfs employed two servants at the recommendation
of Roger Fry in 1916; Lottie Hope worked for a number of other Bloomsbury Group
members, and Nellie Boxall would stay with them until 1934.
The
Woolfs spent parts of the period of the First World War in Asham but were
obliged by the owner to leave in 1919. "In despair" they purchased
the Round House in Lewes, a converted windmill, for £300. No sooner had they
bought the Round House, than Monk's House in nearby Rodmell came up for
auction, a weatherboarded house with oak-beamed rooms, said to date from the
15th or 16th century. The Woolfs sold the Round House and purchased Monk's
House for £700. Monk's House also lacked running water but came with an acre of
garden, and had a view across the Ouse towards the hills of the South Downs.
Leonard Woolf describes this view as being unchanged since the days of Chaucer.
The Woolfs would retain Monk's House until the end of Virginia's life; it
became their permanent home after their London home was bombed, and it was
where she completed Between the Acts in early 1941, which was followed by her
final breakdown and suicide in the nearby River Ouse on 28 March.
Further
works (1920–1940)
Memoir
Club
1920
saw a postwar reconstitution of the Bloomsbury Group, under the title of the
Memoir Club, which as the name suggests focussed on self-writing, in the manner
of Proust's A La Recherche, and inspired some of the more influential books of
the 20th century. The Group, which had been scattered by the war, was
reconvened by Mary ('Molly') MacCarthy who called them
"Bloomsberries", and operated under rules derived from the Cambridge
Apostles, an elite university debating society that a number of them had been
members of. These rules emphasised candour and openness. Among the 125 memoirs
presented, Virginia contributed three that were published posthumously in 1976,
in the autobiographical anthology Moments of Being. These were 22 Hyde Park
Gate (1921), Old Bloomsbury (1922) and Am I a Snob? (1936).
Vita
Sackville-West
On
14 December 1922 Woolf met the writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West, wife of
Harold Nicolson. This period was to prove fruitful for both authors, Woolf
producing three novels, To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and The Waves
(1931) as well as a number of essays, including "Mr. Bennett and Mrs.
Brown" (1924) and "A Letter to a Young Poet" (1932). The two
women remained friends until Woolf's death in 1941.
Virginia
Woolf also remained close to her surviving siblings, Adrian and Vanessa.
Further
novels and non-fiction
Between
1924 and 1940 the Woolfs returned to Bloomsbury, taking out a ten-year lease at
52 Tavistock Square, from where they ran the Hogarth Press from the basement,
where Virginia also had her writing room.
1925
saw the publication of Mrs Dalloway in May followed by her collapse while at
Charleston in August. In 1927, her next novel, To the Lighthouse, was
published, and the following year she lectured on Women & Fiction at
Cambridge University and published Orlando in October.
Her
two Cambridge lectures then became the basis for her major essay A Room of
One's Own in 1929. Virginia wrote only one drama, Freshwater, based on her
great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, and produced at her sister's studio on
Fitzroy Street in 1935. 1936 saw the publication of The Years, which had its
origin in a lecture Woolf gave to the National Society for Women's Service in
1931, an edited version of which would later be published as "Professions
for Women". Another collapse of her health followed the novel's completion
The Years.
The
Woolfs' final residence in London was at 37 Mecklenburgh Square (1939–1940),
destroyed during the Blitz in September 1940; a month later their previous home
on Tavistock Square was also destroyed. After that, they made Sussex their
permanent home.
Death
After
completing the manuscript of her last novel (posthumously published), Between
the Acts (1941), Woolf fell into a depression similar to one which she had
earlier experienced. The onset of the Second World War, the destruction of her
London home during the Blitz, and the cool reception given to her biography of
her late friend Roger Fry all worsened her condition until she was unable to
work. When Leonard enlisted in the Home Guard, Virginia disapproved. She held
fast to her pacifism and criticised her husband for wearing what she considered
to be "the silly uniform of the Home Guard".
After
the Second World War began, Woolf's diary indicates that she was obsessed with
death, which figured more and more as her mood darkened. On 28 March 1941,
Woolf drowned herself by walking into the fast-flowing River Ouse near her
home, after placing a large stone in her pocket. Her body was not found until
18 April. Her husband buried her cremated remains beneath an elm tree in the
garden of Monk's House, their home in Rodmell, Sussex.
In
her suicide note, addressed to her husband, she wrote:
Dearest,
I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of
those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices,
and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You
have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all
that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till
this terrible disease came. I can't fight it any longer. I know that I am
spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You
see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe
all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and
incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have
saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty
of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think
two people could have been happier than we have been.
Mental
health
Much
examination has been made of Woolf's mental health. From the age of 13,
following the death of her mother, Woolf suffered periodic mood swings.
However, Hermione Lee asserts that Woolf was not "mad"; she was
merely a woman who suffered from and struggled with illness for much of her
life, a woman of "exceptional courage, intelligence and stoicism",
who made the best use, and achieved the best understanding she could of that
illness.
Her
mother's death in 1895, "the greatest disaster that could happen",
precipitated a crisis for which their family doctor, Dr Seton, prescribed rest,
stopping lessons and writing, and regular walks supervised by Stella. Yet just
two years later, Stella too was dead, bringing on Virginia's first expressed
wish for death at the age of fifteen. This was a scenario she would later
recreate in "Time Passes" (To the Lighthouse, 1927).
The
death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse, on 10 May,
when she threw herself out of a window and she was briefly institutionalised
under the care of her father's friend, the eminent psychiatrist George Savage.
