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Marion Dell (auth.) - Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears Julia Margaret Cameron, Anny Thackeray Ritchie and Julia Prinsep Stephen-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2015)

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Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
Also by Marion Dell
VIRGINIA WOOLF AND VANESSA BELL: Remembering St Ives
Virginia Woolf’s
Influential Forebears
Julia Margaret Cameron, Anny
Thackeray Ritchie and Julia Prinsep
Stephen
Marion Dell
© Marion Dell 2015
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
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First published 2015 by
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Contents
Acknowledgements
viii
List of Abbreviations
x
Family Tree
xiv
Introduction: ‘Born into a Large Connection’
1
1 ‘And Finally Virginia’: Cameron, Ritchie, Stephen
and Woolf’s Constructs of her Ancestry
Pattledom
Woolf’s problematic response to her past
Woolf, Cameron, Stephen and Ritchie
Interconnections: Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen
Woolf’s narratives of Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen
11
12
12
13
14
18
2 ‘Knocking at the Door’: Heredity, Legacy and
Transition in Night and Day
‘Knocking at the door’: Ritchie and border crossings
Literary transformations
Generic ambivalence in Night and Day
Continuities and porous boundaries
Genetic legacies
Inherited roles for women
Life-writing
A large connection
Ambivalence, liminality and Woolf’s ‘third space’
20
20
22
23
24
27
29
33
35
36
3 ‘The Transparent Medium’: Anny Thackeray Ritchie
Daughters of educated men
Ritchie’s achievements
Woolf’s apprenticeship
Lines of influence from Ritchie’s essays
‘A very feminine kind of writing’
Writing Lives
Lines of descent from Ritchie’s novels
38
39
40
43
44
49
53
62
v
vi
Contents
Ritchie’s proto-modernism
Crafting memories
Woolf’s obscuration of Ritchie’s legacies
Woolf’s covert acknowledgement of Ritchie:
the trope of the door
65
66
67
70
4 ‘Take my lens. I bequeath it to my descendents’:
Julia Margaret Cameron
Cameron’s legacy
‘The Searchlight’: genesis
Cameron and Woolf: recontextualisation, imaginative
retelling and fictionalised auto/biography
Ritchie as ‘transparent medium’ between
Cameron and Woolf
Woolf’s representations of Cameron
Woolf’s suppression of Cameron’s achievements
Blurring boundaries: Cameron’s influence in Woolf’s work
Public and private spheres
Photograph albums: visual auto/biographies
and family histories
Woolf’s visual inheritance: identity,
perspective and angles of vision
Cameron’s proto-modernism: commonalities with Woolf
Woolf’s use of the visual: lines of influence
Cameron, Stephen and Woolf: arresting beauty
95
97
99
102
5 ‘Closer than any of the living’: Julia Prinsep Stephen
Constructs of Stephen
The Angel in the House
Stephen’s achievements: the ‘real’ woman
Stephen’s writing and its influence on Woolf
Stephen’s atheism and philanthropy
Stephen’s mentorship of the young apprentice
Stephen’s legacies: laughter and gossip
The absent mother
Woolf’s engagement with the Angel in the House
The Angel, photography and ways of seeing
Retrieving the lost mother: invisible presences
Living life through from the start: reimagining Stephen
105
106
107
111
112
116
118
122
124
125
127
128
131
72
72
74
80
82
83
85
87
89
91
Contents
6 ‘Let us be our great grandmothers’:
Heredity and Legacy in The Years
Recreating family histories: The Years and
A Sketch of the Past
Resurrecting Julia Stephen
The Years and Night and Day
Street music and echoes of Ritchie
Yorkshire roots
Recovering family histories: Woolf and Ethel Smyth
Endings and continuities
Julia Margaret Cameron: the continuing
influence of the visual
Cycles, liminality and Woolf’s ‘third space’
Conclusion: Invisible Presences’ and ‘Transparent
Mediums’: Virginia Woolf’s Nineteenth-Century Legacies
Woolf’s ambivalent responses to Cameron,
Ritchie and Stephen
Accounting for Woolf’s response
Woolf’s unresolved conflict with her past
Boundaries and boundary crossing
Continuities and lines of descent
Ambivalence: Woolf’s nineteenth-century legacy
vii
134
135
138
140
145
149
151
151
154
157
158
159
161
164
171
175
178
Notes
182
Select Bibliography
192
Index
201
Acknowledgements
I acknowledge the incalculable debt I owe to the late Professor Julia
Briggs, without whose inspiration and guidance this research project
would never have been started; and the equally huge debt to the
Revd Dr Jane de Gay and Dr Delia da Sousa Correa, without whom
it would not have been finished. I would like to thank friends and
colleagues in the Virginia Woolf Society for their support and advice,
especially Sheila Wilkinson, Stephen Barkway, Stuart Clarke and
Dr Claire Nicholson. A huge thank you to my husband John Dell
and my daughter Dr Helen Dell for all their unstinting patience and
practical support.
My thanks also go to: Tom Atkins at Random House. Quotations
from Virginia Woolf’s Diaries, volumes 1–5, Letters, volumes 1–6
and Essays volume 6, Moments of Being, A Passionate Apprentice and
The Pargiters, are reproduced by permission of The Random House
Group Ltd.
Julian Bell and Henrietta Garnett for permission to reproduce
extracts from the Maria Jackson Letters Collection, lodged at Sussex
University.
Sarah Burton and Sarah Baxter at the Society of Authors.
Unpublished drafts of ‘The Searchlight’ are reproduced by permission of The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the
Estate of Virginia Woolf.
Dr Darren Clarke at The Charleston Trust.
Fiona Courage at Sussex University, and for permission on behalf
of the University as the owners to reproduce unpublished material
from the drafts of Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Searchlight’, letters from the
Maria Jackson Letters Collection, and a letter from Madge Vaughan.
Graeme Edwards at the Somerset Archives and Local Studies
Service and for permission to quote from the unpublished diaries of
Arthur Duckworth.
Rachel Flynn and Dr Brian Hinton at the Julia Margaret Cameron
Trust, Dimbola.
Ron Hussey at Houghton, Mifflin Harcourt.
viii
Acknowledgements
ix
The following excerpts reprinted by permission of the copyright
holders Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt: The Diary of Virginia Woolf
vol. 1, copyright 1977 Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett; The Essays
of Virginia Woolf vol. 3, copyright 1989 Quentin Bell and Angelica
Garnett; The Essays of Virginia Woolf vol. 4, copyright 1994 Quentin
Bell and Angelica Garnett; The Essays of Virginia Woolf vol. 5, copyright
2009 by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett; The Letters of Virginia
Woolf vols 1–3, copyright 1975, 1976, 1977 by Quentin Bell and
Angelica Garnett; Moments of Being, copyright 1976 by Quentin Bell
and Angelica Garnett; Mrs Dalloway, copyright 1925 renewed 1953 by
Leonard Woolf; A Haunted House, copyright 1944 renewed 1972
by Harcourt Mifflin Harcourt; Orlando, copyright 1928 renewed
1956 by Leonard Woolf; Roger Fry, copyright 1940 renewed 1968 by
Leonard Woolf A Room of One’s Own, copyright 1929 renewed 1957
by Leonard Woolf; The Years, copyright 1977 by Quentin Bell and
Angelica Garnett; Three Guineas, copyright 1938 renewed 1966 by
Leonard Woolf; To the Lighthouse, copyright 1927 renewed 1954
by Leonard Woolf; The Waves, copyright 1931 renewed 1959 by
Leonard Woolf; All rights reserved.
Karen Kukil and Barbara Blumenthal at the Mortimer Rare Book
Room, Smith College, and for permission to reproduce the cover
image.
Julian Pooley at the Surrey History Centre for permission to quote
from unpublished records from the Royal Earlswood Asylum.
John Vaughan for permission to reproduce extracts from an unpublished letter from Madge Vaughan, lodged at Sussex University.
Catherine Wilson and John Aplin for assistance with the literary
estate of Anny Thackeray Ritchie.
List of Abbreviations
ABoS
Ritchie, Anny Thackeray [Miss Thackeray (Mrs.
Richmond Ritchie)]. 2006. A Book of Sibyls (1883.
Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz; repr. Whitefish USA:
Kessinger Publishing)
Annals
Cameron, Julia Margaret. 1927. Annals of My Glasshouse
(Photographic Journal, July 1927; repr. in Helmut
Gernsheim. 1948. Julia Margaret Cameron: Her Life and
Photographic Work London: Fountain Press: 67–72)
BP
Ritchie, Anny Thackeray [Lady Ritchie]. 1908. Blackstick
Papers (London: Smith, Elder)
BtA
Woolf, Virginia. 2000. Between the Acts (1941. London:
Hogarth Press; repr. Oxford University Press)
CfSM
Ritchie, Anny Thackeray [Anne Thackeray Ritchie]. 1894.
Chapters from Some Memoirs (London and New York:
Macmillan)
DNB
Dictionary of National Biography
D1
Bell, Anne Olivier. 1979. The Diary of Virginia Woolf:
Volume I (1977. London: Hogarth Press; repr. London:
Penguin Books)
D2
Bell, Anne Olivier. 1984. The Diary of Virginia Woolf:
Volume II (1978. London: Hogarth Press; repr. London:
Penguin Books)
D3
Bell, Anne Olivier. 1982. The Diary of Virginia Woolf:
Volume III (1980. London: Hogarth Press; repr. London:
Penguin Books)
D4
Bell, Anne Olivier. 1983. The Diary of Virginia Woolf:
Volume IV (1982. London: Hogarth Press; repr. London:
Penguin Books)
D5
Bell, Anne Olivier. 1985. The Diary of Virginia Woolf:
Volume 5 (1984. London: Hogarth Press; repr. London:
Penguin Books)
x
List of Abbreviations xi
E1
McNeillie, Andrew (ed.). 1989. The Essays of Virginia
Woolf: Volume I (1986. San Diego, New York and
London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; repr. Harvest/HBJ)
E2
McNeillie, Andrew (ed.). 1990. The Essays of Virginia
Woolf: Volume II (1987. San Diego, New York and
London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; repr. Harvest/HBJ)
E3
McNeillie, Andrew (ed.). 1988. The Essays of Virginia
Woolf: Volume III (1988. San Diego, New York and
London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
E4
McNeillie, Andrew (ed.). 1994. The Essays of Virginia
Woolf: Volume IV (1994. London: Hogarth Press; repr.
Orlando, Austin, San Diego and New York: Harcourt)
E5
Clarke, Stuart N. (ed.). 2009. The Essays of Virginia Woolf:
Volume V (London: Hogarth Press)
E6
Clarke, Stuart N. (ed.). 2011. The Essays of Virginia Woolf:
Volume VI (London: Hogarth Press)
F
Ruotolo, Lucio (ed.). 1976. Virginia Woolf, Freshwater
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
Fry
Woolf, Virginia. 2003. Roger Fry: A Biography (1940.
London: Hogarth Press; repr. London: Vintage)
FtP
Ritchie, Anny Thackeray [Lady Ritchie]. 1971. From
the Porch (1913. London: Smith, Elder; repr. New York:
Books for Libraries Press)
HH
Dick, Susan (ed.). 2003. Virginia Woolf, A Haunted House:
The Complete Shorter Fiction (1985. London: Hogarth
Press; repr. London: Vintage)
HPGN
Lowe, Gill (ed.). 2005. Hyde Park Gate News: The Stephen
Family Newspaper (London: Hesperus Press)
JDS
Gillespie, Diane and Elizabeth Steele (eds). 1987. Julia
Duckworth Stephen: Stories for Children, Essays for Adults
(New York: Syracuse University Press)
JR
Woolf, Virginia. 2000. Jacob’s Room (1922. London:
Hogarth Press; repr. Oxford University Press)
L1
Nicolson, Nigel (ed.). 1980. The Flight of the Mind: The Letters
of Virginia Woolf Volume 1 (1975. London: Chatto & Windus)
xii
List of Abbreviations
L2
Nicolson, Nigel (ed.). 1980. The Question of Things
Happening: The Letters of Virginia Woolf Volume II
(1976. London: Chatto & Windus)
L3
Nicolson, Nigel (ed.). 1994. A Change of Perspective:
The Letters of Virginia Woolf Volume III (1977. London:
Hogarth Press)
L4
Nicolson, Nigel (ed.). 1994. A Reflection of the Other
Person: The Letters of Virginia Woolf Volume IV
(1978. London: Hogarth Press)
L5
Nicolson, Nigel (ed.). 1994. The Sickle Side of the Moon:
The Letters of Virginia Woolf Volume V (1979. London:
Hogarth Press)
L6
Nicolson, Nigel (ed.). 1983. Leave the Letters Till We’re
Dead: The Letters of Virginia Woolf Volume VI
(1980. London: Chatto & Windus)
MB
Bell, Alan (ed.). 1977. Sir Leslie Stephen’s Mausoleum Book
(Oxford: Clarendon Press)
MD
Woolf, Virginia. 2000. Mrs Dalloway (1925. London:
Hogarth Press; repr. London: Penguin Books)
MoB
Schulkind, Jeanne (ed.). 1985. Moments of Being
(1976. San Diego, New York and London:
Harcourt Brace)
N&D
Woolf, Virginia. 2000. Night and Day (1919. London:
Duckworth; repr. London: Vintage)
O
Woolf, Virginia. 2000. Orlando (1928. London: Hogarth
Press; repr. Oxford University Press)
OK
Ritchie, Anny Thackeray [Anne Isabella Thackeray].
1995. Old Kensington (1873. London: Smith, Elder; repr.
Bristol: Thoemmes Press)
PA
Leaska, Mitchell A. (ed.). 2004. Virginia Woolf: A
Passionate Apprentice (1990. London: Hogarth Press; repr.
London: Pimlico)
Rem
Reminiscences, in Schulkind, Jeanne (ed.). 1985. Moments
of Being (1976. San Diego, New York and London:
Harcourt Brace: 25–59)
List of Abbreviations xiii
Room
Shiach, Morag (ed.). 1992. A Room of One’s Own (1929.
London: Hogarth Press; repr. Oxford University Press)
RTRB
Ritchie, Anny Thackeray [Anne Ritchie]. 1969. Records of
Tennyson, Ruskin, Browning (1892. London: Macmillan;
repr. New York: Kennikat Press)
Sketch
A Sketch of the Past in Schulkind, Jeanne (ed.). 1985.
Moments of Being (1976. San Diego, New York and
London: Harcourt Brace: 61–159)
TG
Shiach, Morag (ed.). 1992. Three Guineas (1938. London:
Hogarth Press; repr. Oxford University Press)
TP
Leaska, Mitchell A. 1977. The Pargiters by Virginia Woolf
(The New York Public Library & Readex Books)
T&S
Ritchie, Anny Thackeray [Miss Thackeray]. 1890. Toilers
and Spinsters and other Essays (London: Smith, Elder)
TtL
Woolf, Virginia. 2006. To the Lighthouse (1927. London:
Hogarth Press; repr. Oxford University Press)
TW
Woolf, Virginia. 1998. The Waves (1931. London:
Hogarth Press; repr. Oxford University Press)
TY
Woolf, Virginia. 1992. The Years (1937. London: Hogarth
Press; repr. Oxford University Press)
VO
Woolf, Virginia. 2000. The Voyage Out (1915. London:
Duckworth; repr. London: Vintage)
VWB
Virginia Woolf Bulletin published by the Virginia Woolf
Society of Great Britain
VWSGB
The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
Vinditien
xiv
Adeline
Julie
m.
THÉRÈSE JOSEPHE
BLIN DE GRINCOURT
Ambroise ADÉLINE MARIA
m.
JAMES PATTLE
Virginie
MARIA (MIA)
m.
JOHN JACKSON
Louisa
JULIA MARGARET Sarah
m.
m.
Charles Hay
Thoby
Cameron
Prinsep
Adeline
m.
Henry Vaughan
Mary
m.
Herbert Fisher
Eugène
William Makepeace
m.
Thackeray
Virginia
Sophia
m.
m.
John Dalrymple
Charles
Somers-Cocks
(3rd Earl Somers)
JULIA PRINSEP
m.
1) Herbert Duckworth
George
Stella
Gerald
ANNE
(ANNY)
Isabella
Shawe
Harriet Marian
m.
1) Leslie Stephen
JULIA PRINSEP
m.
2) Leslie Stephen
Vanessa
m.
Clive Bell
Thoby
VIRGINIA
Adrian
m.
m.
Leonard Woolf Karin Costelloe
Family Tree
AMBROISE PIERRE
ANTOINE DE L’ÉTANG
Introduction: ‘Born into a Large
Connection’
In A Sketch of the Past, towards the end of her life, Virginia Woolf was
again considering her forebears and memorialising her past. She was
wondering, ‘Who was I then? Adeline Virginia Stephen, the second
daughter of Leslie and Julia Prinsep Stephen, born on 25th January
1882, descended from a great many people’ (Sketch: 65). She was
‘born into a large connection’ (65), an extended family and their
friends with Anglo-Indian, French and English roots and branches.
The focus on Woolf’s pre-eminent place in twentieth-century literary
modernism has meant that legacies from this ‘communicative,
literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth century
world’ (65) have been insufficiently acknowledged. Woolf herself
remains ambivalent about her lines of descent, exhibiting both nostalgia for, and affiliation with, her past; but simultaneously trying
to reject, suppress and obscure its influence. She constructs an unresolved dialogue between her past and her present, figured through
her divided persona ‘two people, I now, I then’ (75).
Three remarkable women from Woolf’s ‘large connection’ were
powerful agents in shaping her as a woman and as a writer. They
illustrate the extent of her nineteenth-century legacies. They are
her great-aunt, Julia Margaret Cameron, her mother, Julia Prinsep
Stephen, and Anny Thackeray Ritchie, whom she called aunt. The
work of Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen is textually, artistically, biographically and genealogically embedded in Woolf’s. I focus strongly
on Woolf’s matrilineage and the transmission of women’s work, but
my argument is not theoretically feminist. It is informed by genetic
theory which explores lines of descent, and reconstructs the writer’s
1
2
Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
process, through different texts, drafts, versions and emendations.
In this I am indebted to the work of the late Professor Julia Briggs.1
Genetic theory challenges the authority of any one text or version.
A text is endlessly changing and is never finished. There are always
new annotations, new readers, new critics and new theories. Related
manuscripts and contextual material continue to be retrieved
and studied. It is a problem explored by Woolf in Night and Day
through Katharine, who is worried by the ever-increasing weight of
material in the Alardyce archive (N&D: 305–6). Woolf had similarly
seen Ritchie poring over the mounds of material in the Thackeray
archive. Woolf’s work is being read differently since the publication
of material not in the public domain in her lifetime, such as Quentin
Bell’s revealing biography (1972). Gaps in our understanding of the
genesis and process of her writing are being filled by A Passionate
Apprentice, Moments of Being, the Hyde Park Gate News, volumes five
and six of the Collected Essays, and ever more exhaustively annotated
works, such as Anna Snaith’s edition of The Years (2012). My study
of the now frequently unpublished or neglected work of Cameron,
Ritchie and Stephen reveals how strong and influential were their
nineteenth-century lines of descent, so furthering understanding of
Woolf’s life and work. Close reading reveals the generic instability,
and the constant reworking and recycling of material, which is a mark
not only of Woolf’s work but also of that of these three forebears,
which circles in her own.
My opening chapter is a biographical introduction to Cameron,
Stephen and Ritchie. I use the names by which they have now
become best known; avoiding, for the sake of consistency and
simplicity, their maiden names and in Stephen’s case her first married
name. Ritchie was christened ‘Anne’. She published under her full
range of names, from Anne Isabella Thackeray to Lady Ritchie. She
was called, and signed herself, variously ‘Anny’ and ‘Annie’. I follow
Thackeray, Woolf, and her great-granddaughter Henrietta Garnett, in
using ‘Anny’. I explore the use which Woolf made of family histories,
starting with that of her colourful great-great-grandfather AmbroisePierre Antoine de L’Étang, Chevalier at the court of Marie Antoinette
who went to India. I trace the genealogical connections between
Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen, and the many interconnections
in their lives and work. They were part of an influential Anglo-Indian
network and, once back in England, of the Little Holland House and
Introduction
3
Freshwater artistic, celebrity circles. They were mutually supportive
in their domestic lives and in their work.
Woolf’s relationship with Cameron, Ritchie, Stephen and their
legacies is very conflicted and inconsistent, making it very difficult to
account for her response. She frequently distances herself from them;
writing them out or fictionalising, caricaturing or mythologising
them. The extent of her manipulation of their biographies and their
achievements detracts from their deserved reputations; but reveals
that her intention was not to portray them with strict accuracy.
Instead she engages with them creatively throughout her writing life.
She uses her aesthetic transformations as a means of exploring them
and their work, and in doing so also exploring her own self and her
own writing.
In the following chapters I argue that Woolf’s response to her forebears is defined by ambivalence. I question the integrity of Woolf’s
representations, and the extent of her obscuration, by retrieving
the achievements of Ritchie, Cameron and Stephen. The work of all
four women is interdisciplinary; interrogating boundaries between
literature, art and photography, auto/biography and fiction, literary
realism and modernism, and nineteenth-century and twentiethcentury contexts. I give a chapter to the work and legacies of each
of these women. However, like Woolf, they inevitably, and joyfully,
transgress boundaries, so that aspects of their influence on Woolf’s
work overlap into each other’s chapters. They are also all interconnected in my founding texts Night and Day (1919) and The Years
(1937), which virtually span Woolf’s mature writing life. In them
she overtly explores the conflicted relationship of the past and the
present; in particular through genetic, familial and cultural legacies.
These novels provide my bookends.
In Night and Day Anny Thackeray Ritchie’s is the most significant of
these legacies, as I explore in Chapter 2. Constructed as Mrs Hilbery,
Ritchie provides Woolf with a medium through whom to debate
heredity, and the art of biography; an art which Woolf both claimed
as her Victorian heritage and carried into the twentieth century.
Woolf, Ritchie and Mrs Hilbery all confront questions of censorship
in their auto/biographical writing, especially about genetic inheritance and its instability, which is a key theme in Night and Day. It
is also both a Marriage and a Suffrage novel. Woolf was concerned
to escape the constraint of inherited roles for women, representing
4
Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
a range of models and identities; but the novel’s lack of resolution
means that none is prioritised.