She spent time recovering at the house of Stella's friend Violet Dickinson, and
at her aunt Caroline Stephen's house in Cambridge, and by January 1905, Savage
considered her cured.
Her
brother Thoby's death in 1906 marked a "decade of deaths" that ended
her childhood and adolescence.
On
Savage's recommendation, Virginia spent three short periods in 1910, 1912, and
1913 at Burley House at 15 Cambridge Park, Twickenham, described as "a
private nursing home for women with nervous disorder" run by Miss Jean
Thomas. By the end of February 1910, she was becoming increasingly restless,
and Savage suggested being away from London. Vanessa rented Moat House, outside
Canterbury, in June, but there was no improvement, so Savage sent her to Burley
for a "rest cure". This involved partial isolation, deprivation of
literature, and force-feeding, and after six weeks she was able to convalesce
in Cornwall and Dorset during the autumn.
She
loathed the experience; writing to her sister on 28 July, she described how she
found the religious atmosphere stifling and the institution ugly, and informed
Vanessa that to escape "I shall soon have to jump out of a window".
The threat of being sent back would later lead to her contemplating suicide. Despite
her protests, Savage would refer her back in 1912 for insomnia and in 1913 for
depression.
On
emerging from Burley House in September 1913, she sought further opinions from
two other physicians on the 13th: Maurice Wright, and Henry Head, who had been
Henry James's physician. Both recommended she return to Burley House.
Distraught, she returned home and attempted suicide by taking an overdose of
100 grains of veronal (a barbiturate) and nearly dying.
On
recovery, she went to Dalingridge Hall, George Duckworth's home in East
Grinstead, Sussex, to convalesce on 30 September, returning to Asham on 18
November. She remained unstable over the next two years, with another incident
involving veronal that she claimed was an 'accident', and consulted another
psychiatrist in April 1914, Maurice Craig, who explained that she was not
sufficiently psychotic to be certified or committed to an institution.
The
rest of the summer of 1914 went better for her, and they moved to Richmond, but
in February 1915, just as The Voyage Out was due to be published, she relapsed
once more, and remained in poor health for most of that year. Then she began to
recover, following 20 years of ill health. Nevertheless, there was a feeling
among those around her that she was now permanently changed, and not for the
better.
Over
the rest of her life, she suffered recurrent bouts of depression. In 1940, a
number of factors appeared to overwhelm her. Her biography of Roger Fry had
been published in July, and she had been disappointed in its reception. The
horrors of war depressed her, and their London homes had been destroyed in the
Blitz in September and October. Woolf had completed Between the Acts (published
posthumously in 1941) in November, and completing a novel was frequently
accompanied by exhaustion. Her health became increasingly a matter of concern,
culminating in her decision to end her life on 28 March 1941.
She
also suffered many physical ailments such as headaches, backache, fevers and
faints, which related closely to her psychological stress. These often lasted
for weeks or even months, and impeded her work: "What a gap! ... for 60
days; & those days spent in wearisome headache, jumping pulse, aching back,
frets, fidgets, lying awake, sleeping draughts, sedatives, digitalis, going for
a little walk, & plunging back into bed again."
Though
this instability would frequently affect her social life, she was able to
continue her literary productivity with few interruptions throughout her life.
Woolf herself provides not only a vivid picture of her symptoms in her diaries
and letters but also her response to the demons that haunted her and at times
made her long for death: "But it is always a question whether I wish to
avoid these glooms... These 9 weeks give one a plunge into deep waters... One
goes down into the well & nothing protects one from the assault of
truth."
Psychiatry
had little to offer Woolf, but she recognised that writing was one of the
behaviours that enabled her to cope with her illness: "The only way I keep
afloat... is by working... Directly I stop working I feel that I am sinking
down, down. And as usual, I feel that if I sink further I shall reach the
truth." Sinking underwater was Woolf's metaphor for both the effects of
depression and psychosis— but also for finding the truth, and ultimately was
her choice of death.
Throughout
her life, Woolf struggled, without success, to find meaning in her illness: on
the one hand, an impediment, on the other, something she visualised as an
essential part of who she was, and a necessary condition of her art. Her
experiences informed her work, such as the character of Septimus Warren Smith
in Mrs Dalloway (1925), who, like Woolf, was haunted by the dead, and
ultimately takes his own life rather than be admitted to a sanitorium.
Leonard
Woolf relates how during the 30 years they were married, they consulted many
doctors in the Harley Street area, and although they were given a diagnosis of
neurasthenia, he felt they had little understanding of the causes or nature.
The proposed solution was simple—as long as she lived a quiet life without any
physical or mental exertion, she was well. On the other hand, any mental,
emotional, or physical strain resulted in a reappearance of her symptoms,
beginning with a headache, followed by insomnia and thoughts that started to
race. Her remedy was simple: to retire to bed in a darkened room, following
which the symptoms slowly subsided.
Modern
scholars, including her nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell, have suggested her
breakdowns and subsequent recurring depressive periods were influenced by the
sexual abuse which she and her sister Vanessa were subjected to by their
half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth (which Woolf recalls in her
autobiographical essays "A Sketch of the Past" and "22 Hyde Park
Gate"). Biographers point out that when Stella died in 1897, there was no
counterbalance to control George's predation, and his nighttime prowling.
"22 Hyde Park Gate" ends with the sentence "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."
It
is likely that other factors also played a part. It has been suggested that
they include genetic predisposition. Virginia's father, Leslie Stephen,
suffered from depression, and her half-sister Laura was institutionalised. Many
of Virginia's symptoms, including persistent headache, insomnia, irritability,
and anxiety, resembled those of her father's. Another factor is the pressure
she placed upon herself in her work; for instance, her breakdown of 1913 was at
least partly triggered by the need to finish The Voyage Out.
Virginia
herself hinted that her illness was related to how she saw the repressed
position of women in society when she wrote A Room of One's Own.n a 1930 letter
to Ethel Smyth:
As
an experience, madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at;
and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of
one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does. And the six
months—not three—that I lay in bed taught me a good deal about what is called
oneself.
Thomas
Caramagno and others, in discussing her illness, oppose the
"neurotic-genius" way of looking at mental illness, where creativity
and mental illness are conceptualised as linked rather than antithetical.
Stephen Trombley describes Woolf as having a confrontational relationship with
her doctors, and possibly being a woman who is a "victim of male
medicine", referring to the lack of understanding, particularly at the time,
about mental illness.
Sexuality
The
Bloomsbury Group held very progressive views regarding sexuality and rejected
the austere strictness of Victorian society. The majority of its members were
homosexual or bisexual.
Woolf
had several affairs with women, the most notable being with Vita
Sackville-West. The two women developed a deep connection; Vita was arguably
one of the few people in Virginia's adult life that she was truly close to.
[Virginia
Woolf] told Ethel that she only really loved three people: Leonard, Vanessa,
and myself, which annoyed Ethel but pleased me – Vita Sackville-West's letter
to husband Harold Nicolson, dated 28 September 1939
During
their relationship, both women saw the peak of their literary careers, with the
titular protagonist of Woolf's acclaimed Orlando: A Biography being inspired by
Sackville-West. The pair remained lovers for a decade and stayed close friends
for the rest of Woolf's life. Woolf had said to Sackville-West she disliked
masculinity.
[Virginia
Woolf] dislikes the possessiveness and love of domination in men. In fact, she
dislikes the quality of masculinity ; says that women stimulate her
imagination, by their grace & their art of life – Vita Sackville-West's
diary, dated 26 September 1928
Among
her other notable affairs were those with Sibyl Colefax, Lady Ottoline Morrell,
and Mary Hutchinson. Some surmise that she may have fallen in love with Madge
Symonds, the wife of one of her uncles. Madge Symonds was described as one of
Woolf's early loves in Sackville-West's diary. She also fell in love with
Violet Dickinson, although there is some confusion as to whether the two
consummated their relationship.
Virginia
initially declined marriage proposals from her future husband, Leonard. She
even went so far as to tell him that she was not physically attracted to him,
but later declared that she did love him, and eventually agreed to marriage.
Woolf preferred female lovers to male lovers and did not seem to be sexually
attracted to men.
I
sometimes think that if I married you, I could have everything—and then—is it
the sexual side of it that comes between us? As I told you brutally the other
day, I feel no physical attraction in you. – Letter to Leonard from Virginia
dated May 1, 1912
Leonard
became the love of her life. Although their sexual relationship was
questionable, they loved each other deeply and formed a strong and supportive
marriage that led to the formation of their publishing house as well as several
of her writings. Though Virginia had affairs with and attractions to women
during their marriage, both she and Leonard maintained a mutual love and
respect for one another.
Adeline
Virginia Woolf (/wʊlf/; née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an
English writer. She is considered one of the most important modernist
20th-century authors. She pioneered the use of stream of consciousness as a
narrative device.
Woolf
was born into an affluent household in South Kensington, London. She was the
seventh child of Julia Prinsep Jackson and Leslie Stephen in a blended family
of eight that included the modernist painter Vanessa Bell. She was
home-schooled in English classics and Victorian literature from a young age.
From 1897 to 1901, she attended the Ladies' Department of King's College
London. There, she studied classics and history, coming into contact with early
reformers of women's higher education and the women's rights movement.
After
her father's death in 1904, the Stephen family moved from Kensington to the
more bohemian Bloomsbury, where, in conjunction with the brothers' intellectual
friends, they formed the artistic and literary Bloomsbury Group. In 1912, she
married Leonard Woolf, and in 1917, the couple founded the Hogarth Press, which
published much of her work. They rented a home in Sussex and permanently
settled there in 1940.
Woolf
began writing professionally in 1900. During the inter-war period, Woolf was an
important part of London's literary and artistic society, and its anti-war
position. In 1915, she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, through her
half-brother's publishing house, Gerald Duckworth and Company. Her best-known
works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and
Orlando (1928). She is also known for her essays, such as A Room of One's Own
(1929).
Woolf
became one of the central subjects of the 1970s movement of feminist criticism.
Her works, translated into more than 50 languages, have attracted attention and
widespread commentary for inspiring feminism. A large body of writing is
dedicated to her life and work. She has been the subject of plays, novels, and
films. Woolf is commemorated by statues, societies dedicated to her work, and a
building at the University of London.
Life
Early life
Virginia
Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on 25 January 1882 at 22 Hyde Park Gate
in South Kensington, London, to Julia (née Jackson) and Sir Leslie Stephen. Her
father was a writer, historian, essayist, biographer, and mountaineer,
described by Helena Swanwick as a "gaunt figure with a ragged red brown
beard ... a formidable man." Her mother was a noted philanthropist, and
her side of the family contained Julia Margaret Cameron, a celebrated
photographer, and Lady Henry Somerset, a campaigner for women's rights.
Virginia was named after her aunt Adeline, but because of her aunt's recent
death the family decided not to use her first name.