Close reading of Night and Day reveals generic ambivalence, and a
multiplicity of complex allusions and intertexts. Woolf enacts oppositions, as the title suggests, but ultimately she rejects the antithetical
and dissolves boundaries. Her trope of the door, which is specifically linked with Mrs Hilbery/Ritchie, figures a crossing point. Her
extended image of the lighthouse illustrates her use of the mythic
and visionary. She inhabits liminal space, like Katharine hovering on
the threshold at the end of the novel.
Chapter 3 explores the full extent of Woolf’s legacy from Ritchie.
Ritchie’s vast body of work in all prose genres, spanning a publishing history from ‘Little Scholars’ in 1860 to From Friend to Friend
posthumously in 1919, was widely respected by her contemporaries
but gradually went out of print in the twentieth century. Woolf labels
Ritchie ‘the transparent medium’ (E3: 18), acknowledging her mediation of the Victorian to Woolf’s present, but also rendering her influence invisible. Ritchie was in a line of female literary mentorship
which she extended to Woolf. She provided her with a role model
of an independent writing woman, who valued her own work and
marketed it astutely in financially advantageous, regenerative ways;
a model which Woolf followed. Yet in Night and Day, in her obituary
of Ritchie (E3: 13–20), and in reviews of Ritchie’s work (E1: 228–9; E3:
399–403), Woolf misrepresents her as amateurish, slight, whimsical
and unprofessional. Ritchie bequeathed a prolific and wide-ranging
body of work of which Woolf would make significant, lifelong, but
largely unacknowledged, use. Their work overlaps not only because
Ritchie’s circulates in Woolf’s but also because aspects of Ritchie’s can
be said to be proto-modernist. Her various transgressive strategies and
innovative techniques, such as blurring genre boundaries, employing
an unreliable narrator and internal monologue, or shifting perspectives, anticipate the modernist aesthetic with which Woolf herself
was experimenting. Ritchie, like Woolf, was at the centre of critical
debates about the nature of auto/biography. She achieves some of
the ‘perpetual marriage of granite and rainbow’ (E4: 478) to which
Woolf would later aspire in her new biography. Ritchie’s deliberate,
joyful, subversive, prankishness allowed her to challenge traditional
masculine models of both biography and essay writing, and to thrive
in a patriarchal society and profession. This, and her interest in the
Introduction
5
conditions of women’s lives, provides yet another strong line of
inheritance which Woolf would develop in her own work.
Inevitably I have had to be hugely selective from the abundance of
Ritchie’s work, choosing as my main exemplars her essay ‘Toilers and
Spinsters’, her group biography Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, Browning,
and her novels From an Island and Old Kensington as illustrative of
connections with Cameron and Stephen and lines of influence with
Woolf.
Ritchie provides the strongest link between Woolf and her greataunt, Julia Margaret Cameron, the subject of Chapter 4. Cameron
was an influential founder member of the Little Holland House and
Freshwater circles and, like Ritchie, provided Woolf with a role model
of a woman artist who regarded her work as a profession, and who
took a controlling interest in all aspects of its production, publication
and marketing. Woolf overtly refuses to take her seriously, reducing
her to a caricature and her art to the butt of jokes in Freshwater, Night
and Day, ‘Pattledom’ and ‘Julia Margaret Cameron’. A comparison
of Woolf’s and Fry’s introductory essays to their 1926 collaborative
collection of Cameron’s photographs, Victorian Photographs of Famous
Men and Fair Women, reveals how different their response is to
Cameron and her art. Nowhere does Woolf acknowledge Cameron’s
undoubted artistic achievements. The complex genesis of her story
‘The Searchlight’ (HH: 263–6), reveals how Woolf first appropriates,
and then consciously suppresses, Cameron.
However, the lines of descent are strong. Cameron was innovative
and experimental, exhibiting the same traits of subversive playfulness as Ritchie. Woolf clearly inherited this from her too, not least in
her ludic and original use of photographs in Flush, Orlando and Three
Guineas. Both Cameron’s and Woolf’s use of photographs illustrates
powerful subversion of patriarchal formal biography and gender stereotypes, especially in the playful juxtapositions of fact and fiction,
and constructions of ontologically uncertain identity. Both blur gender and genre boundaries. Cameron’s posed, freeze-framed, subjects,
and her use of tableaux, influence Woolf’s set-piece scene-making, as
exemplified by her short story ‘Portraits’ (HH: 236–40). Woolf’s visual
aesthetics, especially her use of focalisation, differing perspectives and
angles of vision, which are recognised as fundamental to her literary
modernism, are all resonant of Cameron’s techniques. From the first,
Cameron attracted attention and diverse critical response, especially
6
Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
for her controversial use of soft focus. This technique, which blurs
edges and creates fuzzy outlines, was hugely influential on Woolf’s
own lifelong experiments with the dissolution of boundaries and
with liminality. Woolf had a lifelong interest in photography and her
celebrity and domestic albums are direct descendants of Cameron’s.
Photographs can be retrievals and modes of transmission of family
histories, as Woolf used Cameron’s photographs throughout her life,
and as she explores through the Hilbery album (N&D: 105–7), which
contains a caricature of Cameron as Queenie Colquhoun.
Chapter 5 focuses on Julia Prinsep Stephen, whom Cameron called
her favourite niece and who was the subject of over 50 of her remarkable photographic portraits which present her as very different to the
gloomy worn-down woman seen in family snapshots near the end of
her life. Stephen was a prolific letter writer, and responded to articles
in periodicals for instance on the subject of ‘Agnostic Women’
and ‘The Servant Question’. She published a manual, Notes from
Sick Rooms, and wrote the DNB entry for Julia Margaret Cameron.
She took her nursing and philanthropy seriously, regarding it as a
profession, though, like most of her writing, it remained unpaid.
As a child, Woolf often felt neglected by her mother; but with
maturity, she is able to see things from a different perspective and
to take what she called the ‘later view’ (Sketch: 83). Leslie Stephen
sanctified and idealised Julia in his threnody, the Mausoleum Book.
This apotheosis is often layered with that of the Angel in the House,
deriving from Coventry Patmore’s eponymous poem, so that many
critics and biographers conflate Julia Stephen with this Angel. Woolf
does not apply the term to Stephen but she does reject the tyranny of
idealised Victorian domesticity which she felt threatened her creative
freedom. She does not idealise Julia Stephen but recognises all sides
of a very complex woman through her representations of aspects of
her in Clarissa Dalloway, Mrs Ramsay and Rose Pargiter. Stephen,
especially when younger, was vivacious and gregarious, loving
gossip, parties and the company of young people. Woolf inherited
and creatively transformed this love of gossip and anecdote, as well
as Stephen’s mischievous and sometimes malicious wit. Above all it
was her mother’s laughter which remained in Woolf’s memory.
Julia Stephen’s influence on the work of her daughter was fruitful
and formative. Woolf often literally wrote back through her mother,
using her pen, ‘the parent of all pens’ (D1: 208). Stephen was a
Introduction
7
facilitator and nurturer of Woolf’s writing and publishing: her first
mentor, attentive audience and demanding critic. It was she who
suggested Woolf start the Hyde Park Gate News. Stephen’s stories, now
retrieved by Gillespie and Steele ( JDS), show her to be a close observer
with a clear sense of place which was often expressed in highly
figured, evocative language. Stephen’s merging of fact, fiction, biography, memory and anecdote is clear in Woolf’s own work; as is her
fine ear for the rhythms of speech and conversation. These stories
showed Woolf that she could be an author of her own narratives, and
insert herself and her friends and family into the plots. In A Sketch of
the Past, the memoir which Woolf was writing at the end of her life,
and which remained unfinished at her death, she famously claimed
that writing To the Lighthouse was an act of exorcism after which she
‘ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do
not see her’ (Sketch: 81).
However, ambivalently, she immediately follows this claim with
a series of set-piece memorials in which she imaginatively both
sees and hears her mother. These creatively transformed memories
reveal Stephen’s enduring legacy and continuous ‘invisible presence’
(Sketch: 80) in Woolf’s life and work.
In Chapter 6 I consider The Years (1937) in which Woolf continues
her interrogation of her past, playing her life over again through yet
more fictionalisations of her family. Like Eleanor she seems to be trying
to find a pattern in life, wondering, ‘Does everything then come
over again a little differently?’ (TY: 351). In The Years the past, and
especially the present, are much bleaker and darker than in my other
framing text, Night and Day, reflecting the period of composition.
London streets are sordid and dirty, bombs are dropping, houses are
run down and women are impoverished. Identities are shown as
unstable and memory as fallible. Language is slippery, connectives disappear, and as at the party which constitutes most of the Present Day
section, there is a multiplicity of voices but conversation is disjointed
and elliptical and there is little communication. Gender politics are
even more highly conflicted than in Night and Day. Though the doors
of the houses are flung wide and the women are offered many more
choices than Katharine Hilbery, only Maggie is happy.
The Years is structured, like Night and Day, through oppositions
especially of light and dark, inside and outside, present and absent,
realism and modernism; but again the boundaries are blurred and
8
Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
indistinct. Like North, Woolf is concerned to ‘make a new ripple in
human consciousness’ and ambivalently to ‘be the bubble and the
stream, the stream and the bubble’ (TY: 390). Throughout, Woolf
provides reassuring patterns of completion and continuity through
iterated tropes, circle patterns, and a series of elemental cycles of
the seasons, the weather, days, years and generations. At the end, as
in Night and Day, Woolf moves into a unifying, liminal, visionary,
third space. Eleanor, like Katharine, remains alone on the threshold
looking out.
Woolf’s lines of descent from Ritchie, Cameron and Stephen are
clear. Ritchie is present through the recurring trope of the door,
through her intertext Old Kensington, and obliquely through the
street music of The Years. The barrel organ which sounds throughout
the novel, even the modern sections, resonates with ‘The Enchanted
Organ’ (E3: 399–403), in which Woolf recognises Ritchie’s transgressive nature. The many Yorkshire references in The Years take Woolf
full circle back to ‘Haworth’ (E1: 5–9) and her early mentors Ritchie
and Madge Vaughan. Cameron’s legacy is clear in Woolf’s lexicon
and tropes drawn from photography and film. There is an emphasis
on the visual and on portraits and photographs as transmission of
family history and records of genetic inheritance. Solid objects acquire
Cameron’s soft focus: ‘Things seemed to have lost their skins; to be
freed from some surface hardness’ (TY: 274). Woolf is still obsessed
with her mother. Rose Pargiter has the same red hair and blue eyes as
Julia Stephen, which her descendants inherit. Woolf again explores
the loss of the mother through the matricide of both Rose and
Eugénie Pargiter. Stephen’s presence is also felt in explorations of The
Servant Question. Ethel Smyth, another of Woolf’s ‘great connection’,
is influential in the genesis of The Years, and is a transmitter of family
stories, especially that of James Pattle, which Woolf had read in
Smyth’s autobiography.
In a postmodern age we celebrate uncertainty and ambivalence,
and recognise them in Woolf. In her lexicon it is a predominantly
positive term. In the Conclusion I argue that the ambivalence of
Woolf’s response to her three forebears, in particular, reveals her
response to her past in general. Woolf was concerned to construct herself as different from her nineteenth-century forebears; as modernist,
innovative and an exceptional writer of genius. She proposes a series
of break points between her past and her future, such as the move
Introduction
9
to Bloomsbury in 1906. However, Woolf’s proposed dislocations
also contain continuities. Many of Cameron’s photos, including
those of Stephen, went with her to Gordon Square and Ritchie was
a welcome visitor.
While Woolf frequently rejects her past she also shows affiliation,
researching it methodically and representing it positively. During the
genesis of Night and Day she read about ‘1860 – the Kembles –
Tennyson & so on; to get the spirit of that time’ and was impressed by
their energy and curiosity (D1: 19). ‘Tennyson & so on’ would have
included Cameron, Ritchie and others of the Freshwater and Holland
Park circles. Against them Woolf’s contemporaries seem to her dull
and uncommitted, with ‘no character at all’ (19). While Woolf
overtly rejects her legacies from Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen,
she reveals her appreciation of them by using them, albeit without
acknowledgement, throughout her writing life.
Any assessment of Woolf is complicated by such ambivalence; and
further complicated by the variations in her narratives the further
away from her Victorian forebears she became. Whatever conclusion
is reached, or example cited, an opposite point of view is immediately apparent. At the end of her life, Woolf was still reconstructing
her life and matrilineage from its beginning in A Sketch of the Past,
her final mammoth task of remembering and relocating herself
which remained unfinished at her death. She recognises that, as an
account of her life, these memories can be misleading ‘because the
things one does not remember are as important’ (Sketch: 69). Any
account must be tentative and subjective, ‘this past is much affected
by the present moment. What I write today I should not write in a
year’s time’ (Sketch: 75).
She constantly rewrites and reinvents her ancestors through her
own focus; aware that nothing is stable or only one thing. The
Marie Antoinette story, for instance, is embedded in Sally Seton’s
memories in Mrs Dalloway, which even she doubts are completely
accurate: Sally ‘had pawned her great-grandfather’s ring which Marie
Antoinette had given him – had he got it right?’ (MD: 206). In Night
and Day and still in The Years Woolf debates the tension between
affiliation and rejection through a series of oppositions, which are
then formally disrupted by continuities.
What emerges strongly, but more subtly, is a proposal and a desire
for pattern, harmony and completion. This is figured through the
10
Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
recurrent tropes of the open door, the searchlight and lighthouse,
and natural cycles of the seasons, the hours of the day and the years.
Light, time and states of being are fluid and merging. She employs
images of netting, weaving and stitching together fragments, so that
all become part of a vast fabric both temporally and spatially. Woolf
mythologises and caricatures Ritchie, Cameron and Stephen. She
attempts to eradicate them, render them invisible or exorcise them.
Paradoxically, she succeeds in creating a space where, as Mrs Hilbery
envisioned, ‘one age is linked with another, and no one dies, and
we all meet in spirit’ (N&D: 478). She gives immortality to Cameron,
Ritchie and Stephen through her portrayals of them in her writing;
and simultaneously reveals her own large connection with them.
1
‘And Finally Virginia’: Cameron,
Ritchie, Stephen and Woolf’s
Constructs of her Ancestry
Woolf flamboyantly constructs her own ancestry: ‘Marie Antoinette
loved my ancestor: hence he was exiled; hence the Pattles, the barrel
that burst, and finally Virginia’ (L6: 461). She here traces a direct
line to her great-great-grandfather, Ambroise-Pierre Antoine de
L’Étang, who was born in 1757. Family story has it that as a dashing
young Chevalier he was appointed to the household of Marie
Antoinette, but left France hurriedly when he became too close to
the young Queen.1 He went to Pondicherry, a French settlement in
India, where he married Thérèse-Josephe Blin de Grincourt. They
lived remarkably long lives through some of the most turbulent
and exciting of times. They faced death, defeat and loss on many
occasions, but they were resilient and adaptable survivors. Had de
L’Étang remained in Paris he might have been guillotined in the
Revolution, but soon after he arrived in Pondicherry it was taken
by British forces. He again managed to survive possible death or
captivity, allegedly by negotiating with the English commander. His
equestrian skills and experience were in high demand, and for the
rest of his life he remained in India training and breeding horses for
the British East India Company and the Nawab of Oudh. He died
in 1840, aged 83. While de L’Étang led an adventurous, nomadic
life, Thérèse frequently travelled back to France with her daughters.
Finally she moved there permanently, dying in Paris in 1866 just
three months short of her 100th birthday.
11
12
Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
Pattledom
Possibly de L’Étang’s most lasting legacy was his looks. His aquiline,
aristocratic nose and deep-set hooded eyes evidence dominant genes,
clearly seen through the generations, and inherited by both Julia
Stephen and Virginia Woolf. Anglicised versions of his daughters’
names, Julie, Adéline and Virginie, were also passed down and
continue to be popular in the family. His daughter, Adéline de
L’Étang, married the infamous James Pattle in Calcutta. James and
Adéline had seven daughters who survived to adulthood and who
collectively became known as Pattledom.2 One of these Pattle sisters
was Julia Margaret Cameron and another Maria (Mia) Jackson,
Woolf’s maternal grandmother. Woolf describes them:
Half French, half English, they were all excitable, unconventional,
extreme in one form or another, all of a distinguished presence,
tall, impressive, and gifted with a curious mixture of shrewdness
and romance. (E4: 280)
James Pattle died suddenly in Calcutta and Adéline decided to
repatriate his body, preserved in a barrel of brandy. During the
voyage to England the barrel allegedly burst, and Adéline also died.
These incidents gave rise to yet more lurid, sensational and speculative
stories, exploited not least by Woolf herself (E4: 280; L6: 461).
Woolf’s problematic response to her past
Though Woolf relishes the romance and scandal of these ancestral narratives, her retellings reveal her conflicted response to her
past. She frequently renders her relationship invisible. In her diary
she remembers Lady Strachey telling her ‘stories of beautiful dead
Pattles & Dalrymples [...] how “Dal” was charming; though not a good
man to marry; how Dr Jackson was so handsome & kind’ (D1: 107).
However, she disassociates herself by not claiming ‘Dr Jackson’ as ‘my
grandfather’. In her essay ‘Pattledom’ she notes how, had it not been
for James Pattle, a great many ‘ladies of beauty and charm and wit and
character’, including Lady Troubridge herself, would not have existed
(E4: 280). Woolf again omits herself from this matrilineage; but must
have enjoyed the in-joke. As many of her readers were aware, James
Cameron, Ritchie, Stephen and Woolf’s Ancestry 13
Pattle was her great-grandfather as well as Lady Troubridge’s. Without
him, she too would not have existed, so she must also be one of the
ladies with beauty, charm and wit. In a playful letter to Ethel Smyth
she does overtly claim kinship to the Pattles and the Chevalier de
L’Étang (L6: 461). This letter, dated 12 January 1941, just a few weeks
before her death, reveals that her fascination with, and reinvention
of, her ‘large connection’ lasted throughout her life.
Woolf, Cameron, Stephen and Ritchie
Woolf’s relationships with the three of her forebears in this study
vary in large part because of the different ways in which she knew
them. Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–79) was the oldest of the three.3
She was born in Calcutta but spent her formative childhood with her
grandmother, Thérèse de L’Étang, in Versailles. She married Charles
Hay Cameron in Calcutta, where she had five children and played an
influential role as a society and official government hostess. When
they retired to Dimbola, the house she created at Freshwater on the
Isle of Wight, she began the photographic career which revealed her
as an innovative artist. Financial problems led the Camerons to sell
Dimbola and move to their coffee estates in Ceylon, where she died.
Woolf, born in 1882, therefore never met her and had to rely on the
memoirs and anecdotes of others for her material.
Julia Prinsep Stephen (1846–95) was the youngest daughter of
Cameron’s sister, Maria (Mia), who was also born in India and lived
there with her husband John Jackson, a doctor.4 Stephen was born in
Calcutta; she lived there until she was two, when she was sent to join
her sisters, Adeline and Mary (later Vaughan and Fisher), also being
brought up by their great-grandmother Thérèse de L’Étang in Paris,
and by their aunt and uncle, Sara and Thoby Prinsep, in London.
When John Jackson returned from India the family moved to Frant,
in Kent. Julia married Herbert Duckworth there in 1867. Only three
years after their marriage Herbert Duckworth died suddenly leaving
Julia with two young children, George and Stella. Gerald was born six
weeks later. During this traumatic period Julia was supported by family
and friends, including Anny Ritchie and her sister Minny, then married to Leslie Stephen. In 1878, Julia married the then widowed Leslie
Stephen, who moved, with his daughter Laura, into Julia’s home in
Hyde Park Gate. Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia and Adrian were born there
14
Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
between 1879 and 1883. Julia Stephen died when Virginia was 13.
Woolf therefore knew her mother, but only with what she termed
the ‘curious focus’ (Sketch: 78) of a child. Again she was reliant on the
memories of others, especially Anny Ritchie and Leslie Stephen.
Anny Thackeray Ritchie (1837–1919), daughter of the novelist
William Thackeray, was Leslie Stephen’s sister-in-law by his first marriage, so not genetically connected to Woolf.5 However, Woolf recognises her close family connection by always calling her Aunt Anny,
and Ritchie embraces the role. She was born in London, but at the
age of three, when her mother became mentally ill, she and Minny
were sent to live with their grandmother in Paris. They later returned
to Thackeray’s grand Kensington home, where they became part of
his literary and artistic circle. This included Cameron, who became
Ritchie’s close friend and mentor. Thackeray died leaving many debts
and the sisters had to move to a smaller house. Ritchie continued to
develop her writing career from a sense of vocation, but also as a source
of income. When Minny married Leslie Stephen, he moved into the
sisters’ home. Despite differences in temperament, Ritchie remained
close to him after Minny’s death and throughout her life continued
to care for her niece Laura. She did not marry Richmond Ritchie until
she was 40. They had two children. Unusually for a married woman
and a mother at that time, she continued her increasingly successful and prolific writing career. She visited Freshwater frequently, and
when the Camerons moved to Ceylon she bought The Porch, a guest
cottage they had built near Dimbola. In her last years she lived there
permanently. Woolf was 37 when Ritchie died, so they knew each
other, and each other’s work, well. Ritchie spanned the nineteenth and
the twentieth centuries, becoming what Woolf called a ‘transparent
medium’, mediating for her the worlds of Cameron and Stephen.
Interconnections: Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen
There are striking similarities and interconnections in the lives
of Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen, which influenced Woolf. The
Pattles, Camerons, Prinseps, Thackerays and Ritchies were part of a
powerful Anglo-Indian network which also included families whose
younger generations became Woolf’s friends and relations, such as
the Stracheys, Grants, Dickinsons and Smyths. Their Indian and
French connections gave them fluency in languages, a cosmopolitan
Cameron, Ritchie, Stephen and Woolf’s Ancestry 15
outlook, a love of travel and the arts, and a wide social network.
They were well educated, though not academic. Their sophistication
and cultural confidence, and their delight in each other’s company
and in laughter and amusement, offered Woolf an alternative to her
paternal inheritance from the Clapham sect. Circumstances in their
childhoods and early lives meant that they were also independent,
resourceful, self-reliant and unconventional. Cameron, Ritchie and
Stephen provided role models of lively, independent, professional
women. Woolf had the problem of negotiating their legacies not
only as Victorian antecedents, but also as successful women artists.
Cameron was a highly acclaimed, if controversial, photographer;
Ritchie a popular bestselling writer. Stephen is to some extent an
exception. Her writing was largely unpublished, and her nursing,
though she approached it seriously as a profession, was unpaid.