Both
of the Stephens had children from previous marriages. Julia, from her marriage
to barrister Herbert Duckworth, had George, Stella, and Gerald; Leslie had
Laura from a marriage to Minny Thackeray, a daughter of William Makepeace
Thackeray. Both former spouses had died suddenly, Duckworth of an abscess and
Minny Stephen in childbirth. Leslie and Julia Stephen had four children
together: Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, and Adrian.
Virginia
lived at 22 Hyde Park Gate until her father's death in 1904. She was, as she
described it, "born into a large connection, born not of rich parents, but
of well-to-do parents, born into a very communicative, literate, letter
writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth century world." The house
was described as dimly-lit, crowded with furniture and paintings. Within it, the
younger Stephens made a close-knit group.
Virginia
showed an early affinity for writing. By the age of five, she was writing
letters. A fascination with books helped form a bond between her and her
father. From the age of 10, with her sister Vanessa, she began an illustrated
family newspaper, the Hyde Park Gate News, chronicling life and events within
the Stephen family, and modelled on the popular magazine Tit-Bits. Virginia
would run the Hyde Park Gate News until 1895, a few weeks before her mother's
death. In 1897 Virginia began her first diary, which she kept for the next
twelve years.
Talland
House
In
the spring of 1882, Leslie rented a large white house in St Ives, Cornwall. The
family would spend three months each summer there for the first 13 years of Virginia's
life. Although the house had limited amenities, its main attraction was the
view overlooking Porthminster Bay towards the Godrevy Lighthouse. The happy
summers spent at Talland House would later influence Woolf's novels Jacob's
Room, To the Lighthouse and The Waves.
Both
at Hyde Park Gate and Talland House, the family socialised with much of the
country's literary and artistic circles. Frequent guests included literary
figures such as Henry James and George Meredith, as well as James Russell Lowell.
The family did not return after 1894; a hotel was constructed in front of the
house which blocked the sea view, and Julia Stephen died in May the following
year.
Sexual abuse
In the 1939 essay "A Sketch of the Past"
Woolf first wrote about experiencing sexual abuse by Gerald Duckworth at a
young age. There is speculation that this contributed to her mental health
issues later in life. There are also suggestions of sexual impropriety from
George Duckworth during the period that he was caring for the Stephen sisters.
Adolescence
Julia
Stephen fell ill with influenza in February 1895, and never properly recovered,
dying on 5 May, when Virginia was 13. This precipitated what Virginia later
identified as her first "breakdown"—for months afterwards she was
nervous and agitated, and she wrote very little for the subsequent two years.
Stella
Duckworth took on a parental role. She married in April 1897 but moved to a
house very close to the Stephens to continue to support the family. However,
she fell ill on her honeymoon and died on 19 July 1897. Subsequently George
Duckworth took it upon himself to act as the head of the household, and bring
Vanessa and Virginia out into society. This was not a rite of passage that
resonated with either girl; Virginia's view was that "Society in those
days was a very competent, perfectly complacent, ruthless machine. A girl had
no chance against its fangs. No other desires—say to paint, or to write—could
be taken seriously." Her priority was her writing; she began a new diary
at the start of 1897 and filled notebooks with fragments and literary sketches.
Leslie
Stephen died in February 1904, which caused Virginia to suffer another period
of mental instability from April to September, and led to at least one suicide
attempt. Woolf later described the period of 1897–1904 as "the seven
unhappy years".
Education
As
was common at the time, Julia Stephen did not believe in formal education for
her daughters. Virginia was educated in a piecemeal fashion by her parents:
Julia taught her Latin, French, and history, while Leslie taught her
mathematics. She also received piano lessons. She also had unrestricted access
to her father's vast library, exposing her to much of the literary canon. This
resulted in a greater depth of reading than any of her Cambridge
contemporaries. Later, Virginia recalled:
Even
today there may be parents who would doubt the wisdom of allowing a girl of
fifteen the free run of a large and quite unexpurgated library. But my father
allowed it. There were certain facts – very briefly, very shyly he referred to
them. Yet "Read what you like", he said, and all his books...were to
be had without asking.
Another
source was the conversation of their father's friends, to whom she was
exposed.[citation needed] Leslie Stephen described his circle as "most of
the literary people of mark...clever young writers and barristers, chiefly of
the radical persuasion...we used to meet on Wednesday and Sunday evenings, to
smoke and drink and discuss the universe and the reform movement".
From
1897 Virginia received private tuition in Latin and Ancient Greek. One of her
tutors was Clara Pater, and another was Janet Case, with whom she formed a
lasting friendship and who involved her in the suffrage movement. Virginia also
attended a number of lectures at the King's College Ladies' Department.
Although
Virginia could not attend Cambridge, she was profoundly influenced by her
brother Thoby's experiences there. When Thoby went to Trinity in 1899, he
befriended a circle of young men, including Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey,
Leonard Woolf (whom Virginia would later marry), and Saxon Sydney-Turner, to
whom he would introduce his sisters at the Trinity May Ball in 1900. These men
formed a reading group they named the Midnight Society, which the Stephen
sisters would later be invited to.
Bloomsbury
(1904–1912)
Gordon
Square
After
their father's death, Vanessa and Adrian decided to sell 22 Hyde Park Gate in
South Kensington and move to Bloomsbury. This was a much cheaper area—they had
not inherited much and were unsure about their finances. The Duckworth brothers
did not join the Stephens in their new home; Gerald did not wish to, and George
got married during the preparations, leaving to live with his new wife.
Virginia lived in the house for brief periods in the autumn – she was sent away
to Cambridge and Yorkshire for her health – and settled there permanently in
December 1904.