Like Woolf, all three were concerned with the conditions of
women’s lives. While Woolf’s involvement was largely through
her writing, and focused on the daughters of educated men, her
forebears were also actively involved in helping women of all
classes. As Sylvia Wolf argues, ‘Cameron’s response to beauty,
eradicating class as it did, was so extreme as to constitute an almost
political statement. Her tableaux are parables of radical democracy’
(1998: 15). She gave dignity and employment to women, and men,
of other races in her Ceylon portraits (Ford 2003: 195–203). Ritchie’s
essays such as ‘Toilers and Spinsters’ reveal her concern for the
opportunities for employment and education for all women, as I
discuss in Chapter 3. She and Stephen shared an active interest in
philanthropy: visiting workhouses, housing developments for the
poor, hospitals in London, and in Ritchie’s case also in France. They
worked within an influential and radical campaigning network
which included Octavia Hill, Charles Booth and Jeanie Senior.
Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen were part of a supportive network
in both their domestic and working lives. Their correspondence with
family and friends was prolific but anyone now tweeting or texting
will be familiar with these quotidian minutiae of women’s lives
which Woolf satirises as their ‘enormous daily volubility’ (E4: 379).
The writing and recording of lives was of crucial interest to all four
women. Their auto/biographical writing elides boundaries between
fact and fiction, public and private, domestic and professional.
All wrote and kept huge collections of letters, which along with
16
Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
photographs were circulated around the family. All except Stephen
kept a diary or journal, albums and scrapbooks. It is through such a
bricolage of shared lives that family history is transmitted to the next
generation, as Woolf explores in Night and Day and The Years, and
as she herself did through her own letters and photograph albums.
Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen provided Woolf with a model of a
strong sisterhood. Leslie Stephen noted their ‘ardent friendship’ and
love and support of each other. He instanced how Julia Stephen helped
Anny ‘copy and arrange her manuscripts’, and posed for Cameron’s
photographs, and how all three ‘engaged in the cult of Tennyson’
( MB: 42). They were instrumental in constructing and promoting each
other’s work, and the professional reputations of Cameron and Ritchie.
Stephen wrote the DNB entry on Cameron, celebrating her generosity
and capacity for friendship, as well as her poems and translations and
her photography which gained medals in England, Europe and America
( JDS: 214–15). Cameron compiled a personalised album of photographs
for Ritchie, playfully inscribed, ‘Fatal to Photographs are Cups of tea
and Coffee, Candles & Lamps, & Children’s fingers’ (Olsen 2003: 178).
Ritchie’s novel The Story of Elizabeth (1863) is dedicated to Cameron,
whose guest she was at Freshwater during its completion. It is partly
set on the Isle of Wight. Old Kensington (1873) is dedicated to Stephen’s
children, Georgie and Stella, among others. Ritchie used Stephen’s
home, Saxonbury, as a setting and fictionalised Stephen as Dorothea. She
dedicated Miss Angel (1875), her biography of Angelica Kauffman, to her.
Both Stephen and Ritchie were the subjects of Cameron’s photographs.
Ritchie played an active role in the public presentation and promotion
of Cameron’s work by, for instance, reviewing her 1865 exhibition at
Colnaghi’s in the Pall Mall Gazette, and urging contacts at the South
London Museum (now the V&A) to buy Cameron’s photographs.
Such memorialisation, collaboration, celebration and promotion
of each other’s work prefigures relationships between members of
the Bloomsbury Group. Also shadowing the Bloomsbury Group
are two artistic circles in which Cameron, Stephen and Ritchie were
involved, those at Little Holland House and at Freshwater. The
Little Holland House Circle was a salon run by Cameron’s sister Sara
and her husband, Thoby Prinsep, at their London home. The artist
G.F. Watts was resident there for nearly 30 years and Thackeray,
Tennyson, Browning, Ellen Terry, Burne-Jones and Holman Hunt
were among the luminaries who frequented it. This coterie is an
Cameron, Ritchie, Stephen and Woolf’s Ancestry 17
intertext in Ritchie’s Old Kensington (OK: 138) and in Night and Day
(N&D: 106). Woolf imaginatively recreates her mother there (Sketch:
86–8), but her aesthetic transformations of such scenes from the past
rely on appropriation of others’ accounts, often her older cousin
Herbert Fisher’s or Ritchie’s. The Freshwater Circle, which Ritchie
fictionalises in From an Island (1868–69), included the Camerons at
Dimbola, the Tennysons at Farringford, and Watts and the Prinseps
at The Briary.6 From the 1860s Freshwater became increasingly bohemian and popular. Frequent visitors included Thackeray, Ritchie, the
Stephen family and Lewis Carroll. Woolf appropriates Ritchie’s and
Stephen’s accounts of life there as source material for Freshwater and
‘The Searchlight’, as I discuss in Chapter 4, but typically obscures
them and her own connection with them. In ‘The Old Order’ (E2:
167–76), her review of Henry James’ autobiography, Woolf again
distances herself by constructing the Victorians as other. She notes
positive qualities in their cultural coteries but employs parody and
hyperbole to mock their cult of hero worship, distancing her own
generation from such excess. James was an habitué of both these
circles. Woolf singles out his sharp observations of both the great
and lesser figures of the epoch, instancing George Eliot, Mrs Greville
or Lady Waterford. However, Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen are
completely written out of Woolf’s account of these artistic groups,
although they and their families were founder members and provided the locations for those she specifically names.
As a woman, Woolf cast herself as a member of the Outsiders’
Society (TG: 309). Woolf was arguing from a gendered perspective, but
her Anglo-Indian inheritance also created a social tension. Victoria
Olsen convincingly argues that like the Pattles, Woolf and Vanessa
Bell sought out the company of others with similar backgrounds,
‘Little Holland House, Freshwater, and Bloomsbury may have seemed
exclusive, and peopled by England’s elite, but they were born of
a feeling of distance and alienation from the small, closed worlds
of English society’ (2003: 267). Possibly because of this perceived
alienation, Woolf’s work reveals a strong sense of the stability and
importance of place and property, for instance in repeated constructs
of 22 Hyde Park Gate, and her beloved summer home Talland House
in St Ives, as locations in Night and Day, To the Lighthouse, The Years
and A Sketch of the Past; just as Ritchie utilises her home in Old
Kensington, and Stephen uses hers in her children’s stories.
18
Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
The absent mother and mother–daughter relationships are significant
tropes in Woolf’s work, especially in To the Lighthouse and The Years, and
are another part of her literary and familial inheritance. Family rupture
caused by loss of the mother was a stock scenario of Victorian literature
and a reality in Victorian lives. Herbert Duckworth’s and Laura Stephen’s
mothers died when they were three. Cameron and Ritchie grew up
separated from their mothers, effectively orphaned. The Pattle sisters
gathered into the extended family network orphaned children and those
sent home from India, as Ritchie describes three-year-old Dolly in her
novel, Old Kensington (OK: 8–10). Stepmothers and surrogate mothers
were common in Victorian families, especially Anglo-Indian ones. Ritchie
took in the motherless daughters of her cousin Edward Thackeray.
Cameron adopted one child and fostered others. Mia Jackson lived with
her orphaned Vaughan grandchildren. Julia Stephen was Laura Stephen’s
stepmother and surrogate mother for others. Woolf felt neglected by her
mother and was distraught when she died; but the loss of a mother was
not unusual at that time. It is nevertheless reflected in the tension in
Woolf’s work between the links forged with the past through long-lived
parents and broken links caused by the death of the mother.
Woolf’s narratives of Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen
Cameron, Stephen and Ritchie are not just genealogically and
biographically part of Woolf’s Victorian background. She endlessly
recreates their life stories so that they become integrated in her
multi-valenced construct of her own colourful history, through
numerous, lifelong, reinventions. Her narratives of them, and of her
relationships with them, are problematised by her fictionalisation.
While care must be taken in identifying fictional representations as
a transparent source of biographical information, Woolf made her
connections clear. The current perceptions of Ritchie and Stephen
are still largely mediated through Woolf’s literary transformations of
them as Mrs Hilbery in Night and Day and as Mrs Ramsay in To the
Lighthouse. As Olsen argues, ‘In a sense, Cameron’s story begins when
her great-niece Virginia Woolf began writing it down’ in her 1926
biographical essay (2003: 3). However, Woolf does them a disservice;
she advocates female artistic inheritance and the transmission of
texts from one generation to the next, especially in A Room of One’s
Own. Yet, with a few exceptions, she chooses not to overtly transmit
Cameron, Ritchie, Stephen and Woolf’s Ancestry 19
the texts of these forebears. In spite of all that she knew about their
publications and achievements, she constructs Cameron and Ritchie
as eccentric, disorganised amateurs. Woolf was in many ways the
guardian of their reputations; but unlike Mrs Hilbery with her father,
or Ritchie with Thackeray, she does not write celebratory biographies.
Instead, as I discuss in the relevant chapters, she obscures them,
and her debt to them, by caricaturing or mythologising them in her
novels, essays, memoirs and letters; or by writing them out.
Woolf’s narratives are also problematised by inconsistencies and
inaccuracies. Primary source material, which becomes the basis
for family anecdotes and histories, can be corrupted, or unreliable
because of the fallibility of memory, a process she explores in The
Years. Martin and Rose have contradictory memories (TY: 151, 152);
the obituaries for Eugénie and Digby bear no relation to Martin’s
recollections (146–7). Documentary evidence can be inaccurate, as
when Eleanor accidentally misdates her letters (149); as editorial
notes indicate that Woolf does on occasion with her own letters and
diaries. Woolf constructs different versions of her narrating self, even
in her own diaries and letters, writing to Violet Dickinson as Sparroy,
for instance (L1: 108, 110) and inventing a distancing third person
persona, Miss Jan, for her early journals (PA: 5–7). Further obfuscation
occurs because Woolf is sometimes a deliberately unreliable narrator,
actively falsifying accounts to further her artistic purposes. Dadie
Rylands recognises the ‘fantasy world in which Virginia always
described things’ (Noble 1972: 143). Her famous account in A Room
of One’s Own of the superb dinner in his Cambridge college rooms
(Room: 12–14) differs markedly from his own recollections of it, but
‘as always with Virginia it is the idealized, the romantic fantasy of
what should have been and what it was to her’ (Noble 1972: 144).
Woolf recognises this ‘strange power we have of changing facts
by the force of the imagination’ (E4: 78). She constantly observes
her own editing process, aware of the power of ‘an invisible censor
within’, and understanding that to ‘tell the truth about oneself, to
discover oneself near at hand, is not easy’ (E4: 75, 71). It is clear in
Woolf’s problematic responses to Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen that
suppression, self-censorship, the desire to tell an entertaining story
and the fallibility of memory, make it equally difficult for her to tell
the whole truth about them. Yet her retellings of them reveal her
strong connectedness to them, and ensure that they endure.
2
‘Knocking at the Door’:
Heredity, Legacy and Transition
in Night and Day
Anny Thackeray Ritchie’s is the most significant of the nineteenthcentury legacies on which Woolf draws in Night and Day. Ritchie, still
writing and publishing while Woolf was writing her novel, functions
as intertext and inspiration. She died in March 1919, just weeks
before its publication. Ritchie was aware of,
the rising generation knocking at the door; it seems now as if
already the rising generation had ceased to knock. It has burst in,
leaving the doors wide open. (FtP: 28)
In Night and Day Mrs Hilbery borrows from Ritchie, telling how,
‘little Augustus Pelham said to me, “It’s the younger generation
knocking at the door,” and I said to him, “Oh, but the younger
generation comes in without knocking, Mr Pelham.” Such a feeble
little joke, wasn’t it, but down it went into his notebook all the
same.’ (N&D: 87)
Woolf has clearly been copying anecdotes into her own notebook.
‘Knocking at the door’: Ritchie and border crossings
Woolf employs the door as an extended image symbolic of the
divide between generations, millennia and different states of
being. It is a trope which she continues to use, particularly in
The Years. Importantly, it is also a trope which Woolf specifically
20
Heredity, Legacy and Transition in Night and Day
21
links to Ritchie, and to border crossings, as I discuss further in
Chapter 3. Woolf often constructs a division between the present and the past, defining the Victorians as ‘other’.1 In ‘A Man
With a View’ (1916) she asserts that eminent men, the subjects
of Victorian biographies, already appear ‘strangely remote and
formal’ (E2: 36); and in ‘The Park Wall’ (1916) argues that contemporary writers are ‘achieving something different from the
great dead’ (E2: 43).
However, in Night and Day, in which Woolf contextualises her
Victorian forebears, and Ritchie in particular, there is ultimately
no unbreachable gap between past and present. Woolf’s language and literary techniques construct boundaries as fuzzy and
permeable. ‘Doors’ are not barriers but are border crossing points,
allowing proleptic and analeptic movement across space and time.
Characters constantly move through literal and metaphorical
doors; from exteriors to interiors and back again. Katharine
imagines someone entering the room just as Ralph flings open
the door. He quickly realises that ‘a thousand softly padded doors’
had closed behind him (N&D: 2). As Katharine and Ralph haltingly confess their love, he feels ‘that he had stepped over the
threshold into the faintly lit vastness of another mind’ (486). At
the end Ralph goes out of the door again to the freedom of the
street, while Katharine ‘pushed the door half open and stood upon
the threshold’ (489). Janus-like, Night and Day looks simultaneously both backwards and forwards, while like Katharine remaining poised, as Laura Marcus notes, ‘between past and future’
(2000: 216), tentatively in liminal space.
Night and Day is part of a widespread cultural debate and
Victorian retrospect occasioned in part by the rupture of World
War I. Ritchie, constructed as Mrs Hilbery, provides Woolf with an
excellent medium through whom to articulate her own Victorian
retrospect. Additionally Woolf’s use of her ‘aunt’ as intertext
personalises the general debate, formally linking their lives and
writing, and creating additional layers of resonance, complexity
and ambivalence. Ritchie is usually represented as Victorian, but
she was still writing and publishing for the first two decades of
the twentieth century. Her life thus epitomises the seamless transition that I am proposing; as does her writing, which I discuss in
Chapter 3.
22
Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
Literary transformations
While one must be cautious of suggesting too close an identification
between real and fictional characters, there is evidence that Woolf
is clearly engaging in literary transformations in this novel, and not
only of Ritchie.2 During the genesis and writing of Night and Day,
she was considering her own marriage plot, and Katharine has many
of Woolf’s own characteristics, as her doctor Octavia Wilberforce
identified (Haller 1998: 221), especially her privileged intellectual
and literary background and her love for someone from a different
social milieu. But Woolf advised Janet Case to ‘try thinking of
Katharine as Vanessa, not me’ (L2: 400), and Angelica Garnett argues
that Katharine’s desire to study astronomy parallels Vanessa’s desire
to study art (N&D: xix). Such a fictional conflation of herself and her
sister is possibly a ploy to distance the transformation of her own
marital relationship from too close an identification. But, like her
fictionalisation of Leonard as Ralph Denham, it can also be read as
a response to her husband, for hovering behind Katharine Hilbery
is Katharine Lawrence, Leonard Woolf’s composite portrait of Woolf
and Bell in The Wise Virgins, itself an important intertext in Night
and Day.3 Woolf’s representations are never only one thing, but as
Garnett argues of Katharine’s portrait, they waver ‘like a shadow seen
by candlelight’ (N&D: xviii).
Fictionalising Ritchie as Mrs Hilbery allows Woolf to engage in
an oblique assessment of Ritchie’s personality and the qualities
of her writing. Her ambiguous representation of Katharine, conflating Vanessa and herself in the role of Mrs Hilbery’s/Ritchie’s
daughter, both obscures and reveals her relationship with Ritchie.
As Amanda Holton illuminatingly suggests, she thus ‘takes one step
away from this mother–daughter relationship, which so markedly
intimates closeness and indebtedness’ (2008: 44). Such distancing,
which is typical of Woolf’s ambivalent response to Ritchie, and to
Cameron and Stephen, is an integral part of her project. More layers
of ambivalence are apparent in the many qualities of Katharine
which are contrary to those of her mother. Katharine did not like
literature and even had ‘some natural antipathy to that process of
self-examination, that perpetual effort to understand one’s own
feeling, and express it beautifully, fitly, or energetically in language,
which constituted so great a part of her mother’s existence [...] she
Heredity, Legacy and Transition in Night and Day
23
shrank from expressing herself even in talk, let alone in writing’
(N&D: 35). Though couched in negative terms, this description
reveals an oblique appreciation of Mrs Hilbery’s/Ritchie’s qualities,
since, by implication, she possesses all of Katharine’s ineptitudes and
aversions. The counter-list also reads like a manifesto of Woolf’s own
commitment to the art of writing, thus implicitly acknowledging her
affinity with Ritchie, at least in terms of their attitudes to their work.
Generic ambivalence in Night and Day
Woolf’s conflicted relationship with her nineteenth-century legacies,
both familial and literary, is evident in the generic ambivalence
of Night and Day. In retrospect Woolf regarded the novel as an
apprentice piece (L4: 231); but on completing it, she claimed to
have been avant-garde, ‘groping’ for new answers (D1: 259). The
novel’s critical reception has been similarly diverse.4 It has been
disparaged as retrogressive and conventional by writers such as E.M.
Forster (D1: 310) and Katherine Mansfield.5 Clive Bell thought it a
failure with a conventional Victorian marriage plot.6 Such reductive
analysis emphasises Woolf’s formal attachment to a classical realist
genre and supports readings of Night and Day as drawing on legacies
from Mozart opera or Shakespearean comedy.7 More recent critics
have ‘excused’ her ‘failure’ in this novel, citing mental breakdown
or reluctance to confront issues of war.8 However, Woolf’s creative
choice to engage in a generic and biographical dialogue with her
past in Night and Day is positive and deliberate. While writing her
novel she was experimenting with highly modernist techniques, as
in ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (1917), and ‘Kew Gardens’ (1919) which
also deals overtly with the trauma of war. In April 1919 she both
submitted her manuscript of Night and Day to Gerald Duckworth,
and published ‘Modern Novels’. In this she famously argues that ‘The
mind, exposed to the ordinary course of life, receives upon its surface
a myriad impressions [...] From all sides they come, an incessant
shower of innumerable atoms, composing in their sum what we
might venture to call life itself’ (E3: 33). This manifesto illustrates
Woolf’s boundary-crossing and Janus-like position, in both its content and context. While forward looking, it is firmly rooted in her
literary past, echoing Thomas Hardy’s assertion of ‘the impossibility
of reproducing in its entirety the phantasmagoria of experience with
24
Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
infinite and atomic truth’ and conclusion that to ‘see in half and
quarter views the whole picture, to catch from a few bars the whole
tune, is the intuitive power that supplies the would-be storywriter
with the scientific bases for his pursuit’ (Orel 1967: 135, 137). Hardy’s
explorations in this essay, ‘The Science of Fiction’, published in the
New Review in 1891, were part of a nineteenth-century debate on how
to represent realism in fiction. It was begun by Walter Besant with his
1884 Royal Institution lecture, ‘The Art of Fiction’, and Henry James’
seminal response, also ‘The Art of Fiction’. Many writers including
Stevenson and Zola engaged in it. Woolf’s essay ‘Modern Novels’
can be seen as extending that debate into the twentieth century. It is
misleading to impose any Victorian–modernist dichotomy on Woolf
or her work. I agree with Steve Ellis in his rejection of outmoded
readings which suggest ‘antithetical positions in Woolf’s work
between a past to be fled and a future to be embraced’ (2007: 4). Such
a view also misrepresents the heterogeneity of nineteenth-century
literary realism, as evidenced by Hardy’s definition above, and Ritchie’s
own work discussed in Chapter 3.
Continuities and porous boundaries
In Woolf’s work there is no caesura; but an evolution in which her
Victorian realist roots are integrated into her twentieth-century
modernist maturity. Ellis’ portmanteau term, ‘Post-Victorian Woolf’
(2007: 1), is illuminating in emphasising continuities and connections
rather than rupture. As Hermione Lee argues, Woolf was modern,
but also late Victorian; the ‘Victorian family past filled her fiction,
shaped her political analyses of society and underlay the behaviour
of her social group [and ...] her definition of her self’ (1997: 55).
Woolf both builds on legacies from her past, and simultaneously
experiments with the new, a morphology exemplified by Night and
Day. Julia Briggs, for instance, argues that Night and Day is ‘Thomas
Hardy’s fable of “The Poor Man and the Lady” played out in a leisured
Edwardian world of absurdity, irony and affection’ (2005: 29).
Modern novelists, Woolf argues, have not learnt to write any better
than their predecessors, ‘all that we can be said to do is to keep
moving, now a little in this direction, now in that, but with a circular
tendency’ (E3: 31). Night and Day enacts such analepsis, prolepsis
and circularity of movement. The resultant chronotopic clashes and
Heredity, Legacy and Transition in Night and Day
25
fusions are articulated, and explored structurally, through a series of
polarities, signalled both by the final title and an earlier proposed
title Dreams and Realities. There are tensions between fact and fiction,
past and present, youth and age, light and dark, constraint and freedom, solid and abstract, speaking and silence. Katharine and Ralph
are set against Mary and Rodney; the Denhams against the Otways
or Hilberys; Chelsea against Highgate; and metropolitan centrality
against rural idyll. The dualities are endless and, listed thus, suggest
an aggressively oppositional, overly determined, didactic novel.
Close reading reveals something more nuanced. The boundaries
between these dichotomies are in fact blurred and porous. Woolf
employs literary techniques to merge genres and to conjoin past and
present. Spatial and temporal images segue into each other, as in
her description of the first signs of spring. Here, and throughout the
novel, Woolf’s detailed toponymy and topography create a symbiosis
of realist, external landscapes and modernist, internalised, psychological and ideological locations. The white and violet flowers merge
with the ‘sweetly scented petals in the minds of men and women’.
The unyielding hard surface becomes ‘soft and fluid’ both literally
and figuratively. The reflected shapes and colours of the present are
in flux with those of the past (N&D: 291). The same generic and
temporal fluidity is very apparent in a dynamic passage describing Katharine’s star-gazing (184–5). Her thoughts, condensed into
only six sentences, range over the sky as location of some sublime
power so that ‘the Heavens bend over the earth with sympathy’.
This Romantic representation of the uncanny relationship between
human and nature metamorphs into the rational and scientific with
reference to Darwinian evolutionary theories. Katharine’s sense of
self blends into a unified vision of the world where ‘as she looked up
the pupils of her eyes so dilated with starlight that the whole of her
seemed dissolved in silver and spilt over the ledges of the stars for
ever and ever indefinitely through space’. Alongside the dissolution
of her identity she was simultaneously ‘riding with the magnanimous hero’. Her mythic construct of Ralph evaporates as she literally
comes back to earth, feeling the cold, and seeing Stogdon House
transformed by starlight into something ‘pale and romantic, and
about twice its natural size’. There are clear links with the Romantic
sentiments and diction of Keats, Wordsworth, Hardy and other of
her nineteenth-century literary forebears;9 but the use of highly
26
Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
figured language, and the range and complexity of anachronic shifts,
are self-consciously modernist. From tonight at Stogdon House, we
imaginatively regress to Christ’s Nativity, back to the beginnings of
human evolution, then out into the universe, before circling back to
Katharine’s here and now.
The lack of any clear dichotomy in Woolf’s portrayal of past and present, represented by such temporal dislocations, is further reinforced
by the constant disruption of the linear thrust of the narrative by circularity, synchronicity and iteration. Events are going on simultaneously
inside and outside, or in town and country. The beginning of Chapter 16
overlaps the previous one. There are numerous parallels and mirror
images: the dining tables at Katharine’s and Denham’s homes; Ralph
outside Katharine’s home, and she outside his office. Linked to the
temporal is this novel’s emphasis on the spatial and the visual. It is
highly cinematic in its movement from the minutely particular to the
vastly panoramic, as evidenced in the passages quoted above. There
is movement too from the rich materiality of the Victorian interiors,
heavy with Pre-Raphaelite symbolism; and the atmospheric, impressionist, exteriors especially of the river (N&D: 488–9).
Movement from inside and outside, from past to present, or
Victorian to modern, is often figured through light – hazy, blurred,
candlelight or gas light, star light and moonrise. But images of light
also emphasise Woolf’s resistance to any clear-cut antithesis. Ellis’
reading of night in this novel as ‘a kind of sublime chiaroscuro’, as
opposed to the cold light of day (2007: 25), emphasises the aesthetic
difference between Woolf’s symbolic use of light and that of her
high modernist peers. The startlingly harsh modernity of unshaded
electric light in Mary Datchet’s office dazes Katharine after her
twilight walk (N&D: 74–5); but electric spotlights also reveal the
lustrous past in the Alardyce reliquary (7). Paradoxically, obscurity
can also be revealing. Woolf praises Henry James for the ‘mellow
light which swims over the past’ in his memoir The Middle Years and
notes, ‘the shadow in which the detail of so many things can be
discerned which the glare of day flattens out’ (E2: 168). In Woolf’s
novel, day is a time of non-being; night time provides moments of
being, and opportunities for exploration of a woman’s inner life. By
day Katharine follows her public role and her mother’s plot for her.
By night she privately follows her own, stereotypically masculine,
pursuits of astronomy and mathematics (N&D: 37, 183).
Heredity, Legacy and Transition in Night and Day
27
Woolf’s own ambivalence about her nineteenth-century legacies
is articulated through Katharine, who sometimes felt that to survive
she must free herself from her past, but at other times that, compared with the past, the present was ‘an utterly thin and inferior
composition’ (N&D: 35). The openness of Woolf’s ending in Night
and Day reveals that her debate with her past, and with Ritchie as its
representative in this novel, is on-going and unresolved. Katharine
has not yet fully journeyed to self-knowledge. Nor, as I argue below
in relation to the Marriage and the Suffrage novel, is there any
unambiguous indication of what Woolf proposes as a concluding
statement. There is no realist closure, conventional happy marriage
or harmonious, emblematic dance. They have agreed to marry,
but Ralph is walking away from Katharine’s confining, domestic,
circle of light, into the darkness and freedom of the external world.
Katharine is poised in liminal space; framed in a doorway which is
only half-open.
Genetic legacies
Issues of heredity are integral to Night and Day, originally titled The
Third Generation, which debates the possibility, or impossibility, of
escaping from both generic and genetic legacies. Woolf employs a
subversive Austen-like irony and hyperbole to convey the pressure
which she, like Katharine, felt from the ‘glorious past, in which men
and women grew to unexampled size’ (N&D: 31). Ritchie too felt
this pressure, as is clear in John Aplin’s exhaustive biography of the
Thackeray family, The Inheritance of Genius (2010) and Memory and
Legacy (2011). Ritchie, left almost destitute on her father’s death,
might, like Woolf, share Katharine’s sentiment that it was depressing
‘to inherit not lands but an example of intellectual and spiritual
virtue’ (N&D: 31). Woolf’s Duckworth and Pattle relations inherited
lands and titles; she inherited the Stephen intellect.
In his ‘Verses intended to go with a posset dish to my dear little
god-daughter, 1882’, James Russell Lowell wished for her to be ‘A
Sample of Heredity’.10 However, for Woolf and Ritchie, their intellectual, literary and genetic inheritances were highly conflicted. Like
Katharine, they belonged to ‘one of the most distinguished families
in England, and if any one will take the trouble to consult Mr Galton’s
“Hereditary Genius”, he will find that this assertion is not far from
28
Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
the truth’ (N&D: 28). Woolf records reading her intertext, ‘Galtons
Heredity’ (sic), in 1905 (PA: 274). Galton lists William Thackeray,
Leslie Stephen and his brother Fitzjames Stephen as exemplars of
Literary Men (1978: 185), a point noted by Mary Berenson when
she announced her daughter Karin’s engagement to Adrian Stephen.
Both her daughters would be married into families listed by Galton
and so she was anticipating having clever grandchildren.11
Disturbingly for Woolf and Ritchie, Galton’s researches into
eugenics revealed how often the close relations of such men were
insane, or as he termed it ‘idiots’.12 Fitzjames Stephen’s son Jem died
in an asylum. His behaviour was often so bizarre and aggressive as
to suggest to some biographers, in search of sensation, that he could
have been Jack the Ripper.13 Anxieties about inherited madness
were strong in the nineteenth century, represented fictionally in
such novels as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. There was unfounded
speculation that Rochester’s first wife, ‘the mad woman in the
attic’, was based on Ritchie’s mentally unstable mother, Isabella
Thackeray.14 These anxieties also haunted Woolf. As a child she
witnessed her cousin Jem’s strange behaviour (Sketch: 98–9) and
knew of his suicide. She was 11 when her half-sister, Laura Stephen,
was admitted to the Earlswood Asylum, diagnosed by Dr Seton as
being ‘imbecile from an early age’.15 The supposed cause of her
illness was given as heredity and attributed solely to her maternal
grandmother, Isabella Thackeray, in spite of the many instances of
mental illness in Leslie Stephen’s close relations, as documented by
Thomas Caramagno (1992: 97–113).16 Leslie Stephen’s breakdown
was attributed by his family to overwork. However, both he, and
later Woolf, were diagnosed as having neurasthenia by Dr Savage,
who interestingly found Night and Day ‘A great novel – particularly
in its psychology’ (L2: 416). Julian Bell wrote to his mother of the
‘black Stephen madness’ which he felt he had inherited, and its link
to genius, ‘You, Nessa darling, aren’t mad because you’re my grandmother, a Pattle, and you’re a painter, and beautiful as Demeter, who
isn’t mad – whereas Virginia is half on the border-line – which makes
her a poet of genius’ (Q. Bell 1938: 61).
Woolf’s anxieties about her unstable genetic inheritance are
articulated obliquely in Night and Day. The ‘real night or nightmare’
haunting the novel is, Briggs argues (2005: 34), the major breakdown
Woolf suffered during the genesis of that novel in 1913–15. Woolf
Heredity, Legacy and Transition in Night and Day
29
acknowledges that she was ‘so tremblingly afraid of my own insanity
that I wrote Night and Day mainly to prove to my own satisfaction
that I could keep entirely off that dangerous ground’ (L4: 231). She
does not address the issue overtly, as if, like Aunt Eleanor, she believes
that insanity ‘is not a fit subject for fiction’ (N&D: 335). However,
she does overtly debate the silences, suppressions and repressions at
the heart of biographies. Mrs Hilbery agonises over whether or not
to conceal any mention of her father’s early amorous attachments
and later marital infidelities (34).17 Ritchie too had written much of
her major work against a background of anxiety about the unstable
sanity of her mother, her aunt Jane and her niece Laura (Gérin 1981:
194–5). Ritchie suppresses much, including her mother’s mental
state, in her hagiographical introductions to her father’s novels.
Though Woolf mocks such sensitivity and censorship in Ritchie/Mrs
Hilbery, she wrote out her half-sister Laura.18 Her lifelong conflict
is revealed in her still agonising over such problems in writing her
biography of Roger Fry, and suppressing obscure ‘distasteful’ facts
such as Fry’s adultery with Vanessa Bell and his wife’s incarceration
in an asylum.19
Inherited roles for women
Night and Day can be read as both a Marriage and a Suffrage novel.
In each genre, legacies and continuities across the millennial divide
are apparent, but are represented ambivalently, with unresolved
tensions. The novel is set about 1910–12, a time when Woolf
famously claimed that character changed (E3: 421), and engages
with contemporary social and political debates about the position of
women. However, as Jane de Gay argues, her pre-war setting and use
of the ‘outmoded literary style of the courtship narrative’ simultaneously results in ‘a way of immersing herself in, and examining in
writing, the social order into which she had been born’ (2007: 45).
Woolf’s concern about inherited roles for women is signalled by the
opening tableau of the tea-table (N&D: 1–6), reminiscent of Julia
Stephen’s Sunday At Homes.
As I argue in the relevant chapters, Cameron, Ritchie, and to some
extent Stephen, offered Woolf the legacy of a model of a professional,
independent woman who successfully combined her work with her
role as wife and mother. However, in Night and Day Woolf rejects
30
Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
this powerful paradigm, thus obscuring the achievements of her
forebears. Instead she offers a number of alternative and competing
role models for women’s lives; but the lack of narrative omniscience,
judgemental tone, or resolved ending, means that ultimately no
single model is privileged. It is unclear if marriage is portrayed as
happy ending, as escape or as freedom; nor if the novel is advocating
the primacy of work or of wedlock. Katharine resists a sentimental,
romanticised view of marriage but, as Garnett argues, her ‘sometimes bitter revolt against an ineffectual and paralytic attitude is a
silent one’ (N&D: xx–xxi). Her unease is registered through her need
for self-expression yet she also resists the role of New Woman, as
I discuss below.
Woolf also explores women’s life choices through equally ambivalent representations of the mother–daughter relationship. Katharine
is one of a ‘very great profession’ (N&D: 36), who excels at living at
home, being groomed for a role as angel-wife and mother, or as selfeffacing angel-daughter. Mrs Hilbery is figured as an impediment to
Katharine’s sense of selfhood. As Ellen Rosenman argues, ‘Katharine’s
competence chains her to her mother as tightly as incompetence
would have bound her to a more masterful parent’ (1986: 32). Woolf
initially constructs Katharine as almost diametrically opposed to her
mother in character, but, as Holton notes, Katharine’s increasing daydreaming and absent-mindedness, beneath ‘her practical veneer’,
means that ‘a realisation of the actual if partial similarity between
Mrs Hilbery and Katharine, Victorian and modern, seems to invade
the text’ (2008: 46). Their relationship becomes increasingly complex and ambivalent as characteristics of the one are mapped upon
the other. It is a symbiotic association; one of mutual dependence
through their work on the biography, which itself constructs them
both as subservient to the perceived needs of the great man for
memorialisation. Moreover Mrs Hilbery, though matriarchal, is not
an Angel in the House, but, like Ritchie, is a writer. Katharine shows
both affiliation and disquiet at her inheritance, but not outright
rejection. Mrs Hilbery, overtly representative of the older generation,
is actually more open to change than her daughter. While first suggesting the acceptable William Rodney as Katharine’s suitor, so that
they could live nearby and carry on with the Life (N&D: 133), she
later urges her to marry for love. She acts as deus ex machina, rushing
home from Shakespeare’s grave to engineer the marriage to Ralph;
Heredity, Legacy and Transition in Night and Day
31
and is rewarded by the arrival of a substitute daughter, Cassandra
(477–8).
Woolf and Ritchie both make an exploration of women’s roles
and choices integral to their novels, but as E.M. Forster argues in
‘Pessimism in Literature’ (1906), changes in attitudes to marriage
posed different problems for the twentieth-century novelists, not
only ideological but also formal ones. The Victorian woman was
passed like a commodity from her father to her husband so that,
‘Marriage was the final event for her: beyond it, she was expected to
find no new development, no new emotion,’ but for a contemporary
couple, ‘their courtship was but a prelude: their wedding is but the
raising of the curtain for the play. The drama of their problems, their
developments, their mutual interaction, is all to come. And how can
a novelist of today, knowing this, end his novel with a marriage?’
(Quoted in Miller 1994: 39). In Night and Day Woolf resists the traditional, resolved, happy marriage ending; but is not yet ready to
explore the drama of what might come after. This is more nuanced
than her solution in The Voyage Out, where Rachel Vinrace must die
to avoid the dilemma. Marriage choices, for both men and women,
and in some cases what comes after, are still subjects for Woolf’s
exploration in The Years.
The Marriage Question, prevalent at the fin de siècle and into the
twentieth century, was concurrent with the Suffrage movement,
about which Woolf was equally conflicted.20 While writing Night and
Day she was President of the radical Women’s Guild, but responds
satirically to major political liberations for women. The Suffrage
Bill in January 1918, which gave her the vote, did not make her
feel more important, ‘Its [sic] like a knighthood; might be useful to
impress people one despises’ (D1: 104). Mary Datchet’s ineffective
office (N&D: 70–1) is modelled on that where Woolf did voluntary
work (L1: 422), and Datchet herself on her activist friends Margaret
Llewelyn Davies and Janet Case, who were offended by Woolf’s
portrayal of the movement (Briggs 2005: 53, 89–92). Mary Datchet
offers another model for women’s lives, but Woolf again blurs the
boundaries. Seemingly an independent New Woman with a flat of
her own, Mary is actually only an ‘amateur worker’ (N&D: 68), an
unpaid activist for women’s suffrage, reliant on an income from her
father and her sister’s self-sacrifice as angel at home. Moreover she
would quickly settle for marriage should Ralph propose. Excluded
32
Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
from the marriage plot at the end of the novel, Mary becomes for
Ralph and Katharine, Marcus argues, ‘an image of a bettered future’
(2000: 216). However, although a symbolic beacon light shines
from her window (N&D: 487), Ralph and Katharine resist its appeal.
The New Woman role temporarily tempts Katharine, but she has
little inclination to abandon her comfortable lifestyle or gain any
necessary skills. Ralph challenges her explanation that she only
assists her mother by asking if she does anything herself (11). At the
end she is unchanged in this respect, still immersed in her inner life.
Joan Denham must of necessity be self-supporting, but Woolf does
not represent her as an aspirational model. Cassandra Otway, with
her flute and silkworms, represents almost the opposite. As Sonya
Rudikoff argues, she is ‘the type of intensely absorbed, talented,
but essentially ineffectual young woman whose activities not only
did not challenge the ideology of separate spheres but in fact reinforced it’ (1987: 2). Katharine questions her mother’s and aunts’
responses to sexual indiscretions, such as those of her grandfather
or of Cyril Alardyce (N&D: 92–3, 95–6), but although she would like
to discuss them more frankly she is still shocked by news of Cyril’s
illegitimate child. Woolf does not represent any woman espousing
sexual freedoms, as in, for instance, Grant Allen’s The Woman Who
Did (1895) and H.G. Wells’ Anne Veronica (1909). None of Woolf’s
female characters aspire to transgress the boundaries of conventional
middle-class morality; though she condoned such behaviour in her
sister and other Bloomsberries.
Woolf’s conflicted response to her past is also revealed by the
locations her characters inhabit, and in particular the interplay
between urban and rural, public and private, inside and outside space,
and different social and economic areas of London. Anna Snaith
and Michael Whitworth explore Katharine’s ambivalence through a
recovering of knowledge about one of the new streets down which
she walks after leaving Denham’s office (N&D: 422–3). Kingsway
becomes, they argue, ‘a space in which traces of the past were confronted by the rationalizing forces of modernity, an encounter which
is paradigmatic for modernism’ (Snaith and Whitworth 2007: 15). It
is a location freighted with multiple meanings and subtexts, including references to World War I, Katharine’s marriage choices and Mrs
Hilbery’s art of biography as a political discourse (15–16). In addition, Kingsway contextualises Mary Datchet, themes of suffrage and
Heredity, Legacy and Transition in Night and Day
33
events in Woolf’s own life. Kingsway Hall was the location of a highly
charged meeting of the NUWSS (National Union of Women’s Suffrage
Societies) on 4 September 1914 when pacifists such as Janet Case and
Margaret Llewelyn Davies were outvoted by those who agreed to
suspend their action and join the national war effort; an argument
which reverberates through Three Guineas. The Woolfs attended the
rally there in March 1918 (D1: 124–5) to celebrate women gaining
the vote. It is a space which, as the obverse of Chelsea, both threatens
and excites Katharine, representing various options available to her.
Marcus identifies layers of ambiguity and complexity in Woolf’s figuring of the difference between Katharine and Mary Datchet through
the contrast between home and street: ‘Fascinated by the creation
of private dreams in public places, Woolf explores the relationship
between the “inner” realms of daydream and reverie (which are
often, and paradoxically, enabled by the life of the city streets) and
the outer-directed but limited world of feminist and social activism’
(2000: 215). But Woolf offers no resolution.21
Life-writing
Ritchie’s prime importance to Woolf in her writing of Night and
Day is as a medium for her debate on memorialisation, by ‘recalling the voices of the dead’ (N&D: 31–8, 102–7).22 Woolf explores
legacies, and the weight of the past on future generations, through
Mrs Hilbery’s writing of the monumental work on Richard Alardyce,
assisted by her daughter Katharine. Throughout her apprenticeship and early writing career, Woolf had watched Ritchie, assisted
by her daughter Hester, working on the 13-volume Biographical
Edition of Thackeray’s work (1898–99) and the 26-volume Centenary
Biographical Edition (1910–11).23 Similarly Woolf had assisted her
cousin by marriage, Frederic Maitland, in the memorialisation of
Leslie Stephen (L1: 155; PA: 219, 224–9), still a formidable presence
in any debate about biography. As Aplin identifies, what Woolf got
‘uncannily right, with an insight which crosses generations’ in her
portrayal of Ritchie/Mrs Hilbery ‘was this sense of a life in thrall to
memory, of the inhibiting power of duty’ (2011: xii).
In her life-writing Woolf is both building upon, but moving on
from, the work of her precursors, and engaging with that of her contemporaries. Night and Day reveals the same subversion of Victorian
34
Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
hagiography as another of its intertexts, Lytton Strachey’s Eminent
Victorians (1918). Woolf composes Katharine, for instance, in an
ironic set piece of jingoistic Englishness and imperialism, portrayed
surrounded by the full panoply of her genetic, cultural and military
heritage; figured in patriotic colours, and gilded (N&D: 11). Ralph,
who is ‘merely middle class’ and without family traditions (10), is
an iconoclast who hates ‘great men’ and thinks that the nineteenthcentury ‘worship of greatness’ explains ‘the worthlessness of that
generation’ (12). Contradictorily, he is simultaneously attracted to
heritage and an authoritative medievalist (445).
Woolf’s ambivalence to her past is revealed in differences between
the methodologies of Night and Day and Eminent Victorians. Woolf’s
novel is not homage, but, as Ellis has argued, ‘a riposte’ (2007: 15)
to Lytton Strachey’s biographies. Woolf’s subversions are more
nuanced than Strachey’s, reflecting her purpose to create indeterminacy and liminality, and Strachey’s less conflicted antagonism to
the Victorians. Strachey’s modernist project is to ‘shoot a sudden,
revealing searchlight into obscure recesses’ and lower ‘a little bucket,
which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen’
(1986: 9). Conversely, Woolf like Katharine looks into a deep pool
to be ‘bathed in the light of sixty years ago’ (N&D: 103); an activity
which Ellis suggests ‘allows full scope to a creative imagination that
plays among the shadows rather than seeks to put them to flight’
(2007: 30). This methodology is influenced by Ritchie, whom Woolf
praises for a temperament through which ‘the gloom of that famous
age dissolves in an iridescent mist’ (E3: 399–400).
Ritchie is also, as Joanne Zuckerman has identified, ‘an important
predecessor, confronting the same problem of reconciling the recording of experience, as it actually passes through the mind, with the
demands of the conventionally structured novel’ (1973: 38). Woolf
explores the impossibility of ever achieving a single representation of
any life, through the abortive attempts of Mrs Hilbery and Katharine
to compose the letters, diaries and photograph albums into any
coherent whole. Identity as ontologically uncertain is part of her
modernist aesthetic. In ‘Street Haunting’, still employing the trope
of the door, she articulates this ambivalence: when the door shuts
the ‘shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves’ is broken, and she wonders is ‘the true self neither this nor
that, neither here nor there’ (E4: 481, 486).
Heredity, Legacy and Transition in Night and Day
35
Just as there are endless Richard Alardyces, and, as Woolf argued,
endless Leslie Stephens (Sketch: 115–16; E5: 589–91 n. 1), so there
are endless potential Katharines. She is morphic, simultaneously
absent, yet present; fictional yet autobiographical. Woolf identified both polarities, and fusion, in her representation of Vanessa as
Katharine. What enthrals her is the combination: ‘to crack through
the paving stone and be enveloped in the mist’ (L2: 232). This image
combines what Woolf would later debate in ‘The New Biography’
as elements of ‘granite-like solidity’ and ‘rainbow-like intangibility’
(E4: 473); and which, as I argue in Chapter 3, can also be closely linked
to techniques in Ritchie’s own work. William Rothenstein noted
how Vanessa Bell harmoniously integrated Victorian and modernist
qualities. Pre-Raphaelitism was past, but Bell impressed him ‘when
I met her in houses where the older ideas still lingered, with the
quiet courage of her opinions. She looked as though she might have
walked among the fair women of Burne-Jones’ Golden Stairs; but
she spoke with the voice of Gauguin’ (1932: 53). Woolf resists such a
confident, focused, depiction of Katharine.