From
March 1905 the Stephens began to entertain their brother Thoby's intellectual
friends at Gordon Square. The circle, who were largely members of the Cambridge
Apostles, included Saxon Sydney-Turner, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell and Desmond
MacCarthy. Their social gatherings, referred to as "Thursday
evenings", were a vision of recreating Trinity College. This circle formed
the nucleus of the intellectual circle of writers and artists known as the
Bloomsbury Group. Later, it would include John Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, E.
M. Forster, Roger Fry, Leonard Woolf, and David Garnett.
Virginia
began teaching evening classes on a voluntary basis at Morley College and would
continue intermittently for the next two years. This work would later influence
themes of class and education in her novel Mrs Dalloway. She made some money
from reviews, including some published in church paper The Guardian and the
National Review, capitalising on her father's literary reputation in order to
earn commissions.
Vanessa
added another event to their calendar with the "Friday Club",
dedicated to the discussion of the fine arts. This introduced some new people
into their circle, including Vanessa's friends from the Royal Academy of Arts
and Slade School of Fine Art (where she had been studying), such as Henry Lamb
and Gwen Darwin, and also the eighteen-year-old Katherine Laird
("Ka") Cox, who was about to attend Newnham College, Cambridge. Cox
would become Virginia's intimate friend. These new members brought the
Bloomsbury Group into contact with another, slightly younger, group of
Cambridge intellectuals who Virginia would refer to as the
"Neo-Pagans". The Friday Club continued until 1912 or 1913.
In
the autumn of 1906, the siblings travelled to Greece and Turkey with Violet Dickinson.
During the trip Vanessa fell ill with appendicitis. Both Violet and Thoby
contracted typhoid fever; Thoby died on 20 November.
Two
days after Thoby's death, Vanessa accepted a previous proposal of marriage from
Clive Bell. As a couple, their interest in avant-garde art would have an
important influence on Woolf's further development as an author.
Fitzroy Square and Brunswick Square
After
Vanessa's marriage, Virginia and Adrian moved into 29 Fitzroy Square, still
very close to Gordon Square. The house had previously been occupied by George
Bernard Shaw, and the area had been populated by artists since the previous
century. Duncan Grant lived there, and Roger Fry moved there in 1913. Virginia
resented the wealth that Vanessa's marriage had given her; Virginia and Adrian
lived more humbly by comparison.
The
siblings resumed the Thursday Club at their new home, while Gordon Square
became the venue for a play-reading society. During this period, the group
began to increasingly explore progressive ideas, with open discussions of
members' homosexual inclinations, and nude dancing from Vanessa, who in 1910
went so far as to propose a libertarian society with sexual freedom for all.
Virginia appears not to have shown interest in practising the group's free love
ideology, finding an outlet for her sexual desires only in writing. Around this
time she began work on her first novel, Melymbrosia, which eventually became
The Voyage Out (1915).
In
November 1911 Virginia and Adrian moved to a larger house at 38 Brunswick
Square, and invited John Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant and Leonard Woolf to
become lodgers there. Virginia saw it as a new opportunity: "We are going
to try all kinds of experiments", she told Ottoline Morrell. This
arrangement for a single woman living among men was considered scandalous.
Dreadnought
hoax
Several
members of the Bloomsbury Group attained notoriety in 1910 with the Dreadnought
hoax, in which they posed as a royal Abyssinian entourage (with Virginia as
"Prince Mendax") and received a tour of the HMS Dreadnought by
Virginia's cousin Commander Fisher, who was not aware of the joke. Horace de
Vere Cole, who had been one of the masterminds of the hoax along with Adrian,
later leaked the story to the press and informed the Foreign Office, leading to
general outrage from the establishment.
Virginia
Woolf's participation, dressing with a blackened face and beard, was a
startling testament to her alienation from the whole business of war expressed
in the inspection of the latest killing machine.
Asham
House (1911–1919)
During
the latter Bloomsbury years, Virginia travelled frequently with friends and
family, to Dorset and Cornwall as well as further afield to Paris, Italy and
Bayreuth. These trips were intended to avoid her suffering exhaustion from
extended periods in London. The question arose of Virginia needing a quiet
country retreat close to London, for the sake of her still-fragile mental
health. In the winter of 1910 she and Adrian stayed at Lewes and started
exploring the area of Sussex around the town. She soon found a property in
nearby Firle, which she named "Little Talland House"; she maintained
a relationship with that area for the rest of her life, tending to spend her
time either in Sussex or London.
In
September 1911 she and Leonard Woolf found Asham House[d] nearby, and Virginia
and Vanessa took a joint lease on it. Located at the end of a tree-lined road,
the house was in a Regency-Gothic style, "flat, pale, serene,
yellow-washed", remote, without electricity or water and allegedly
haunted. The sisters had two housewarming parties in January 1912.
Virginia
recorded the events of the weekends and holidays she spent there in her Asham
Diary, part of which was later published as A Writer's Diary in 1953. In terms
of creative writing, The Voyage Out was completed there, and much of Night and
Day. The house itself inspired the short story "A Haunted House",
published in A Haunted House and Other Short Stories. Asham provided Woolf with
much-needed relief from the pace of London life and was where she found
happiness that she expressed in her diary on 5 May 1919: "Oh, but how
happy we've been at Asheham! It was a most melodious time. Everything went so
freely; – but I can't analyse all the sources of my joy".
While
at Asham, in 1916 Leonard and Virginia found a farmhouse to let about four
miles away, which they thought would be ideal for her sister. Eventually,
Vanessa came down to inspect it, and took possession in October of that year,
as a summer home for her family. The Charleston Farmhouse was to become the
summer gathering place for the Bloomsbury Group.