A large connection
Woolf tried, disingenuously, to obscure her use of Ritchie as intertext,
admitting that there were touches of her but that as she wrote ‘Mrs
Hilbery became to me quite different from any one in the flesh’ (L2:
406). However, she wrote gleefully telling Vanessa that the Ritchies
were furious about her character Mrs Hilbery (L2: 474). It is unclear
if Ritchie knew of Woolf’s readily recognisable portrait. In 1961
biographer Elizabeth Boyd discussed this with Leonard Woolf, who
said that he believed that Lady Ritchie did not think that a portrait
of her existed in Night and Day. The Woolfs had seen her not long
before she died and she did not seem perturbed about anything.24
However, unless Woolf told her, or showed her drafts, which is
unlikely, Ritchie could not have known of it since she died before
the novel’s publication.
Ritchie, however, could not be obscured from her integral part in
Woolf’s large connection. Leonard Woolf, like Ralph Denham acutely
aware of his outsider status, recognised that the ‘Stephens and the
Stracheys, the Ritchies, Thackerays, and Duckworths had an intricate
tangle of ancient roots and tendrils stretching far and wide through
36
Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
the upper middle classes, the county families, and the aristocracy’
(1964: 74–5). Woolf’s employment in Night and Day of her legacies
from this ‘intricate tangle of ancient roots’, reveals, I have argued,
her conflicted relationship with her past; both seeking to escape yet
drawn back to it. Her ambivalence is figured by Katharine’s moment
poised on the threshold (N&D: 489), and articulated again in ‘Street
Haunting’ where though she relishes the pleasure of escaping from
the house into the streets yet, on returning, finds it ‘comforting to
feel the old possessions, the old prejudices, fold us round, and shelter
and enclose the self’ (E4: 491).
Ambivalence, liminality and Woolf’s ‘third space’
In Woolf’s lexicon, liminality, ambivalence and indeterminacy are
positive qualities, allowing endless creative possibilities. She can contemplate existing simultaneously in antithetical states: ‘Now is life
very solid, or very shifting? I am haunted by the two contradictions’
(D3: 218). Night and Day exemplifies this fluidity and dissolution of
boundaries. As Ellis argues, it ‘tends not towards finding some halfway
house between opposites but prioritises the claims of the imaginative
or “figurative” engagement with the world’ (2007: 24). It integrates
realist, modernist and what we would now term postmodernist techniques; fact, fiction and the visionary. It links Woolf with her forebears, especially Ritchie, and with her Victorian past. Katharine’s sense
of kinship with her grandfather figures the generational slip which
Woolf later debates in terms of literary descent from the Victorians,
where the Georgians turn to their grandparents’ generation for guidance (E3: 336). Jean Mills explores the influence on Woolf of Jane
Harrison’s studies in mythography. Night and Day, she argues, ‘takes on
new meaning and stylistic, structural, and thematic dimension when
it is read through a Harrisonian lens’. It creates ‘out of the public and
private spheres yet a third intellectual and ideological space’ (2006: 6).
Woolf’s habitation of this third space is apparent in Katharine’s sudden awareness of a mutually empathetic ‘mysterious kinship of blood’
(N&D: 306) with her Victorian grandfather. Katharine realises that she
is the same age as Richard Alardyce in his portrait as a young man, and
invests him with mythic qualities (306). The diction reprises her sense
of transcendence in the garden at Stogdon House, where she imaginatively experiences riding with the ‘magnanimous hero’ (184–5).
Heredity, Legacy and Transition in Night and Day
37
Woolf’s dissolution of boundaries, and imaginative engagement
with her past, is clear too in her similar figuring of Ralph as mythic,
‘a fire burning through its smoke, a source of life’ (N&D: 485); and
through her prioritising of the abstract and the figurative particularly at the end of the novel. Her potent trope of the lighthouse, a
founding and recurrent symbol in her life and work, here represents
the visionary and the numinous. In Ralph’s epiphany, he imagines
birds blown by the gale and knocked senseless against the glass. He
is simultaneously and ambivalently ‘both lighthouse and bird’; both
‘steadfast’ and ‘whirled’ (378). The trope similarly melds Woolf’s
past and present, fact and fiction, by imaginatively recreating her
memory of sailing to the Godrevy Lighthouse, aged ten: ‘On arriving
at the light-house Miss Virginia Stephen saw a small and dilapidated
bird standing on one leg on the light-house [...] it had been blown
there and they then saw that it’s [sic] eyes had been picked out’
(HPGN: 109). As Ralph walks towards Katharine’s house, the image
of the lighthouse and the birds persist. From outside, the illuminated drawing-room becomes a visionary space, ‘the centre of the
dark, flying wilderness of the world’, its lighthouse-like beams ‘with
searching composure over the trackless waste’ (N&D: 379). In his
vision Katharine becomes diaphanous, amorphous, ‘a shape of light,
the light itself’, while he was like a bird fascinated by the lighthouse
and ‘held to the glass by the splendour of the blaze’ (380).
Woolf’s ‘third space’, I suggest, is the liminal. It is ambivalently
on the cusp of past and present, present and future; fact, fiction and
vision. Like Woolf’s ‘true self’ it is ‘neither this nor that, neither here
nor there’ (E4: 486). With Ralph and Katharine, Woolf is in ‘this difficult region, where the unfinished, the unfulfilled, the unwritten,
the unreturned, came together in their ghostly way and wore the
semblance of the complete’ (N&D: 488). It is a space which she would
continue to inhabit and in which she would continue to engage with
Ritchie, Cameron and Stephen.
3
‘The Transparent Medium’:
Anny Thackeray Ritchie
Until her death in 1919, Ritchie functioned as an embodied link
between Woolf and her forebears. Woolf, in her obituary, claims
that Ritchie was ‘the unacknowledged source’ of information about
the Victorian age and ‘the transparent medium through which we
behold the dead’ (E3: 18). Woolf also claims that ‘Young writers
might do worse than go to Lady Ritchie’s pages for an example of the
power of an apparently simple and yet inevitably right sense of
the use of language’ (14–15). It is clear that Woolf did go to Ritchie’s
pages but Ritchie is an almost entirely ‘unacknowledged source’.
Ritchie’s obituary is one of the few exceptions when Woolf does write
openly about her (13–20), but employing the same ambivalence
which characterises Night and Day. She claims to admire her sincerely
but the validity of her tribute is undercut as she privately admits to
doubting the sincerity of her own emotions and ‘dressing it up a
trifle rosily, in the Times tomorrow’ (D1: 247–8).
Ritchie provided a role model of a professional independent
woman, whose work and working practices were a powerful legacy
for Woolf. Woolf’s construct of Ritchie as Mrs Hilbery is ambivalent,
misrepresenting her as amateurish and inept; but also acknowledging
that ‘it was not possible to write Mrs. Hilbery off among the
dunces’ (N&D: 36). Ritchie’s writing career shows professionalism
and determination; it brought her success and renown. Her work
exhibits many of the literary qualities and the concerns, for instance
for the transmission of a female literary tradition, for which Woolf
has become most critically acclaimed. As I explore, Woolf privately
feels able to draw upon Ritchie’s work in ways which reveal a close
38
Anny Thackeray Ritchie 39
knowledge, and admiration, of its characteristics; while publicly
devaluing it, or simply writing it out. It seems clear that Woolf’s
agenda was something other than portraying Ritchie accurately but
that, as Holton argues, she employed her ‘as a means to help define
herself and her literary aims’ (2008: 44).
Daughters of educated men
Woolf and Ritchie have much in common, most obviously their
shared ‘19th Century Hyde Park Gate world’ (D1: 247) which
shaped them as professional writers. Ritchie, like Woolf, was born
into a wide circle with literary, publishing and academic influence,
including Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and the Carlyles
(E3: 470). Both were daughters of educated men, editors of the
Cornhill, and spent their lives, as Aplin shows, ‘working through
the responsibilities of inheritance and memory’ (2011: 258). Leslie
Stephen’s influence on his daughter’s literary apprenticeship was
famously in allowing her the run of his library. In retrospect Woolf
felt that he constrained rather than assisted her writing, claiming
that had he lived longer she would have been unable to write
(D3: 208). Euphemia Otway’s feeling that the ‘prime of her life was
being rapidly consumed by her father’ who is dictating ‘the memoirs
which were to avenge his memory’ (N&D: 196), echoes Woolf’s own
recollections of her father dictating the last of the Mausoleum Book.
Leonard Woolf notes that Thackeray and his daughters had an
intimacy and companionship unusual between parents and children
(E3: 470). Ritchie’s father was her mentor and first critic. She
became his scribe, proof-reader, secretary, hostess and companion;
gaining an intimate knowledge of all aspects of the publishing
and literary world and a first-hand acquaintance with many of its
most influential members. Like Woolf, she wrote copiously even as
a young child. Aged 23, her first publication was ‘Little Scholars’
in the Cornhill and from then on she was never without reputable
publishers for her prolific output. The Story of Elizabeth was serialised
beginning in September 1862, just before Thackeray’s death. Even
at this early stage of her career, Ritchie felt able to publish the first
instalments before she had completed writing the whole novel,
while staying with Julia Margaret Cameron at Freshwater, in the late
autumn of 1862. This practice was common among writers such as
40
Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
her father, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. It shows remarkable
self-confidence in a young woman publishing her first novel; and
possibly even greater confidence from her editor, George Henry
Lewes. This was not misplaced, for as Woolf recognised, ‘The Story of
Elizabeth, written in early youth, is as fluent, easy and composed in
style as the work of one who has been framing sentences and casting
scenes for a lifetime’ (E3: 14).
Ritchie’s achievements
During Woolf’s formative years, Ritchie provided her with a model
of a successful, professional woman whose writing gave her an
independent income, and a wide, admiring readership. Old Kensington
went through several reprints in its first year (Aplin 2010: 253). Her
first four novels were serialised in the Cornhill. Smith Elder republished
‘The Works of Miss Thackeray’, beginning with Old Kensington in
1873. Cameron, on her voyage to Ceylon in 1875, wrote to tell her,
‘I find your name beloved Annie like a household word in this ship
each one knowing about you and many a one carrying your book
in their hand’ (quoted in Aplin 2010: 254). Ritchie was not only a
popular writer but well regarded, acclaimed by contemporary authors
such as George Eliot and Dickens (Shankman 1994: 69–70). Jane
Harrison was impressed by her warmth, generosity and talent, and
claimed that she was one of ‘the men and women who influenced me
most’ (1925: 48). Harrison also regretted not keeping ‘a fine parody
of her novels’ (49), published by Punch, showing that Ritchie’s style
was readily recognised. In 1882, when Harpers commissioned a
memoir of Tennyson, the poet requested that Ritchie should write
it (Aplin 2006: 40). George Murray Smith wrote that she was ‘a
woman of genius – with many of the characteristics – and some of the
limitations, of a woman of genius’ (quoted in Shankman 1994: 265).
Fitzjames Stephen was her friend and thought her a ‘beautiful
mixture of genius & innocent simple goodness & kindness’ (quoted
in Aplin 2010: 239). Desmond MacCarthy who, as Ritchie’s nephew
by marriage and member of the Bloomsbury Group, knew both
women well, paid tribute to Ritchie’s writing in his Introduction
to Hester Fuller’s memoir (Fuller and Hammersley 1951: 5–15). He
noted that her ‘prose, like that of Virginia Woolf, had often a lyric
quality’ (11). He supposed that Woolf had not reread Ritchie’s novels
Anny Thackeray Ritchie 41
since her childhood but ‘of this she was certain, that as a writer Anne
Thackeray Ritchie had won a place in English Literature’ (14).
Ritchie continued writing until her death in 1919. From Friend
to Friend was published posthumously. She had Woolf in mind in
her last weeks, writing several times to her and feeling that past
and present were merging into one (Aplin 2011: 250–1). Ritchie is,
therefore, a very visible presence, and active influence, until Woolf
was 37 and about to publish her own ‘Life’ of Ritchie in her persona
of Mrs Hilbery. In 1925, in ‘The Lives of the Obscure’, Woolf still
confidently assumes her readers’ detailed knowledge of Ritchie,
describing Laetitia Pilkington as ‘a very extraordinary cross between
Moll Flanders and Lady Ritchie, between a rolling and rollicking
woman of the town and a lady of breeding and refinement’ (E4: 127).
This oblique acclaim paradoxically also reveals Woolf’s subtle suppression of Ritchie’s reputation, emphasising her social status while
ignoring her as a writer. It is a suppression which Woolf inherits
from Leslie Stephen, as in an entry under Ritchie’s husband’s name
in the DNB. The injustice done to Ritchie’s reputation is apparent
to Desmond MacCarthy who thought the DNB entry misleading.
Ritchie, MacCarthy acknowledges, was an accomplished hostess
but she ‘had been too accustomed to celebrities from her childhood
onwards to seek their company eagerly, and then she liked so many
ordinary men and women herself. “That dear fantastic lady”, as
Henry James used to call her was tolerant of bores. She was remarkable in herself’ (Fuller and Hammersley 1951: 14–15).
Woolf’s construct of Ritchie as ‘a lady of breeding and refinement’,
while in many ways accurate, also suppresses her quietly subversive,
uninhibited side. As Lillian Shankman argues, ‘The proper daughter
of a Victorian household, she nevertheless found ways to be herself –
an original [...] Being a lady bred, she was never abrasive, but softly
achieved her purpose’ (1994: 265). Ritchie’s refusal to be constrained
by family connections, or limited by social or gender expectations,
seems to fulfil her father’s prophecy that she would become ‘a man
of genius’ (265). Jane Harrison noted that Ritchie never ‘had her delicate feet quite on the ground’ (1925: 49). Woolf recognises this fey
manner in her fictionalisation: Mrs Hilbery ‘was beautifully adapted
for life in another planet’. She was ‘amazed at the ascendancy which
rules and reasons exerted over the lives of other people [... but] she
had a way of seeming the wisest person in the room’ (N&D: 36).
42
Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
Ritchie, as Woolf here obliquely acknowledges, engages in a subtle
form of rebellion, evidence of what Carol Hanbery MacKay terms
creative negativity. This is one of the subversive techniques by which
many creative Victorian women, among whom she cites Ritchie and
Cameron, constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed themselves
in order to work successfully in a patriarchal society (2001: 3–7).
Ritchie does this initially by harnessing the literary and publishing
networks bequeathed by her father to establish herself as a financially
independent writer. Then, aged 40, she surprised her family, and
scandalised society, by marrying her cousin, Richmond Ritchie, 17 years
her junior. She had two children, at a dangerously mature age,
while successfully continuing her professional career. Marriage and
motherhood gave her increased social stature and the support of an
even more extended and influential family. Her husband’s extreme
youth, and her independent income and established reputation,
tipped the usual power balance in a Victorian marriage, allowing
her to continue to exploit patriarchy to her advantage. As MacKay
argues, she, and her role model Cameron before her, used ‘their
eccentric personae as means to secure the space and time they
needed to pursue their creative undertakings’ (2001: 10). Woolf
however suppresses this model of a successful combination of wife,
mother and professional artist. She did not consider it as an option
in Night and Day and wrote it out of her discussion in A Room of
One’s Own.
Beth Daugherty argues that Ritchie taught the young Woolf ‘what
a professional writing woman acted like’ and how that woman
‘subtly critiqued her society without calling undue attention to her
rebelliousness’ (2010a: 23). Ritchie is an exemplar of shrewd working practices; her extensive output included novels, short stories,
memoirs, essays, reviews and introductions, as well as her own prolific
letters and journals. Her research was exhaustive,1 and her work sold
in Britain, Europe, America and Australia. Ritchie took a controlling
interest in all aspects of the publication of her work, including typography, bindings and illustrations. Ritchie benefitted from Thackeray’s
experience, and from witnessing Cameron’s business acumen, to
exploit the market. She negotiated her own contracts, even after her
marriage, and maximised her sales, and those of her father’s works
after his death. Her essays were recycled in different formats, which
gave her increased income and continuing visibility in different
Anny Thackeray Ritchie 43
marketplaces. Her confidence and sense of self-worth is evidenced by
her returning Harpers’ cheque for £50 for her article on Tennyson,
and successfully demanding £100 instead (Aplin 2006: 41 n. 78).
Woolf’s apprenticeship
As a passionate apprentice, Woolf benefitted from Ritchie’s example and
from the expertise and practical assistance of a supportive matriarchy
from her ‘22 Hyde Park Gate world’, especially Madge Vaughan and
Violet Dickinson, who introduced her into their literary and publishing
networks. Woolf’s recuperative holiday with the Vaughans in Yorkshire
in 1904 can be pinpointed as the start of her professional writing
career. Vaughan, an established author, and, like Ritchie, her father’s
biographer,2 was influential in nurturing and promoting Woolf’s early
publishable writing; continuing, as mother-substitute, what Julia
Stephen had done for her very first writing, as I explore in Chapter 5.
While Woolf stayed at Settle, and after she returned to London,
Vaughan read her work critically and tried to boost her confidence.
She focuses on the strength of Woolf’s literary heritage; and on the
need for her, as the younger generation, to transmit that legacy and to
move on experimentally: ‘I believe in your genius. I feel in you a rare
quality [...] Dear Virginia you have a great inheritance in your Father’s
spirit and brains. I see that nothing has been lost. Think what an
immortality that is for him, and for your mother.’3 Woolf was still very
insecure, vulnerable and dependent, constantly seeking approval. She
cast Vaughan as her literary mother, writing to her as ‘Dearest Mama
Vaughan’, ‘Dearest Foster Parent’ and figuring herself as ‘your infant’
(L1: 161, 165). The two continued to swap books and to discuss each
other’s writing for some years, until Woolf gradually distanced herself
and did not acknowledge her debt.
Woolf’s visit with the Vaughans to the Brontë parsonage (L1: 156–60)
is the genesis for ‘Haworth’, her first essay accepted for publication,
thanks to one of several productive introductions made for her by
Violet Dickinson.4 This was a model of female mentorship which
Ritchie inherited from Cameron and, as Emily Blair evidences, also
from Margaret Oliphant (2007: 117–20). Oliphant’s review of The Story
of Elizabeth virtually launched Ritchie’s professional career, and she
secured prestigious early writing projects for her (119). Ritchie continued
the tradition, keeping ‘a watchful, interested eye’ (Aplin 2011: xii)
44
Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
on Woolf’s progress. Ritchie was enthusiastic about the Stephen
siblings’ move to Gordon Square (PA: 228), helping them with
domestic arrangements, and read Woolf’s published work (Aplin 2011:
190, 233). They shared a taste for the absurd, which Ritchie fostered –
sending Woolf copies of two bizarre epitaphs she had discovered
which she knew would amuse her (Aplin 2011: 140). When Woolf was
agonising over her first novel Ritchie wrote to Leonard Woolf, signing
herself ‘Yours auntfully’, asking about her progress and offering The
Porch as a writer’s retreat (Shankman 1994: 276–7).
Lines of influence from Ritchie’s essays
Ritchie’s legacy extends far beyond providing a role model and
practical support. She bequeaths a body of work of which Woolf would
make significant use. Ritchie published her last novel, Mrs Dymond,
in 1885 and then concentrated on other genres. So, as Daugherty
notes, Woolf first experienced Ritchie as ‘a writer of introductions,
memoirs, essays and biographical sketches’ (2010a: 23). The mode of
production of ‘Toilers and Spinsters’ is typical: first published in the
Cornhill in March 1861, then given new valence by its inclusion in
Toilers and Spinsters and Other Essays (1874) and in Volume VII of The
Works of Miss Thackeray (1890). Woolf’s inheritance of this financially
advantageous, regenerative, model is readily seen in publishing
histories of her own essays, diaries and short stories. ‘Geraldine and
Jane’, for instance, which revisits events in Victorian Cheyne Row,
began as a review of Geraldine Jewsbury’s work, published in the
Times Literary Supplement in 1929, reprinted with additional material
in The Bookman, New York, then revised for The Common Reader
published by the Hogarth Press in 1932, and in Collected Essays 2009
(E5: 10–28, 505–19).
‘Toilers and Spinsters’ is a meticulously researched, first-hand
account, written in a colloquial, anecdotal, conversational tone.
Woolf’s debt is evident in ‘Haworth’ in which she employs precisely
this style. More significantly the argument of Ritchie’s essay, about
conditions for women and particularly the need for an independent
income and a room of their own, anticipates concerns which Woolf
would make her own. At the time of writing, Ritchie was herself a
‘toiler and spinster’, making an independent living from her work,
and directly responding to the sort of derisive comments which Leslie
Anny Thackeray Ritchie 45
Stephen later published in ‘The Redundancy of Women’: ‘What are
we to do with this army of spinsters whose enforced celibacy is an
evil to themselves and to society?’5
Ritchie’s riposte is witty and ludic, evidence of the creative
negativity which MacKay proposes, and of espièglerie, the particular
aspect of it which she assigns specifically to Ritchie, and defines as a
method of striking a deceptively non-threatening pose, for instance
by writing superficially slight works on minor subjects (2001: 14).
Ritchie’s arguments are forceful but there is no anger or sarcasm. Her
typical first person narrator pursues topics in an anecdotal, rambling,
tangential way, adding asides, fragments of personal recollection, or
snippets of conversation. She begins by humorously parodying the
common stereotype of spinsters, who can only see ‘a tombstone at
the end of my path, and willows and cypresses on either side’. They
are encouraged by ‘Sunsets of spinster life, Moans of old maids,
Words to the wasted, Lives for the lonely, without number, all
sympathising with these griefs’. Then Ritchie firmly demolishes this
stereotype, demanding to know who has forced these spinsters to
live this way: ‘Are unmarried people shut out from all the theatres,
concerts, picture-galleries, parks and gardens? May not they walk on
any day of the week? Are they locked up all summer time, and only
let out when an east wind is blowing?’ (T&S: 2–4).
This interrogative style, repetition of questions and assertions, and
tone of mild sarcasm in connection with women’s lives, can clearly
be heard again in Woolf’s voice in A Room of One’s Own, accusing
her audience of young women: ‘You have never shaken an empire or
led an army into battle. The plays of Shakespeare are not by you [...]
What is your excuse?’ (Room: 146). Both Ritchie’s and Woolf’s essays
continue with long lists of what women have actually achieved.
‘Toilers and Spinsters’ makes full use of anecdote, humour, hyperbole, verbal patternings and irony – precisely the playful, digressive,
narrative voice which Woolf employs.
In ‘Toilers and Spinsters’, Ritchie is ahead of her time. She allows
her Victorian woman to live happily and independently as a spinster,
an option not offered by Woolf in Night and Day. Her essay anticipates
many of the arguments which were to become much more stridently
articulated in the New Woman debates in the 1890s; and her
subversive attack, expressed in language which punctures patriarchal
institutions, resonates throughout Woolf’s work. It prefigures
46
Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
the polemical issues Woolf addresses especially in A Room of One’s
Own, ‘Professions for Women’ and Three Guineas. The real problem
Ritchie identifies for spinsters, and some married women, is ‘want of
adequate means’ to live their lives fully; to be able to afford travel,
books, ‘the pleasure of giving’ and ‘that social equality which is
almost impossible without a certain amount of money’ (T&S: 5–6).
These were her own reasons for wanting an additional income.
‘Husbands, the statistics tell us, it is impossible to provide; money,
however, is more easily obtained’ (6).
Ritchie is more practical, inclusive and democratic than Woolf.
The desirable room of one’s own she identifies in ‘Toilers and
Spinsters’ is communal, and accessible to women of all classes;
very different from the solitary, exclusive one of Woolf’s imagining.
‘Governesses and hard-working ladies’ need a place where they can
afford a modest meal, find intellectual conversation, and space for
reading and writing. She locates the Ladies’ Club in Berners Street,
not as luxurious as those male clubs in Pall Mall but with the Office
for the Franchise for Women on the ground floor of the Club. She
bemoans the fact that too many women are apathetic and ignorant
about suffrage issues. Using cutting irony, she hopes that if women
prove themselves capable of running their homes and families
effectively they ‘may perhaps be trusted in time with the very
doubtful privilege of a 5,000th voice in the election of a member of
the borough’ (T&S: 11 n. 12). She extols education for women, revealing her wide research by advocating not only a privileged university
education, which attracted Woolf, but vocational training as well so
that women could be apprenticed in increasingly well-paid jobs as
hairdressers, printers, law-copiers, dial painters or sunglass engravers.
Ritchie’s attitude is that no honest work is degrading and is better
than sinking into poverty.6 She details the growth of professional
conditions for women working in education: the London Association
of Schoolmistresses, the Cambridge scheme for local examinations
and the availability of education by correspondence. Ritchie ends by
describing how spinsters can therefore find work and income, have
friendships, and even become surrogate mothers to the many motherless children, as she had done with Amy Thackeray’s daughters,
Margie and Anny (Garnett 2004: 68; Gérin 1981: 157).
Woolf had direct access to Ritchie’s work. As a child she read
Ritchie’s articles, for instance in Atalanta, one of the increasing
Anny Thackeray Ritchie 47
number of magazines to which Ritchie submitted work, and which
the Stephen family took.7 It was a progressive magazine for girls and
young women which embodied attitudes to education and work
such as those advocated in ‘Toilers and Spinsters’. Atalanta urged
girls to find work, even including a Situations Vacant column, and
to be well educated. It also provided some of that education through
the ‘Atalanta Scholarship and Reading Union’. Importantly Atalanta
showed Woolf that women could publish their work. As Daugherty
points out, ‘In the home of an eminent Victorian man of letters,
a monthly column title told her that there were English men and
women of letters. And the table of contents told her women like
her Aunt Anny could, in turn, write about those women of letters’
(2010a: 33). Woolf had already ‘published’ her work in the Hyde Park
Gate News, encouraged by her mother. Its format and list of contents
almost certainly owe much to Atalanta. Daugherty further suggests
that ‘Its conversational style and democratic inclusion of readers’
responses through its discussion-orientated approach would also
have provided Virginia Woolf with an early dialogic model for her
reviews and essays’ (33). Ritchie’s work thus showed Woolf that she
could become financially independent through her journalism, as
she later advocates (E5: 637–8).
Woolf not only read Ritchie’s work but read it critically. She
engaged with it directly when she was herself an apprentice. One
of her earliest published reviews, in 1908 in the Times Literary
Supplement, was of Ritchie’s collection of essays, Blackstick Papers
(E1: 228–9). It reveals a conflicted response to Ritchie’s work, on
the one hand praising it, but on the other allegedly finding it
‘impossible to define the charm, or refer it, as the critic should, to
some recognised source’. It is easier ‘to ascribe it to magic’ (E1: 228).
Lady Ritchie, she suggests, does not treat her themes in a prosaic,
learned or sentimental way, rather she seeks inspiration from
looking out of the window, glancing at her book or remembering
episodes 40 years ago. She creates an essay with ‘the buoyancy and
shifting colours of a bubble in the sun’ (E1: 228). As Leila Brosnan
notes, ‘the praise Woolf allows to Ritchie, though unadulterated, is
couched in such terms that its implications are troubling as well as
refreshing’ (1999: 105). Woolf seems to approve of Ritchie’s essay,
but her assumed inability to analyse the writing critically, and her
discourse of magic and whimsy, belittles the professionalism of
48
Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
the writer. Ritchie, as represented here, is an embryo Mrs Hilbery,
whose writing is the result not of any academic effort but of ‘spells
of inspiration’ which ‘flickered over the gigantic mass of the subject
as capriciously as a will-o’-the-wisp, lighting now on this point, now
on that’ (N&D: 32). Neither Ritchie nor Mrs Hilbery has a problem
producing pages of writing each morning ‘as instinctively as a
thrush sings’ (32).
In Night and Day Woolf mocks the qualities she seems to be
praising in her 1908 review. However, typically ambivalent, in ‘The
Modern Essay’ (1922) she uses the same discourse of magic and
facility as a recommendation. An essay should give pleasure and ‘lay
us under a spell with its first word’ (E4: 216). She switches her
position yet again in ‘Women and Fiction’, deriding the qualities she
mocks in Mrs Hilbery/Ritchie: ‘In the past, the virtue of women’s
writing often lay in its divine spontaneity, like that of the blackbird’s
song or the thrush’s. It was untaught; it was from the heart. But it
was also, and much more often, chattering and garrulous – mere
talk spilt over paper and left to dry in pools and blots’ (E5: 34). Ann
Martin argues perceptively that, ‘by the late twenties, the cluster of
images that connect Ritchie, women’s writing, and birds has come
to signify the limitations of the Victorian precursor’ (2005: 38),
yet Woolf continues to use her lines of inheritance from Ritchie.
Woolf, as Hermione Lee asserts, ‘constructed her own kind of essay
out of the (still current) belle-lettriste tradition of essays on general
literary subjects [...] but what she did within that context was
idiosyncratic: part polemic, part criticism, part fantasy, part history,
part confession’ (1997: 403–4). This idiosyncrasy is also at the heart
of Ritchie’s work and readily accessible as a model for Woolf of a
female bellettrist tradition. Woolf’s essay on de Sévigné, for instance
(E6: 497–504), reveals disturbing layers of Woolf’s ambivalence. In
writing of de Sévigné, she suggests, ‘We are very little conscious of
a disturbing medium between us – that she is living, after all, by
means of written words’ (E6: 499). However, there is a ‘disturbing
medium’; for between Woolf and her essay is Ritchie and her essay
on Madame de Sévigné, a work which Woolf obscures. Moreover
her representations of de Sévigné’s working practices undermine her
argument that a woman writing needs a room of her own. Woolf
constructs herself as amazed at how de Sévigné achieves her brilliant
results while simultaneously pursuing her daily tasks, and apparently
Anny Thackeray Ritchie 49
without effort, revision or practice (499). Such methodology is significantly similar to how Ritchie is portrayed in ‘Blackstick Papers’
(E1: 228) and as Mrs Hilbery. Ambivalently Woolf portrays such ‘lack
of painstaking or effort’ in Ritchie as evidence of amateurism; but
de Sévigné is acclaimed as ‘a born critic’ whose ‘judgements were
inborn’ (E6: 500).
‘A very feminine kind of writing’
Ritchie’s focus on women’s lives and writing, expressed in language
which is often formally transgressive, anticipates the issues and
linguistic experiments which make Woolf celebrated as a feminist
icon. Woolf defines ‘the psychological sentence of the feminine
gender’ as ‘of a more elastic fibre than the old, capable of stretching
to the extreme, of suspending the frailest particles, of enveloping the
vaguest shapes’ (E3: 367). This sentence Woolf attributes to Dorothy
Richardson, but the accolade should rather go to Ritchie, whose use
of language precisely fits Woolf’s definition, as a sentence from her
essay ‘Jane Austen’ proves:
What a difficult thing it would be to sit down and try to
enumerate the different influences by which our lives have been
affected – influences of other lives, of art, of nature, of place and
circumstance, – of beautiful sights passing before our eyes, or
painful ones: seasons following in their course – hills rising on our
horizons – scenes of ruin and desolation – crowded thoroughfares –
sounds in our ears, jarring or harmonious – the voices of friends,
calling, warning, encouraging – of preachers preaching – of people
in the street below, complaining, and asking our pity! (ABoS: 267)
It is the very opposite of the man’s sentence as exemplified by
Johnson and Gibbon (Room: 99–100). Quentin Bell recognises it in
Ritchie’s writing, and explicitly links it to Woolf: ‘Do we not hear in
these sentences a turn of speech, a volatile kind of thought which
hardly reappears in English Literature before the publication of The
Voyage Out? It is a very feminine kind of writing’ (1990: 39).8 Bell
refers as an exemplar to one of Ritchie’s long rambling letters. It is
headed irrationally ‘Blois, Yesterday’ and describes ‘what a lovely old
place it is, sunny-streaked up and down, stones flung into now from
50
Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
St. Louis’s days, others rising into carved staircases and gabions and
gargoyles. This isn’t a description – I wish it were – it isn’t white or
crisp enough, or high enough’ (H. Ritchie 1924a: 154).
Ritchie’s voice in this letter is typical, doing all that Woolf later
advocates. She has no qualms about ignoring patriarchal rules of
syntax, nor important ‘masculine values’, but gives significance to
‘the feelings of women in a drawing-room’ (Room: 96). Her digressive,
discursive style privileges gossip and anecdote. Her publisher, George
Murray Smith, reveals how ‘“copy” for her books was a medley of
pieces of paper of all shapes and sizes, written here and there and
fastened together with a needle and thread: an expressive symbol
of her somewhat vagrant genius’ (quoted in Shankman 1994: 265).
Such piecing together of fragments, both figuratively in her writing
and literally in her working practices, would now be celebrated as
iconically feminine.9 Woolf extols Jane Austen and Emily Brontë
as the only writers who write as women write (Room: 97), but again
fails to mention Ritchie.
Ritchie’s celebration and mischievous flaunting of her stereotypically feminine qualities exemplify what MacKay terms her espièglerie
(2001: 14). It is a deliberate and purposeful ploy, enabling her
to succeed in a male-dominated profession. Woolf exaggerates and
satirises her chaotic working practice in Night and Day. However, as
Shankman points out, ‘No one who was muddleheaded could have
written twenty-one books, countless introductions, and innumerable
articles’ (1994: 265).10 Trev Lynn Broughton agrees, issuing ‘a kind
of health warning over the Anny myth’ (1999: 77). Ritchie happily
appropriates male jibes, harnessing the often pejorative terms of
‘witch’ and ‘sibyl’, and adopting a disingenuously modest tone about
the value of her own work:
As I write on, it seems to me that my memory is a sort of Witches’
Caldron [sic], from which rise one by one these figures of the
past, and they go by in turn and vanish one by one into the mist,
[...] I am suddenly conscious as I write that my experiences are
very partial; but a witch’s caldron must needs after all contain
heterogeneous scraps; and mine, alas! can be no exception to
the rest. It produces nothing more valuable than odds and ends
happily harmless enough, neither sweltered venom nor fillet of
finny snake. (CfSM: 54, 67)
Anny Thackeray Ritchie 51
While Ritchie celebrates this methodology, Woolf mocks Mrs Hilbery
for exclaiming: ‘“I really believe I’m bewitched! I only want
three sentences, you see, something quite straightforward and
commonplace, and I can’t find ’em”’ (N&D: 104). However, she
ambivalently appropriates the image of a cauldron as source of
imagination and the ‘heterogeneous scraps’ which provide a writer’s
material when Bernard describes: ‘Whatever sentence I extract whole
and entire from this cauldron is only a string of six little fish that let
themselves be caught while a million others leap and sizzle, making
the cauldron bubble like boiling silver’ (TW: 214).
Ritchie’s methodology is dynamic; she moves outwards from a
central imagined self to notice apparently disparate fragments, then
interweaves these fragments. She does this within individual essays,
stories and memoirs, but also by publishing collected editions. Such
a process of collection can be seen to elevate the work from a piece
of periodical journalism, often seen as ephemeral, popular culture,
to a book – an enduring form of Literature. She is characteristically
overtly dismissive of her work, and mindful of her father’s legacy, for
instance in her anthology Blackstick Papers:
Readers of my father’s works will be familiar with the name of
the Fairy Blackstick [...] If I have ventured to call the following
desultory papers by the Fairy Blackstick’s name, it is because
they contain certain things in which she was interested – old
books, young people, schools of practical instruction, rings, roses,
sentimental affairs, &c. &c. (BP: 1)
In this anthology, typically, she feels no compulsion to confine
herself to categories but celebrates her eclectic mix of essays on
artists, musicians and writers such as Tourguénieff (her spelling),
Bewick, Felicia Hemans and Mrs Gaskell, many of whom she
had met. She includes descriptions of places she has visited such as
Roedean School, Brighton, Nohant and Paris. Woolf’s praise of the
anthology is typically ambivalent, dismissive and patronising: ‘It is
true the string does not always unite the pearls; but the pearls are
there, in tantalising abundance’, but she does admit that Ritchie’s
descriptions, character sketches and profundity are ‘beyond the
reach of any but a few modern writers’ and well worth collecting
together (E3: 17). Epistemologically and materially, collecting such
52
Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
fragments in ‘some book of selections’ gives new resonances to the
essays and in part provides the string to unite the pearls.
Ritchie also functions as ‘transparent medium’ (E3: 18) by forging
new connections between earlier women writers by anthologising
their work and transmitting it to new readers, including the
reviewer, Woolf. Ritchie’s declared project in Blackstick Papers is
to call ‘back to existence’ books which have been ‘mysteriously
shelved – forgotten – consigned to oblivion’ (BP: 4), and with the
books their authors. When Woolf argues, in A Room of One’s Own,
for a need to retrieve women’s writing, and when she writes ‘The
Lives of the Obscure’, she writes out the fact that Ritchie was doing
both in Blackstick Papers and continued to do so, most overtly
in A Book of Sibyls (1883). Woolf’s canon of nineteenth-century
women writers prioritises Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë and
George Eliot. Ritchie avoids such selection and the stereotypically
masculine pursuit of creating hierarchies or canons. A Book of Sibyls
is dedicated to her friend and ‘Dear Sibyl’, Margaret Oliphant. The
four essays, all previously published elsewhere, are on Mrs Barbauld,
Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie and Miss Austen, and employ what
MacKay calls an ‘empathetic identification’ with her subjects ‘as a
primary artistic technique’ in her writing about women authors
(1990: 77). Ritchie is characteristically modest in her claims for ‘this
little book’ (ABoS: 8), the compiling of which had given her ‘great
pleasure and interest’ (8). Again she is both financially astute in her
recycling of already published work, and whimsical, writing to her
editor George Murray Smith:
Since I saw you, as I was crossing Lynton moor in a storm, with
the children tucked up on my knees, and the wind whirling,
I thought of Macbeth’s Three Witches, and then it suddenly
occurred to me, that my new book ought to be called
A Book of Sibyls
by
Mrs. Richmond Ritchie
and this would obviate the danger of anyone thinking they had
already read Four Old Friends, and not sending for it in consequence. It would also give a sort of point to my volume, for the
Anny Thackeray Ritchie 53
Sibyls were certainly authoresses [...] To return to my Sibylline
metaphor, I am rather in the condition of the Sibyl myself,
coming with my small shreds of literature and large demands.
(H. Ritchie 1924a: 188)
In 1913, with characteristic slipperiness and insouciance, she gives a
different account of the genesis of her title: ‘Some time ago, borrowing
a title from a well-known Elizabethan collection of histories, I wrote
a little volume called A Book of Sibyls’ (FtP: 5). She returns to her
Sibylline metaphor with her paper ‘A Discourse on Modern Sibyls’, a
meandering discussion of earlier and contemporary women writers,
which was posthumously published in From the Porch.
Writing Lives
It is in the genre of auto/biography that connections between Ritchie’s
and Woolf’s work are possibly the most productive and interesting.
Ritchie’s work again anticipates many of the approaches which Woolf
would develop. It is a genre which frequently overlaps with issues
of women’s lives, and with a female literary tradition. Ritchie’s story
‘Adventures of Three Little Sisters’, published by Leslie Stephen’s
nephew, James Kenneth Stephen, in his magazine the Reflector,11
articulates the power of writing, even unpublished writing, transmitted
from mother to daughter. It fictionalises her friends, the Bell family,
and is structured with a framing account of a family on a beach and
then the story, which one of the children reads in a notebook she
has found, written by her mother when she was young. The child
gradually realises that she is reading a fictionalised autobiography of
her mother and her two aunts, which is simultaneously a version of
events in Ritchie’s own childhood. Family histories were also passed
down through Ritchie’s 1878 Journal, addressed to her niece Laura,
about her dead mother and the Thackeray sisters’ childhood. The
narrative slips from past to a sadly impossible future, because of Laura’s
disabilities: ‘When our Papa went to America we went to live in Paris
with our Grannie, & all our life at that time was a little bit like the Story
of Elizabeth wh perhaps will amuse you to read some day’ (quoted in
Shankman 1994: 207). She has saved Minny Stephen’s letters for her
daughter to read. In the same way Woolf writes her Reminiscences of her
and her sister’s childhood for Vanessa Bell’s then unborn child.
54
Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
Both Ritchie’s Journal and Woolf’s Reminiscences are private pieces
left unpublished at their death, but like all their diaries they are
used as cauldrons full of source material for their work.12 Events
and conversations find their way into the novels of both writers,
transgressing the boundaries of biography and autobiography; of fact
and fiction; of private and public; and of past, present and future.
Both wrote writers’ diaries. Ritchie experiments with short sketches
of people and places and reflects on the writing process. Of one
sketch she comments that it is
a story in which some true things were told with others that were
not true, all blended together in that same curious way in which,
when we are asleep, we dream out allegories, and remembrances,
and indications that we scarcely recognize when we are awake.
Story-telling is, in truth, a sort of dreaming, from which the writer
only quite awakes when the last proof is corrected. (Quoted in
Shankman 1994: 195)
Woolf’s frequently used fishing metaphor for the creative process
being like catching a fish on the end of a line (Room: 6) is strikingly
similar to Ritchie’s ‘sort of dreaming’; as is her assertion that ‘it is
in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes
comes to the top’ (40). Both Ritchie and Woolf revise and recycle
their diary entries and letters into their fictional and factual auto/
biographies in what becomes a lifelong, self-generating body of
writing. Both critically reassess their own diaries. In January 1919,
Woolf notes that she has been rereading her diary entries and
is struck by the way her impulsive writing process gathers up matters
which seemed extraneous but which on reflection are ‘the diamonds
of the dustheap’ (D1: 234). Presciently she imagines her future
50-year-old self plundering these diaries as source material, as she
actually did for A Sketch of the Past and for The Years. Both Ritchie’s
Journal and Woolf’s memoir are to some extent fictional constructs:
written up many years later, highly selective, carefully edited and
self-censored. Alison Light notes that even after the publication
of A Sketch of the Past, Trekkie Ritchie’s retrieval, in 1980, of more
unpublished manuscripts reveals just how ‘coolly Virginia revised
her own version of her past and her self, and would have gone on
revising, if she had lived’ (2008: 308). Woolf seeks to differentiate
Anny Thackeray Ritchie 55
between ‘I now’ and ‘I then’ (Sketch: 75). Similarly Ritchie’s Journal
is, as Aplin identifies, ‘an amalgamation of materials which represent
her old and young selves [...] it has its own story to tell, and it
chooses not to tell everything’ (2010: 142–3).
Both experiment with a wide range of narrative styles and voices.
Ritchie creates the garrulous spinster Miss Williamson as alter ego
and guide in several essays and short stories. In her letter writing too,
as MacKay suggests, Ritchie ‘rhetorically creates and destroys various
images of herself and others in a process of alternate construction
and deconstruction, enabling her to establish and explore the
multiple relationships that women especially try to foster’ (2001: 83).
Woolf writes as Sparroy, Goat and various other anthropomorphic
selves in her letters; and constructs Miss Jan, a persona and double
perspective, for her own writing self in her diary (PA: 5). Lee notes her
reluctance to be pinned down to one stable voice and her interesting
use of the ‘damned egotistical self’ (1997: 5). Woolf explores the
aesthetic of diary writing and fictionalisation in two early stories,
‘The Journal of Miss Joan Martyn’ and ‘Memoirs of a Novelist’, and
engages in this and connected forms of life-writing throughout her
writing life (Lee 1997: 3–20).
Ritchie’s and Woolf’s life-writing can be seen to be the most
experimental and formally transgressive of all their writing and it
places each at the centre of contemporary debates about the status
of biography. In the nineteenth century biography was increasingly
professionalised, as for instance in the DNB. However, as Broughton
has noted, ‘in tandem [...] there burgeoned a more or less informal
domestic industry of family memoirs, letter books, travel journals
and reminiscences’ (1999: 76), in which many of the Bloomsbury
Group’s parents, such as Lady Strachey, were involved. Ritchie’s
biographies are simultaneously autobiographical. Drawing on her
own experience, she represents characters and settings through
carefully observed, realist, material detail, geographically and
historically accurate and vivid. Her audience is drawn into a shared
interpretive community. Typically, she makes, at least ostensibly,
no great claim for this work: ‘I love my recollections, and now
I understand why everybody writes them. One begins to dance again,
and lark, and frisk, and thrill, and do all the things one can hardly
believe one ever did’ (quoted in Broughton 1999: 75). Such a ludic,
deceptively frivolous attitude again confirms MacKay’s suggestion of
56
Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
espièglerie. Ritchie is a prankster, avoiding direct confrontation but
simply refusing to accept the rules, or even to acknowledge that the
rules exist.
Long before Lytton Strachey’s iconoclastic Eminent Victorians,
Ritchie challenges masculine structures of the authorised biography.
Broughton argues perceptively that, ‘by blurring the boundaries
between memory and fiction and between the trivial and the significant
[...] Thackeray Ritchie turns the problems of biography into its poetic’
(1999: 75). Ritchie’s stimulus is frequently a seemingly random
item which is then invested with metonymic power, such as the
‘little old black fat book’ (CfSM: 43) in ‘My Professor of History’. It is
a technique Woolf adopts, for instance, with her Manx cat, the lack
of whose tail triggers her ponderings on differences in the academic
world around her (Room: 14). Ritchie uses the technique subversively
to reduce eminent men to what, from her child’s eye view, seem to
be significant items: ‘The first time I ever saw Mr Gladstone I only
saw the soles of his boots’ (CfSM: 67); ‘The sun is shining, and an
odd sort of brass buckle which fastens an old-fashioned stock, flashes
like a star. “[...] that is the Duke of Wellington,” said my father’ (68).