Marriage
and war (1912–1920)
Leonard
Woolf was one of Thoby Stephen's friends at Trinity College, Cambridge, and had
encountered the Stephen sisters in Thoby's rooms while visiting for May Week
between 1899 and 1904. He recalled that in "white dresses and large hats,
with parasols in their hands, their beauty literally took one's breath away".
In 1904 Leonard Woolf left Britain for a civil service position in Ceylon, but
returned for a year's leave in 1911 after letters from Lytton Strachey
describing Virginia's beauty enticed him back. He and Virginia attended social
engagements together, and he moved into Brunswick Square as a tenant in
December of that year.
Leonard
proposed to Virginia on 11 January 1912. Initially she expressed reluctance,
but the two continued courting. Leonard decided not to return to Ceylon and
resigned from his post. On 29 May Virginia declared her love for Leonard, and
they married on 10 August at St Pancras Town Hall. The couple spent their
honeymoon first at Asham and the Quantock Hills before travelling to the south
of France and on to Spain and Italy. On their return, they moved to Clifford's
Inn, and began to divide their time between London and Asham. Though Virginia
wanted to have children, Leonard refused, as he believed Virginia was not
mentally strong enough to be a mother, and worried what having children might do
to her mental health.
Virginia
Woolf had completed a penultimate draft of her first novel The Voyage Out
before her wedding but undertook large-scale alterations to the manuscript
between December 1912 and March 1913. The work was subsequently accepted by her
half-brother Gerald Duckworth's publishing house, and she found the process of
reading and correcting the proofs extremely emotionally difficult. This led to
one of several breakdowns over the subsequent two years; Woolf attempted
suicide on 9 September 1913 with an overdose of Veronal, being saved with the
help of Maynard Keynes' surgeon brother Geoffrey Keynes who drove Leonard to St
Bartholomew's Hospital to fetch a stomach pump. Woolf's illness led to
Duckworth delaying the publication of The Voyage Out until 26 March 1915.
In
the autumn of 1914 the couple moved to a house on Richmond Green, and in late
March 1915 they moved to Hogarth House, also in Richmond, after which they
named their publishing house in 1917. The decision to move to London's suburbs
was made for the sake of Woolf's health. Many of Woolf's circle of friends were
against the war, and Woolf herself opposed it from a standpoint of pacifism and
anti-censorship. Leonard was exempted from the introduction of conscription in
1916 on medical grounds. The Woolfs employed two servants at the recommendation
of Roger Fry in 1916; Lottie Hope worked for a number of other Bloomsbury Group
members, and Nellie Boxall would stay with them until 1934.
The
Woolfs spent parts of the period of the First World War in Asham but were
obliged by the owner to leave in 1919. "In despair" they purchased
the Round House in Lewes, a converted windmill, for £300. No sooner had they
bought the Round House, than Monk's House in nearby Rodmell came up for
auction, a weatherboarded house with oak-beamed rooms, said to date from the
15th or 16th century. The Woolfs sold the Round House and purchased Monk's
House for £700. Monk's House also lacked running water but came with an acre of
garden, and had a view across the Ouse towards the hills of the South Downs.
Leonard Woolf describes this view as being unchanged since the days of Chaucer.
The Woolfs would retain Monk's House until the end of Virginia's life; it
became their permanent home after their London home was bombed, and it was
where she completed Between the Acts in early 1941, which was followed by her
final breakdown and suicide in the nearby River Ouse on 28 March.
Further
works (1920–1940)
Memoir
Club
1920
saw a postwar reconstitution of the Bloomsbury Group, under the title of the
Memoir Club, which as the name suggests focussed on self-writing, in the manner
of Proust's A La Recherche, and inspired some of the more influential books of
the 20th century. The Group, which had been scattered by the war, was
reconvened by Mary ('Molly') MacCarthy who called them
"Bloomsberries", and operated under rules derived from the Cambridge
Apostles, an elite university debating society that a number of them had been
members of. These rules emphasised candour and openness. Among the 125 memoirs
presented, Virginia contributed three that were published posthumously in 1976,
in the autobiographical anthology Moments of Being. These were 22 Hyde Park
Gate (1921), Old Bloomsbury (1922) and Am I a Snob? (1936).
Vita
Sackville-West
On
14 December 1922 Woolf met the writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West, wife of
Harold Nicolson. This period was to prove fruitful for both authors, Woolf
producing three novels, To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and The Waves
(1931) as well as a number of essays, including "Mr. Bennett and Mrs.
Brown" (1924) and "A Letter to a Young Poet" (1932). The two
women remained friends until Woolf's death in 1941.
Virginia
Woolf also remained close to her surviving siblings, Adrian and Vanessa.
Further
novels and non-fiction
Between
1924 and 1940 the Woolfs returned to Bloomsbury, taking out a ten-year lease at
52 Tavistock Square, from where they ran the Hogarth Press from the basement,
where Virginia also had her writing room.
1925
saw the publication of Mrs Dalloway in May followed by her collapse while at
Charleston in August. In 1927, her next novel, To the Lighthouse, was
published, and the following year she lectured on Women & Fiction at
Cambridge University and published Orlando in October.
Her
two Cambridge lectures then became the basis for her major essay A Room of
One's Own in 1929. Virginia wrote only one drama, Freshwater, based on her
great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, and produced at her sister's studio on
Fitzroy Street in 1935. 1936 saw the publication of The Years, which had its
origin in a lecture Woolf gave to the National Society for Women's Service in
1931, an edited version of which would later be published as "Professions
for Women". Another collapse of her health followed the novel's completion
The Years.