She sees ‘the back of one great man’s head, the hat and umbrella
of another’ (67). Woolf recognised the power of Ritchie’s oblique
description of the great man: ‘there was an ink-pot, perhaps a chair,
he stood in this way, he held his hat just so, and, miraculously
and indubitably there he is before our eyes’ (E3: 18). She would
develop such impressionist, and subversive, techniques herself, with
painstaking crafting and rewriting; in Ritchie she again represents
the effect as happenstance and effortless.
The avowed impetus for Ritchie’s early memoirs is to celebrate
her father’s role in shaping her life, especially her creative life, by
introducing her to eminent friends. However, as MacKay identifies,
the ‘illustrious figures who people Ritchie’s pages soon begin to
take a back seat to the voice that memorializes them’ (1990: 68),
as is evident in her anthology Chapters from Some Memoirs (1894).
She develops an associative style and a double perspective, that of
the child remembering her first meeting with these people, and
of the adult crafting that memory. She employs a first person,
digressive narrative voice; often interrogative and directly addressed
conversationally to the reader. She is idiosyncratic and self-avowedly
subjective; chapters are entitled ‘My Poet’, ‘My Musician’, ‘My
Anny Thackeray Ritchie 57
Professor of History’ and ‘My Triumphal Arch’. She combines
autobiography with biography, not only of the overt subjects, but
also of her father who is almost always inserted anecdotally. Time
is slippery; often conflated and with huge analeptic and proleptic
shifts. She blurs epistemological and ontological boundaries, content
to remain in states of uncertainty; all techniques which Woolf would
later explore for instance in Night and Day. Ritchie’s title even morphs
into the enigmatic Chapters from Some Unwritten Memoirs when the
collection is published the following year in America.
The auto/biographical work of both Ritchie and Woolf is
problematised by its relationships with that of their fathers.13 Both
were, in many ways, lifelong guardians of their fathers’ posthumous
literary reputations; yet both rebel against their patriarchal masculine
biographical styles. However, it is Ritchie, rather than Woolf, who
poses the greater challenge to Leslie Stephen’s sense of what constitutes
a biography and a biographer. She is a disturbing and disruptive
influence in his personal and professional life, conflicting with
his own formal, ordered, organised and painstakingly detailed
methodology. He is ‘constantly framing theories to account for her’
(MB: 15). Ritchie refuses to play the role of Angel in the House, leaving
that to her sister; but also refuses, at least overtly, the masculine role of
serious professional author. Exhibiting her espièglerie, she again playfully represents her writing as resulting from chance and inspiration,
rather than hard work: ‘Another miscellaneous apparition out of my
caldron rises before me as I write’ (CfSM: 69). Ritchie’s acceptance of
the apparent slightness of her work, and unembarrassed espousal of
her idiosyncratic methods, pulls the carpet from under her critics,
especially Stephen.
Her challenge is that she is successful. She is able, as Broughton
argues, ‘to flout literary convention, to make work look like leisure
[...] If Thackeray Ritchie can work round to sound conclusions by
such haphazard means without sacrificing her impact, or income,
as a writer, then the vocation of letters is effectively deskilled and
devalued’ (1999: 73). Throughout her life much of Woolf’s material
and attitudes about Ritchie are inherited from Leslie Stephen.14
However, as Broughton argues, ‘Stephen’s Anecdotes are invariably
designed to cut her [...] down to size’ (1999: 77–8). In the Hyde
Park Gate News Woolf, clearly ventriloquising an adult viewpoint,
represents Ritchie as acting in ‘a childish manner’ (HPGN: 144).
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Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
Her assessments thus need to be treated with care; it is naïve, as Holton
warns, ‘to take what Woolf says about Ritchie and her Victorianism as
gospel instead of recognising that her assertions are coloured by her
very distinct personal agenda’ (2008: 51), and, I would add, initially
by her father’s personal agenda. In the Mausoleum Book, written
the year after Ritchie’s Chapters from Some Memoirs, Leslie Stephen
mocks Ritchie’s unprofessional working practices, instancing her
novel published with chapters in the wrong order in Australia
(MB: 14). Like her father, Woolf too misrepresents and mocks these
practices (N&D: 34–5), and recycles the Australia story in her review
of Ritchie’s letters, ‘The Enchanted Organ’ (1924). She mistitles the
novel Angelica, instead of Miss Angel, and fails to note that it was
Leslie Stephen and staff at the Cornhill who sent ‘the proofs all
wrong and the end first!!!’ (E3: 400) to Australia, while Ritchie was
in Europe. With a shared sense of prankishness, Minny Stephen
writes to tell her sister of it, ‘I cant [sic] help laughing when I think
of Leslie & Mr Payn sitting in the office & spelling out the sentiment &
and not knowing which was meant for sense’ (quoted in Aplin
2010: 265). Leonard Woolf perpetuates the story in his obituary
as an example of Ritchie’s ‘limitations’ (E3: 471). He exaggerates it
even more in his autobiography: Ritchie’s erratic streak, he claims,
resulted in her getting ‘the chapters of most of her novels so muddled
that the last chapter was printed as the first (and nobody noticed it)’
(1964: 71). Leslie Stephen castigates Ritchie for inaccuracies in
her facts and figures (MB: 14), while seemingly unaware that her
hyperbole was often deliberately and playfully provocative. Woolf
recognises this prankishness in Ritchie, ‘“There are 40,000,000
unmarried women in London alone!” Lady Ritchie once informed
him. “Oh, Annie, Annie!” my father exclaimed in tones of horrified
but affectionate rebuke. But Lady Ritchie, as if she enjoyed being
rebuked, would pile it up even higher next time she came’ (E5: 586).
Woolf does not comment on how much Leslie Stephen tried to
control Ritchie. His model for life-writing was the DNB. His entry
on Thackeray was, ‘as dry as I can make it; but intended to serve as
a kind of table of contents to [Ritchie’s] quasi-biography &, I hope,
to keep her dates & facts a bit straight. Her writing is very charming
in every other way but does want a skeleton of matter of fact
statement!’ (Bicknell 1996: 489). His pedantry is implicitly mocked
by Ritchie’s rejection, in her own work, of this academic measured
Anny Thackeray Ritchie 59
tone, objective balance and formal Latinate diction; as it was later to
be mocked also by Woolf (Room: 99). He nevertheless invited Ritchie
to write the DNB entry on Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Stephen
responds to ‘Dearest Anny’: ‘I think you have done Mrs B very well.
I have read it & put in some savage criticisms, marking, however,
what I really think should be omitted in a dictionary. Too much
sentimental reflection looks terribly out of place in our dismal work’
(Bicknell 1996: 332).
Ritchie’s methodology has, what Broughton calls, a ‘curiously
familiar, modernist air’ (1999: 75). It is ‘curiously familiar’ because
it is precisely the methodology which Woolf would later develop
as part of her contribution to twentieth-century debate on the nature
of biography. In ‘The New Biography’, Woolf lauds Harold Nicolson’s
Some People for creating a new attitude and a slimmer form. It
‘is not fiction because it has the substance, the reality of truth. It is
not biography because it has the freedom, the artistry of fiction’
(E4: 475–6). One of the advantages of this ‘new’ school of biography,
Woolf argues, is ‘the lack of pose, humbug, solemnity’ (476). Another
is the reduced bulk effected because ‘the man himself, the pith
and essence of his character, shows itself to the observant eye in
the tone of a voice, the turn of a head, some little phrase or anecdote picked up in passage’ (476). The biographer is ‘as much the
subject of his own irony and observation’ (477). Woolf supposedly
cannot name a biographer who has as yet managed this balance
successfully; ‘whose art is subtle and bold enough to present that
queer amalgamation of dream and reality’ (478). Yet again Woolf
writes out Ritchie, seemingly unaware that her biographical method
embodies precisely ‘that perpetual marriage of granite and rainbow’
(478) which Woolf is extolling. As MacKay identifies, ‘Ritchie takes
us through a dazzling series of crystals of time, or windows, through
which intuitions, details, or clues transport us to realms where
different times coexist, where dream and reality cooperate, and
where the ostensible form of the essay and individual personality
are dissolved’ (2001: 77). Ambivalently, Woolf does overtly recognise
these qualities in Ritchie’s work in her obituary, ‘To embrace oddities
and produce a charming, laughing harmony from incongruities was
her genius in life and in letters.’ Her ‘random ways were charming’,
but who ‘could be more practical or see things when she liked more
precisely as they were?’ (E3: 401, 400).
60
Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
Ritchie is a pioneer of the now popular group biography in Records
of Tennyson, Ruskin, Browning, providing another model for Woolf. It
addresses its subjects obliquely, beginning by placing Ritchie and her
father in the centre of the frame. ‘The sons and daughters of men
and women eminent in their generation are from circumstances
fortunate in their opportunities’ (RTRB: 129). She is so fortunate
in being able to meet first as family friends those she later comes
to realise are eminent, in this case the Brownings. She digresses to
a childhood memory of seeing frightening paintings. By circuitous
route she travels from paintings to the artist, Mr Browning, to his son
and daughter-in-law returning to Paris from Florence, to going with
her grandmother to look for rooms for them, to finally meeting Robert
and Elizabeth Browning, to a description of Elizabeth Browning’s
character and a history of her childhood. Ritchie is writing from
first-hand knowledge of her subjects having known them in London,
France and Italy, emphasising her cosmopolitan connections. She
disregards all the rules of formal biography, admitting, ‘When
Mrs. Orr’s authoritative history of Robert Browning appeared, the
writer felt that it was but waste of time to attempt anything like a
biographical record. Hers is but a personal record of impressions and
remembrances’ (140). What results is an idiosyncratic scrapbook.
While the central history of the Brownings is told more or less
chronologically, it is interspersed with anecdotes and asides. Ritchie
recycles her own earlier article from the DNB and quotes extensively
from Mrs Orr’s book. She includes snippets of letters from and to the
Brownings, pages of facsimile handwriting, snatches of conversation,
extracts from newspapers, magazines, and different people’s journals
and diaries. More snippets are included in the copious footnotes. She
combines discursive memoirs of the Lives with critical analysis of the
Works. Her blurring of generic and ontological boundaries results
in changing perspectives and angles of vision; techniques which
Woolf was to employ extensively and which I discuss in connection
with Cameron’s work. Ritchie ends at Robert Browning’s graveside,
reflecting on his funeral and quoting poetry.
The insertion of the self into biography is one of Ritchie’s most
significant features. It interrupts the biographical narrative and
results in a balancing act between stability and instability. Woolf
employs it in her biographical essays and in her only formal, most
factual, biography, that of Roger Fry, creating a collage of fragments
Anny Thackeray Ritchie 61
from letters, diaries and personal anecdotes. She begins with Fry’s
childhood and his relationship with his mother, quoting a long
extract from Fry’s own writing which is cut off mid-sentence,
‘There the fragment stops. But the sequel is known – he picked the
poppy and was gravely reproved by his mother for doing so. The
disillusionment was great’ (Fry: 16). The result for Fry, as imagined
by Woolf, is remarkably similar to her own moments of being at
Talland House (Sketch: 71–3). For Fry, as for her, ‘The shock of that
confused experience was still tingling fifty years later’ (Fry: 16). Woolf
then includes items from Fry’s mother’s lists of ‘Things that were not –:
Things that were: when I was a little child’, before imaginatively
filling in the gap in the author’s narrative (17). The long anecdote
follows, in a mixture of direct and reported speech. The anecdotal,
empathetic, voice; the discursive style; the bricolage of biographical
source material; and the carefully crafted use of antithesis and aural
patterns, are recognisably those pioneered by Ritchie.
Ritchie, like Woolf, reflects on her own apprenticeship as a writer,
inspired by a remark she overheard Browning make to another
young would-be authoress about the need for patience. He drew an
analogy between writing and spinning wool:
My blurred pages looked altogether different somehow. It was
spinning wool – it was not wasting one’s time, one’s temper – it
was something more than spoiling paper and pens. And this much
I may perhaps add for the comfort of the future race of authoresses
who are now twisting the cocoons from which the fluttering
butterflies and Psyches yet to be will emerge some day upon their
wings: never has anything given more trouble or seemed more
painfully hopeless than those early incoherent pages, so full of
meaning to one’s self. (RTRB: 161–2)
Ritchie’s spectacular refusal to conform to the rules of authorities such
as Leslie Stephen showed one of ‘the future race of authoresses’ the
generic flexibilities which biography could offer. It seems impossible
that Woolf’s equally idiosyncratic, though less discursive and
anecdotal, biography of Elizabeth Browning, Flush, is not influenced by
Ritchie’s. It begins in equally circuitous fashion with a detailed family
history of what we finally realise is a dog, then to Flush in particular,
to how Flush is taken to Wimpole Street, and finally to meeting with
62
Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
Miss Barrett. Woolf does not draw explicitly on Ritchie’s work in the
DNB nor in the Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, Browning. However, she
had that material available to her; and a model of a writer who felt
able to ignore the ‘perpetual admonitions of the eternal pedagogue –
write this, think that’ and to be deaf to the ‘persistent voice, now
grumbling, now patronizing, now domineering, now grieved [...]
that voice which cannot let women alone’ (Room: 97), a voice so like
that of Leslie Stephen. Ritchie’s biographical essays, memoirs and her
fictionalised biography of Angelica Kaufmann, Miss Angel, free Woolf
to follow on the same path. They pave the way for Flush and for the
ultimate espièglerie of Orlando.
Lines of descent from Ritchie’s novels
Ritchie’s novels continue her interest in the fictionalisation of
real people and locations, and the reconstructions of history. She
again functions as transparent medium for Woolf, as Old Kensington
illustrates:
A quarter of a century ago the shabby tide of progress had not
spread to the quiet old suburb where Lady Sarah Francis’s house was
standing [...] The children could listen to the cawing of the rooks,
to the echo of the hours, as they struck on from one day to another,
vibrating from the old square tower of the church. (OK: 1).
Woolf’s writing, both fiction and auto/biography, is haunted by
techniques and concerns clearly seen here in Ritchie’s work: the
emphasis on memory, and the literary crafting of memory; the poetic
vision and discourse; repeated motifs and sense impressions.
Ritchie’s evocations of childhood, the lovingly remembered house,
the detailed descriptions of the flowers and the acoustic echoes of
the ‘caw of the rooks’ are resonant of Woolf’s constructed memories
of Talland House (Sketch: 66). Both writers emphasise time passing.
Ritchie prefigures Woolf, for instance in Night and Day, in her
disruptions of the linear trajectory from one generation to another
and one year to the next, by circularity and iteration. The ‘shabby
tide of progress’ is reiterated with slight slippage to become ‘the
shabby stream of progress rises and engulfs’ (OK: 2), linking images
of time and tides, rising and falling. Time, in both their works, is
Anny Thackeray Ritchie 63
anachronic, synchronic and dramatic, so that, ‘At night the strokes
seemed to ring more slowly than in the day’ (1). Sound impressions,
‘the echo of the hours’, which resonate through Old Kensington,
resonate too through Woolf’s writing, most obviously in Mrs
Dalloway, in the ‘leaden circles’ of Big Ben’s reverberations (MD: 4),
and her working title of The Hours. Woolf is aware that ‘the strength
of these pictures [...] can still be more real than the present moment’
(Sketch: 67). These sense impressions form the core of what she went
on to theorise as her moments of being, which, as I argue below, also
have clear lines of influence from Ritchie’s work.
Ritchie provides another model for Woolf in her creative fusion
and accretion of fact and fiction and her recycling of personal
experience. Old Kensington anticipates the Bloomsbury in-game of
fictionalising friends and shared events in which Woolf engaged,
for instance in Night and Day and Freshwater. Ritchie bases her main
character, Dolly, on Julia Stephen. The portrait is an act of homage
and friendship, like Woolf’s of Sackville-West in Orlando, rather
than predominantly mockery and satire as is Woolf’s portrait of
Ritchie as Mrs Hilbery. There are many biographical references in
Old Kensington which would be recognised by those inside the 22
Hyde Park Gate Circle. George Vanborough goes to school in Frant,
location of Julia Stephen’s home Saxonbury, and where she married
Herbert Duckworth. Dolly and her brother George are sent back from
India as toddlers to their Aunt Sarah in Kensington, as Julia and her
siblings were to Sarah Prinsep. George dies in Varna fighting in the
Crimean War, as did Julia’s brother-in-law, George Duckworth. Both
Ritchie and Stephen lived with their grandmothers in Paris for long
periods as children. Both also knew the other locations in the novel,
Eton and Cambridge, intimately.
Old Kensington reveals Ritchie’s precise, closely observed,
topographical detail and strong evocation of place, which is also a
key feature of Woolf’s. Both writers are flâneuses, haunting London
streets. Woolf, Ritchie, and their characters Dorothea and Katharine,
break the stereotype of the flâneuse as a vulnerable object of the male
gaze. They walk unafraid, independent, neither predatory nor prey;
observing the quotidian minutiae of urban life and gathering it for
their own creative purposes; celebrating the beauty of the city and
sometimes angered by scenes of disease and degradation. Ritchie’s
garrulous narrator leads her readers step by step around named
64
Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
streets, past specific shops and churches, not only of contemporary
Kensington but also remembering an earlier, quieter time.
In both Ritchie’s and Woolf’s novels houses are fictionalisations of
their family homes. The Thackerays’ grand mansion in Kensington has
elements of Dolly’s grandmother’s, Church House, Kensington. Rhoda’s
home in ‘Dear Old Street!’ (OK: 4) is based on Ritchie’s home, 13 Young
Street. Houses are also palimpsests, locations of historic continuity
and stability. In Old Kensington, as in Night and Day and The Years,
solid objects such as chairs, old music scores, books and portraits are
invested with significance and passed down the generations. Characters
are represented through their attitudes to such inherited artefacts. Frank
is revealed as the wrong man for Dorothea when he suggests that old
houses, such as Holland House, ‘are too much like coffins and full of
dead men’s bones. Modern lath and plaster has the great advantage of
being easily swept away with its own generation’ (OK: 132). Rhoda’s
wickedness and shallowness are apparent when she sells the family
home to a property developer who demolishes it. Conversely, Katharine
is shown to be at home in the Alardyce shrine, admirably perpetuating
her grandfather’s legacy by maintaining his possessions (N&D: 6–9). In
The Years, though the Pargiter houses are sold, memorabilia are kept,
if only by Crosby (TY: 208). Significant items of furniture, like the
crimson chair with gold claws, are recycled in different family rooms
through the generations (123, 126, 158, 274–5).
Old Kensington and Night and Day have elements of the traditional
realist comedy of manners and courtship novel. Both look back to
Austen especially in these preoccupations.15 Woolf’s humour can
be harsh and satirical, while Ritchie retains Austen’s wit and gentle
comic irony. Young, impecunious Stan Vanborough’s chosen wife is
sadly not the heiress he should be looking for but a lady whose
fortune ‘consisted chiefly in golden hair and two pearly rows of
teeth’ (OK: 8). Just as Katharine is saved from a stultifying marriage
with William Rodney, Dolly is saved from the possessive, materialistic
Robert Henley. Both are non-typical heroines who, though they are
tempted into socially acceptable marriages to someone of the ‘right’
class, to the point of becoming engaged to the ‘wrong’ man, are
ultimately unwilling to compromise. In both novels the traditionally
realist happy marriage ending is problematised. There is not full
closure; neither heroine is unambiguously free or happy. Katharine
remains in liminal space. Dolly is married but the ceremony is not
Anny Thackeray Ritchie 65
described or celebrated and she receives few presents. The novel’s
concluding reflective narrative address has a predominantly negative
discourse, ending with echoes of old sad voices, and just a flicker of
hope: ‘Their fires are out, their hearths are in ashes, but see, it was
the sunlight that extinguished the flame’ (OK: 531).
Woolf’s fusion, in Night and Day and in The Years, of oppositions –
particularly of light and dark, silence and noise, and past and present – is
also prefigured in Old Kensington:
the shop-lights cease, the fog seems to thicken, and a sudden
silence to fall upon everything; while the great veils spread along
the road, hiding how many faces, hearths and homelike rays.
There are sometimes whole years in one’s life that seem so buried
beneath some gloomy shadow. (OK: 89)
Henry James calls Ritchie ‘a woman of genius’, praising her facility
for converting glimpses and impressions into reality, and her
ability to ‘guess the unseen from the seen [...] to judge the whole
piece by the pattern’.16 Woolf would continue to explore this search
for links, pattern-making and unification, especially in The Years and
A Sketch of the Past.
Ritchie’s proto-modernism
Woolf continues to use Ritchie’s novels and short stories in increasingly complex, but unacknowledged, ways. The work of the two
women does not only overlap because Woolf is making intertextual
use of Ritchie’s, for instance drawing on From an Island and The
Story of Elizabeth for Freshwater and ‘The Searchlight’, as I discuss
in Chapter 4, but also because in places Ritchie’s is ahead of her
time. Her concern for the conditions of women’s lives is often
more risqué than Woolf’s. Mrs Dymond is a victim of domestic
and military violence. The Story of Elizabeth portrays a mother and
daughter vying for the attentions of the same lover. Ritchie’s literary
proto-modernism is apparent in her representation of the inner
lives of her heroines; her lack of omniscience and certainty; and
her impressionist description. There is a clear narrative persona in
Old Kensington, the voice of a reflective old woman who comments
about ‘our heroine’ and slips into first person addresses to the reader.
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Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
However, in places, Ritchie moves from the omniscience characteristic of the realist novel, towards a less knowing, more uncertain,
modernist, narration: ‘[Dolly] stopped to look at a couple of snails
creeping up among the nails in the wall. I think she then practiced
a little mazourka’ (OK: 227); ‘Is it that evening or another that they
were all assembled [...]?’ (80). Dolly’s inner agitation is represented
in free indirect discourse (335). These devices remain incipient and
provisional in Ritchie’s work, but they provide a line of influence
which Woolf could develop to full modernist fruition.