The
Woolfs' final residence in London was at 37 Mecklenburgh Square (1939–1940),
destroyed during the Blitz in September 1940; a month later their previous home
on Tavistock Square was also destroyed. After that, they made Sussex their
permanent home.
Death
After
completing the manuscript of her last novel (posthumously published), Between
the Acts (1941), Woolf fell into a depression similar to one which she had
earlier experienced. The onset of the Second World War, the destruction of her
London home during the Blitz, and the cool reception given to her biography of
her late friend Roger Fry all worsened her condition until she was unable to
work. When Leonard enlisted in the Home Guard, Virginia disapproved. She held
fast to her pacifism and criticised her husband for wearing what she considered
to be "the silly uniform of the Home Guard".
After
the Second World War began, Woolf's diary indicates that she was obsessed with
death, which figured more and more as her mood darkened. On 28 March 1941,
Woolf drowned herself by walking into the fast-flowing River Ouse near her
home, after placing a large stone in her pocket. Her body was not found until
18 April. Her husband buried her cremated remains beneath an elm tree in the
garden of Monk's House, their home in Rodmell, Sussex.
In
her suicide note, addressed to her husband, she wrote:
Dearest,
I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of
those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices,
and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You
have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all
that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till
this terrible disease came. I can't fight it any longer. I know that I am
spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You
see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe
all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and
incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have
saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty
of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think
two people could have been happier than we have been.
Mental
health
Much
examination has been made of Woolf's mental health. From the age of 13,
following the death of her mother, Woolf suffered periodic mood swings.
However, Hermione Lee asserts that Woolf was not "mad"; she was
merely a woman who suffered from and struggled with illness for much of her
life, a woman of "exceptional courage, intelligence and stoicism",
who made the best use, and achieved the best understanding she could of that
illness.
Her
mother's death in 1895, "the greatest disaster that could happen",
precipitated a crisis for which their family doctor, Dr Seton, prescribed rest,
stopping lessons and writing, and regular walks supervised by Stella. Yet just
two years later, Stella too was dead, bringing on Virginia's first expressed
wish for death at the age of fifteen. This was a scenario she would later
recreate in "Time Passes" (To the Lighthouse, 1927).
The
death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse, on 10 May,
when she threw herself out of a window and she was briefly institutionalised
under the care of her father's friend, the eminent psychiatrist George Savage.
She spent time recovering at the house of Stella's friend Violet Dickinson, and
at her aunt Caroline Stephen's house in Cambridge, and by January 1905, Savage
considered her cured.
Her
brother Thoby's death in 1906 marked a "decade of deaths" that ended
her childhood and adolescence.
On
Savage's recommendation, Virginia spent three short periods in 1910, 1912, and
1913 at Burley House at 15 Cambridge Park, Twickenham, described as "a
private nursing home for women with nervous disorder" run by Miss Jean
Thomas. By the end of February 1910, she was becoming increasingly restless,
and Savage suggested being away from London. Vanessa rented Moat House, outside
Canterbury, in June, but there was no improvement, so Savage sent her to Burley
for a "rest cure". This involved partial isolation, deprivation of
literature, and force-feeding, and after six weeks she was able to convalesce
in Cornwall and Dorset during the autumn.
She
loathed the experience; writing to her sister on 28 July, she described how she
found the religious atmosphere stifling and the institution ugly, and informed
Vanessa that to escape "I shall soon have to jump out of a window".
The threat of being sent back would later lead to her contemplating suicide. Despite
her protests, Savage would refer her back in 1912 for insomnia and in 1913 for
depression.
On
emerging from Burley House in September 1913, she sought further opinions from
two other physicians on the 13th: Maurice Wright, and Henry Head, who had been
Henry James's physician. Both recommended she return to Burley House.
Distraught, she returned home and attempted suicide by taking an overdose of
100 grains of veronal (a barbiturate) and nearly dying.
On
recovery, she went to Dalingridge Hall, George Duckworth's home in East
Grinstead, Sussex, to convalesce on 30 September, returning to Asham on 18
November. She remained unstable over the next two years, with another incident
involving veronal that she claimed was an 'accident', and consulted another
psychiatrist in April 1914, Maurice Craig, who explained that she was not
sufficiently psychotic to be certified or committed to an institution.
The
rest of the summer of 1914 went better for her, and they moved to Richmond, but
in February 1915, just as The Voyage Out was due to be published, she relapsed
once more, and remained in poor health for most of that year. Then she began to
recover, following 20 years of ill health. Nevertheless, there was a feeling
among those around her that she was now permanently changed, and not for the
better.
Over
the rest of her life, she suffered recurrent bouts of depression. In 1940, a
number of factors appeared to overwhelm her. Her biography of Roger Fry had
been published in July, and she had been disappointed in its reception. The
horrors of war depressed her, and their London homes had been destroyed in the
Blitz in September and October. Woolf had completed Between the Acts (published
posthumously in 1941) in November, and completing a novel was frequently
accompanied by exhaustion. Her health became increasingly a matter of concern,
culminating in her decision to end her life on 28 March 1941.
She
also suffered many physical ailments such as headaches, backache, fevers and
faints, which related closely to her psychological stress. These often lasted
for weeks or even months, and impeded her work: "What a gap! ... for 60
days; & those days spent in wearisome headache, jumping pulse, aching back,
frets, fidgets, lying awake, sleeping draughts, sedatives, digitalis, going for
a little walk, & plunging back into bed again."
Though
this instability would frequently affect her social life, she was able to
continue her literary productivity with few interruptions throughout her life.
Woolf herself provides not only a vivid picture of her symptoms in her diaries
and letters but also her response to the demons that haunted her and at times
made her long for death: "But it is always a question whether I wish to
avoid these glooms... These 9 weeks give one a plunge into deep waters... One
goes down into the well & nothing protects one from the assault of
truth."
Psychiatry
had little to offer Woolf, but she recognised that writing was one of the
behaviours that enabled her to cope with her illness: "The only way I keep
afloat... is by working... Directly I stop working I feel that I am sinking
down, down. And as usual, I feel that if I sink further I shall reach the
truth." Sinking underwater was Woolf's metaphor for both the effects of
depression and psychosis— but also for finding the truth, and ultimately was
her choice of death.
Throughout
her life, Woolf struggled, without success, to find meaning in her illness: on
the one hand, an impediment, on the other, something she visualised as an
essential part of who she was, and a necessary condition of her art. Her
experiences informed her work, such as the character of Septimus Warren Smith
in Mrs Dalloway (1925), who, like Woolf, was haunted by the dead, and
ultimately takes his own life rather than be admitted to a sanitorium.
Leonard
Woolf relates how during the 30 years they were married, they consulted many
doctors in the Harley Street area, and although they were given a diagnosis of
neurasthenia, he felt they had little understanding of the causes or nature.
The proposed solution was simple—as long as she lived a quiet life without any
physical or mental exertion, she was well. On the other hand, any mental,
emotional, or physical strain resulted in a reappearance of her symptoms,
beginning with a headache, followed by insomnia and thoughts that started to
race. Her remedy was simple: to retire to bed in a darkened room, following
which the symptoms slowly subsided.
Modern
scholars, including her nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell, have suggested her
breakdowns and subsequent recurring depressive periods were influenced by the
sexual abuse which she and her sister Vanessa were subjected to by their
half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth (which Woolf recalls in her
autobiographical essays "A Sketch of the Past" and "22 Hyde Park
Gate"). Biographers point out that when Stella died in 1897, there was no
counterbalance to control George's predation, and his nighttime prowling.
"22 Hyde Park Gate" ends with the sentence "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."
It
is likely that other factors also played a part. It has been suggested that
they include genetic predisposition. Virginia's father, Leslie Stephen,
suffered from depression, and her half-sister Laura was institutionalised. Many
of Virginia's symptoms, including persistent headache, insomnia, irritability,
and anxiety, resembled those of her father's. Another factor is the pressure
she placed upon herself in her work; for instance, her breakdown of 1913 was at
least partly triggered by the need to finish The Voyage Out.
Virginia
herself hinted that her illness was related to how she saw the repressed
position of women in society when she wrote A Room of One's Own.n a 1930 letter
to Ethel Smyth:
As
an experience, madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at;
and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of
one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does. And the six
months—not three—that I lay in bed taught me a good deal about what is called
oneself.
Thomas
Caramagno and others, in discussing her illness, oppose the
"neurotic-genius" way of looking at mental illness, where creativity
and mental illness are conceptualised as linked rather than antithetical.
Stephen Trombley describes Woolf as having a confrontational relationship with
her doctors, and possibly being a woman who is a "victim of male
medicine", referring to the lack of understanding, particularly at the time,
about mental illness.
Sexuality
The
Bloomsbury Group held very progressive views regarding sexuality and rejected
the austere strictness of Victorian society. The majority of its members were
homosexual or bisexual.
Woolf
had several affairs with women, the most notable being with Vita
Sackville-West. The two women developed a deep connection; Vita was arguably
one of the few people in Virginia's adult life that she was truly close to.
[Virginia
Woolf] told Ethel that she only really loved three people: Leonard, Vanessa,
and myself, which annoyed Ethel but pleased me – Vita Sackville-West's letter
to husband Harold Nicolson, dated 28 September 1939
During
their relationship, both women saw the peak of their literary careers, with the
titular protagonist of Woolf's acclaimed Orlando: A Biography being inspired by
Sackville-West. The pair remained lovers for a decade and stayed close friends
for the rest of Woolf's life. Woolf had said to Sackville-West she disliked
masculinity.
[Virginia
Woolf] dislikes the possessiveness and love of domination in men. In fact, she
dislikes the quality of masculinity ; says that women stimulate her
imagination, by their grace & their art of life – Vita Sackville-West's
diary, dated 26 September 1928
Among
her other notable affairs were those with Sibyl Colefax, Lady Ottoline Morrell,
and Mary Hutchinson. Some surmise that she may have fallen in love with Madge
Symonds, the wife of one of her uncles. Madge Symonds was described as one of
Woolf's early loves in Sackville-West's diary. She also fell in love with
Violet Dickinson, although there is some confusion as to whether the two
consummated their relationship.
Virginia
initially declined marriage proposals from her future husband, Leonard. She
even went so far as to tell him that she was not physically attracted to him,
but later declared that she did love him, and eventually agreed to marriage.
Woolf preferred female lovers to male lovers and did not seem to be sexually
attracted to men.
I
sometimes think that if I married you, I could have everything—and then—is it
the sexual side of it that comes between us? As I told you brutally the other
day, I feel no physical attraction in you. – Letter to Leonard from Virginia
dated May 1, 1912
Leonard
became the love of her life. Although their sexual relationship was
questionable, they loved each other deeply and formed a strong and supportive
marriage that led to the formation of their publishing house as well as several
of her writings. Though Virginia had affairs with and attractions to women
during their marriage, both she and Leonard maintained a mutual love and
respect for one another.
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