Crafting memories
Woolf, like Ritchie, believed that every experience should become part
of the hoard which a writer can plunder, as evidenced for instance in
To the Lighthouse, The Years and Old Kensington. These all deal with the
loss of the mother. Ritchie’s loss was as traumatic as Woolf’s. Isabella
Thackeray was diagnosed as mad, and the sisters removed from her,
when Ritchie was three years old. Like Stephen she became an invisible
presence in her daughter’s life. Dolly feels rejected and is haunted
by the mother, absent in India. MacKay’s reading of Old Kensington
reveals Ritchie’s ‘disturbing vision’: ‘a haunting psychological universe
of isolation and disconnection’ (2001: 89). All three novels also evoke
lost worlds of childhood, ‘the echo of their own childish voices
whooping and calling to one another as they used to do’ (OK: 3),
through the transformative power of fictionalised, crafted, memory.
The literary use of memory was specifically noted by Leonard Woolf as
one of the greatest qualities in Ritchie’s work: ‘She had the rare power
of not only feeling, but also of making others feel, how amusing and
romantic her fireside memories were. Old Kensington is the best of her
novels, because in it she is allowing this power full play, not in the
world of facts, but of imagination’ (E3: 470–1).
Ritchie emphasises the power of childhood memory in a letter
written just before her death. Quoting Shakespeare, and sounding
just like Mrs Hilbery, she asks her daughter,
Who says ‘Youth’s a stuff will not endure?’ It lasts as long as we
do, and is older than age. For those moments of eager life of seeing
and being come back to us, and we babble of green fields and live
among them to the very end. (H. Ritchie 1924a: 304)
Anny Thackeray Ritchie 67
Woolf circulates Ritchie’s discourse in her memoir A Sketch of the Past, a
meditation on how memory works. Ritchie’s ‘moments of eager life of
seeing and being’ shadow what Woolf theorises as ‘moments of being’
(Sketch: 78). Ritchie did not overtly theorise her work, though she is
very reflective about her memoir writing, especially in Chapters from
Some Memoirs. She considers ‘How odd those mysterious moments are
when nothing seems to be happening, but which nevertheless go on
all the rest of one’s life’ (CfSM: 166). Anticipating Woolf, she employs
an event or an item as the trigger for an epiphany. She first remembers a childhood incident, apparently trivial at the time, then moves
from the personal and particular to the general and philosophical:
‘one of the compensating constituents of all our various existences
consists in that very disproportion which passing impressions most
happily take for us, and which they often retain, notwithstanding the
experience of years’ (86–7). Woolf remembers ‘exceptional moments’
at Talland House (Sketch: 71). These epiphanies become not just the
impetus for some creative project but internalised and numinous.
Ritchie is alert, as Aplin notes, to ‘the limitations of her method of
recollection, with its natural tendency to fill in the gaps’, quoting
one of her biographical introductions where ‘the writer must confess
that although she remembers these raptures and the go-cart and some
picture-books [...] she has reconstructed much of what happened
from the scraps and letters of that time’ (2010: 36). Woolf would
follow this methodology to imaginatively recreate her memoirs.
Woolf’s obscuration of Ritchie’s legacies
Ritchie’s body of work provides a rich legacy on which Woolf draws
extensively, but she chooses not to acknowledge that debt overtly.
Instead of celebrating, retrieving and openly transmitting the work
of her forebear, as she advocates for earlier women’s writing, Woolf
chooses actively to diminish and to obscure Ritchie’s achievements.
Woolf’s obituary is typically ambivalent, damning with faint praise,
as signalled by the negative opening sentence:
The death of Lady Ritchie will lead many people to ask themselves
what she has written, or at least which of her books they have read;
for she was never, or perhaps only as Miss Thackeray for a few years in
the ’sixties and ’seventies of the last century, a popular writer. (E3: 13)
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Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
As I have shown, Ritchie was a well-known and critically acclaimed
writer in her day and for some time into the twentieth century. Woolf’s
claim that she lacked ambition (E3: 17) ignores Ritchie’s professionalism, the number and variety of published works, her high sales and
independent income. Woolf includes some praise of Ritchie’s work but
undercuts this with a duplicitous discourse, professing incredulity that
‘a writer capable of such wit, such fantasy, marked by such a distinct
and delightful personality, is not at least as famous as Mrs Gaskell’
(13). Since, as Blair has explored, Woolf’s opinion of Gaskell is conflicted (2007: 71–7), to be as popular as her is not an accolade. Woolf
again emphasises Ritchie’s personality and the slightness of her
work; seemingly accepting Ritchie’s disingenuous protestations and
ignoring her espièglerie. Ritchie ‘rested we will not say indolently,
but frankly and simply in her gift [...] There is no premeditation, no
effort at profundity’ (E3: 14–15). She sidelines Ritchie into ‘an art
of her own’, excelling in recording personalities from her own past.
‘Here the whimsical and capricious genius has its scope unfettered
and exquisitely inspired’ but her work is supposedly so slight and
idiosyncratic that it resists analysis (17). Woolf resorts to a patronising,
hyperbolic, parodically Victorian discourse to attempt to account
for Ritchie. She would have been surprised but pleased ‘to realise
with what a benediction many are today turning to the thought
of her, thanking her not only for her work, but thanking her more
profoundly for the bountiful and magnanimous nature, in which all
tender and enchanting things seemed to grow’ (18).
Woolf’s essays often follow Ritchie’s, as I have shown, yet Woolf
only once admits that she regularly uses Ritchie’s work, while still
simultaneously belittling it by attributing bird-like qualities to
her methodology, ‘Again and again it has happened to us to trace
down our conception of one of the great figures of the past not
to the stout official biography consecrated to him, but to some
little hint or fact or fancy dropped lightly by Lady Ritchie in passing’ (E3: 18). She feels no need to acknowledge her lifelong use of
these little facts or fancies derived from Ritchie’s work. She makes
unattributed use, for instance, of Ritchie’s first-hand accounts of Julia
Margaret Cameron for her own essay on Cameron (E4: 385–6 notes
17, 21, 23, 24, 33, 38, 40, 46). Some borrowings are more obscure.
Woolf takes her fanciful title, and some material, for her review
of Yarmolinsky’s biography of Turgenev, ‘A Giant with Very Small
Anny Thackeray Ritchie 69
Thumbs’, from Ritchie’s ‘Concerning Tourguénieff’. In this Ritchie
recounts Turgenev’s playful apology for not going to visit her in
Onslow Street as arranged because, as he showed her, he had very
small thumbs, and ‘people with such little thumbs can never do what
they intend to do’ (BP: 237; E4: 418 n. 1).
Often Woolf simply writes Ritchie out. At the end of Flush she
adds a list of authorities. Nothing of Ritchie’s, for instance Records
of Tennyson, Ruskin, Browning or the DNB article on Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, is included. Woolf is aware of the high regard in which
Ritchie was held, as a person and a writer, but chooses not only not
to record it but sometimes to actively distort or mock it. The novelist
Margaret Oliphant paid tribute to Ritchie’s warmth and generosity:
There never was any more fascinating or a more delightful
companion, so pleased to please, so ready to see the best of you
[...] if you wanted the moon very much, she would eagerly, and
for the moment quite seriously, think how she could help to get
it for you, scorning the bounds of the possible. ( Jay 1990: 148)
Woolf’s parody of Oliphant’s unacknowledged compliment has a
sarcastic, negative gloss. Describing some of her visitors when she is
ill, women ‘who having dropped out of the race, have time to spend
upon fantastic and unprofitable excursions’, Woolf instances ‘AR’,
‘the rash, the magnanimous, who, if you fancied a giant tortoise to
solace you or theorbo to cheer you, would ransack the markets of
London and procure them somehow’ (E5: 197).
Woolf asserts that young writers should study Lady Ritchie’s
work (E3: 14–15), but does not acknowledge just how often she
had done that herself. Nor does she acknowledge how important
Ritchie’s legacy was to the development of her own writing and her
writing career. Though Woolf tries to distance herself from Ritchie,
close reading of each of their works reveals how closely Ritchie’s
foreshadows Woolf’s, and the extent of Woolf’s affiliation. It is possible that Woolf herself was unaware of the many echoes. Phrases,
ideas and snippets from Ritchie’s writing may have lain dormant in
her consciousness until she needed them. However, although each
echo or resonance, when looked at discretely, could be coincidental,
the sheer number of them argues for more than just chance. As Gérin
suggests, Ritchie and Woolf though ‘opposite in temperament [...]
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Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
had in common the poet’s vision, the capacity to see’ (1981: 242).
Ritchie’s ‘moments of eager life of seeing and being’ (H. Ritchie
1924a: 304) can be linked to Woolf’s moments of being. It is not too
fanciful to suggest that even the snail which Dolly watches climbing
up the wall (OK: 227) reappears in ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (HH: 83).
Woolf’s covert acknowledgement of Ritchie:
the trope of the door
Ultimately, however, Woolf does celebrate Ritchie and her enduring power, albeit obliquely. This is apparent in her specific linking
of Mrs Hilbery/Ritchie with the recurrent trope of the door. Woolf
structures boundaries as permeable and in flux. Ritchie’s work similarly dissolves generic limits and merges past and present. Ritchie’s
life spans the centuries; even her marriage is trans-generational.
As Mrs Hilbery, she is first fully described ‘in the doorway of
the ante-room’ (N&D: 12) and reappears at key moments. When
Katharine and Ralph first articulate their love, ‘the door opened with
considerable hesitation, and Mrs. Hilbery’s head appeared’ (408); she
opens the door wreathed in flowers from Shakespeare’s tomb to help
Katharine reconcile her marriage choices (461); and ‘with her usual
prescience of the need for her intervention, opened the door’ to help
Katharine and Cassandra (477). Prankishly she escapes from Night
and Day to reappear at Mrs Dalloway’s party. Sally and Peter notice a
fellow guest, ‘It was Mrs. Hilbery, looking for the door [...] But there
were so many doors, such unexpected places, she could not find her
way’ (MD: 209).
Woolf’s trope constructs Ritchie in a powerful, liminal position;
the ‘transparent medium’ between past and present, realist and
modern. Woolf argues that ‘the generations certainly look very
different ways’ (D1: 247), but on this threshold, Janus-like, they
can do both simultaneously. The doorway figures a poetic meeting
place, emphasising the crossing points, commonalities and merging which I have argued are revealed in their work; rather than
the rupture which Woolf sometimes overtly proposes. Woolf writes
herself against Ritchie by constructing her as Victorian and distant.
She ambivalently also acknowledges Ritchie’s refusal to conform to a
Victorian stereotype. Repeating a story about her as a child indecorously dancing in the street to the sound of a barrel organ, Woolf
Anny Thackeray Ritchie 71
recognises that Ritchie is a rebel and a prankster, ‘Miss Thackeray, or
Mrs Richmond Ritchie, or Lady Ritchie, was always escaping from the
Victorian gloom and dancing to the strains of her own enchanted
organ’ (E3: 399).
Woolf’s physical escape from the ‘Victorian gloom’ of 22 Hyde
Park Gate paradoxically takes her back full circle to the previously
respectable Bloomsbury location from which Ritchie had escaped.
She never escapes from Ritchie’s invaluable legacy, as the resonances
of Ritchie’s voice in Woolf’s work at the end of her life, in Roger Fry
and A Sketch of the Past, reveal. Through Woolf’s conflicted affiliation
to that legacy, she gives immortality to Ritchie, whose work circulates
endlessly in Woolf’s own.
4
‘Take my lens. I bequeath
it to my descendents’:
Julia Margaret Cameron
Woolf, like Katharine Hilbery, knew that through photographs
she could, ‘join the present on to this past’ (N&D: 106). Those in
the Hilbery family album are fictionalisations of the Pattle sisters
and their coterie sweeping over the lawns at Melbury House/Little
Holland House, with Julia Margaret Cameron constructed as Queenie
Colquhoun (106–7). As early as January 1919, Woolf recognised
the comic potential of anecdotes about Freshwater such as she read
in the biography of Watts,1 for instance of the Camerons leaving for
Ceylon and taking their coffins with them (D1: 237). She includes the
coffin anecdote in Night and Day and develops the joke in Freshwater.
She thus overtly constructs Cameron, like Ritchie, as a figure of
fun, belittling, mocking and patronising her, while obliquely
acknowledging her status by intertextual affiliation.
Cameron’s legacy
In Freshwater, the Mrs Cameron character commands, ‘Take my lens.
I bequeath it to my descendents. See that it is always slightly out of
focus’ (F: 73). Woolf did take Cameron’s lens and used it in many
complex and subtle ways. Cameron’s is not the only lens which influences Woolf, of course, not least because of technical developments
in the art of photography and cinema during her lifetime. However,
Cameron’s influence was formative, part of the matrilineal legacy
inherited in her childhood, and a family ritual, as Maggie Humm
explores in Snapshots of Bloomsbury (2006a). Woolf’s work exhibits all
of the qualities for which Cameron was well known: her experimental
72
Julia Margaret Cameron 73
photographic techniques and innovative use of light; the ontological
uncertainty of her subjects; the fluidity between fact and fiction; and
her use of private reference and personal anecdote.2 Woolf’s lexicon
frequently derives from the photographic process, which she knew
was such a lengthy, arduous, yet highly creative one for Cameron.
Woolf had been a keen consumer of Victorian photography. Aged
five she went with Vanessa and Adrian to see the Animatographs, a
precursor of the cinema, but was shown X-ray photographs of hands,
a baby and a puppy (PA: 9–10). She had a lifetime’s interest, and
practical expertise, in all aspects and innovations of photography,
which was informed, though not exclusively, by Cameron’s work.
As a child, she watched her siblings taking, developing and printing
their photographs so that she was knowledgeable not only about the
artistic but also the technical aspects, as evidenced by her diary entry
for 7 August 1897 in which she lists exact prices and specifications
for photographic equipment ordered (120).
Cameron, like Ritchie, provides Woolf with the model of a successful, independent, business woman and artist who could also
subvert patriarchal institutions by her espièglerie. Woolf kept, and
referenced, Cameron’s photographs, as she did Ritchie’s books. There
is the same fluidity and border-crossing between the work and lives
of Cameron and Woolf as I have argued for between Woolf and
Ritchie. Cameron’s work, like Ritchie’s, not only shadows Woolf’s,
but at times merges and overlaps with it, because of qualities
which can be labelled proto-modernist. Cameron’s photographs of
Julia Stephen, and those of Herschel and Taylor, intertexts in ‘The
Searchlight’, were material objects transported from 22 Hyde Park
Gate and recontextualised in 46 Gordon Square; thus physically,
visually and aesthetically bridging the gap between her nineteenthcentury childhood and her twentieth-century modernist maturity.
In ‘The Searchlight’, as Marcus argues, the telescope becomes a
device profoundly linked to Woolf’s relationship with her past and
her own genesis; in this sense, ‘the “telescope story” takes its place
alongside To the Lighthouse, a text in which optical technologies –
telescope, photograph, film – become the media of memory and of
the “passage” between present and past, past and present’ (2008: 7).
Photography and optics enter Woolf’s literary lexicon and creative
aesthetic, especially in her crafting of childhood memory through
scene-making: ‘Figuratively I could snapshot what I mean by some
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Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
image; I am a porous vessel afloat on sensation; a sensitive plate
exposed to invisible rays’ (Sketch: 133).
‘The Searchlight’: genesis
Woolf’s ambivalent relationship with Cameron and her work in
particular, and with her own past in general, is revealed in her short
story ‘The Searchlight’ (HH: 263–6). Woolf first makes Cameron’s
influence explicit, and then deliberately obscures it, in the gestation of the story through its many drafts.3 It is a highly visual text,
so much so that Vanessa Bell immediately wanted to illustrate it
(Spalding 1996: 309). There are elements common to all versions:
setting in the past; a flight of rooks rhythmically rising and falling;
the tower as an important location and trope; a solitary, bookish,
motherless boy growing up there; the telescope through which the
boy studies astronomy; his focus one evening on a young couple
kissing; the narrative pause emphasising his éclaircissement. Each
version privileges the scene-making which is central to Woolf’s work;
and which Marcus (2008: 5) and Colin Dickey (2010: 383–4) link
closely to photography, though not specifically to Cameron.
Woolf’s exploration of photographic techniques as creative ways
of seeing is clear in an early draft, ‘What the telescope discovered’
(SxMs-18/2/B/9/J), in 1929. It is a short, simple, linear narrative;
but significantly the reader is positioned as if behind a camera,
first viewing a panoramic scene, ‘upon the border of England and
Scotland’. The narrative focus moves on to the ancient, ruined tower
from where the boy looks through his telescope. With him the reader
then focuses on the man and woman kissing. The boy keeps his telescope ‘fixed motionless upon them’. The story ends precipitously
with the boy running violently out into the fields. The importance
which Woolf attaches to the telescope as a trope of revelation is
emphasised by the final sentence, ‘Through the telescope he had
discovered a new world.’
Woolf’s more complex 1930 version (SxMs-18/2/B/9/K) is selfconsciously modernist in its temporal shifts and focus on specularity;
and its epistemological and ontological lack of stability. Its change in
title to ‘Incongruous Memories’, emended to ‘Inaccurate Memories’,
signals Woolf’s change of emphasis, which remains in all subsequent
drafts. The central narrative is framed by a lengthy, philosophical
Julia Margaret Cameron 75
debate on the fallibility of memory and how this impacts on the
process of both reading and writing, especially life-writing. The literary and biographical genetics of the story are closely bound with
Woolf’s other explorations of memory and of recovering scenes from
her own childhood. Early drafts were written while Woolf was also
working on To the Lighthouse and the later ones when working on
A Sketch of the Past. In ‘Inaccurate Memories’ Woolf’s scene is ‘taken
originally from what biography or autobiography scarcely matters.
In memory it seems to run like this –’ (SxMs-18/2/B/9/K: 2). The
central narrative then begins in fairytale mode but with much more
material detail than in earlier versions. The story ends as the boy,
initially tentatively named ‘perhaps Henry’, focuses the telescope on
the couple as they kiss:
It was miles away; but the shock was like a blow on his own
shoulder. There was life, there was love, there was passion! Sweeping
the telescope aside, Henry crammed his hat on his head, rushed
down stairs out onto the road, out into the world – and so became
in time – was it Sir Henry Taylor of the Colonial Office? It may have
been – at any rate his name was Henry. (SxMs-18/2/B/9/K: 5)
The inclusion of Sir Henry Taylor links Woolf’s debate about the
nature of auto/biography and memory specifically to Cameron. In
January 1939 Woolf noted that she had finally written the Henry
Taylor telescope story which had been at the back of her mind for
some years (D5: 204). She appropriates and significantly alters his
daughter Una Taylor’s account of his memories, introducing a sense
of voyeurism and sexual frisson. What Taylor, ‘a lonely boy, bred in
the North’, originally saw through his telescope was not a lovers’
kiss but ‘a sister greet a brother on his return with joy’ (E4: 10).
Taylor was a frequent subject for Cameron’s photographs, and her
1867 photograph of him (Ford 2003: 21) becomes an intertext for
Woolf’s portrait of the great-grandfather with his shock of white hair
(HH: 263). Three of Cameron’s 1867 portraits of another friend, the
astronomer Sir John Herschel, show similar physical characteristics
(Ford 2003: 98, 99, 100). Woolf’s representations of the grandfather/
old man, in appearance and interest in astronomy, thus amalgamate
Taylor and Herschel, and through them Cameron and the Freshwater
Circle of which they were part.
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Woolf makes this connection explicit in a subsequent version, ‘A
Scene from the Past’ (SxMs-18/2/B/10/E: 1–5). It begins, ‘The scene was
Freshwater; the date 1860; the month June’. In this version the framing
is longer, and more filled with incident and material detail, than the
central narrative which it both contains and interrupts, ‘Outside the
studio all the birds were singing as birds sang then [...] The photographer had left her sitter for a moment. Menaced by her clenched fist
and her threat of eternal damnation if he moved, he sat still. For a
moment draped in an Indian shawl pinned with a cameo brooch, he
maintained his pose as King Arthur.’ The old man makes his escape
and, with a young girl, goes to the harbour. ‘They were silent perhaps.
In Freshwater then no one spoke of war, no one spoke of politics [...]
It was enough to breathe, it was enough to be. Only the rooks were
crying and calling over Farringford Woods. “Maud, Maud, Maud”
they were crying and calling’ (2).4 Eventually the girl confesses to
being kissed the evening before, triggering the old man’s memory
of seeing lovers kiss, which then becomes the central narrative. It is
self-consciously crafted and highly dramatic. It has complex temporal
slippages, and shifts of narrative voice, but is now firmly located ‘on
a black Yorkshire moor’ (3). The girl is moved by the story of the solitary boy with his telescope, and asks the reader to ‘pause where, in
Whitehall, rise the august battlements of the Colonial Office. It was
there he ruled; there stands his statue today’ (3). This version ends
with a didactic address to the reader which playfully subverts formal
written biography, specifically that written by Leslie Stephen:
It is left for our oblivious age to add Taylor, Sir Henry. (1800 –
1886) Author of Philip Van Artevelde, Isaac Comnenus and The
Statesman. He contributed articles to the Quarterly Review upon
Moore and Lord John Russell: and he was acquainted with
Southey, Wordsworth, Mill and Sir James Stephen. Should any
one object; the story given here is not to be found in the
Dictionary of National Biography, and is therefore untrue;
should they say birds never sang so loud; hollyhocks never grew
so high, it is impossible now to contradict them. For whereas the
Dictionary of National Biography remains intact, the book in
which this story is told, and the album in which you could see
him draped in a shawl posed as King Arthur were destroyed only
the other day by enemy action. (SxMs-18/2/B/10/E: 5)
Julia Margaret Cameron 77
While Leslie Stephen’s DNB article on Taylor is extant, such a photograph could never be in any album since although Taylor posed
for Cameron as himself, as his own character Van Artevelde and
as King David (Ford 2003: 107, 106, 109), it was William Warder
who posed as King Arthur for an illustration in Tennyson’s Idylls
of the King (Ford 2003: 193). Woolf’s imaginative repositioning of
Cameron’s subjects focuses strongly on the fallibility, yet potency,
of memory and anecdote; on the differences between memoir and
official biography; on both oral and written histories; on non-verbal
source material such as photographs and statues; and on the fuzzy
boundaries between, for instance, past and present or public and
private. It also draws on the play between fact and fiction, seen
in Cameron’s performative photographs enacted by real people
constructed as mythical or historical characters.
These issues are further emphasised and complicated in another
version, ‘The telescope’ (SxMs-18/2/B/10/F: 7–19), in which the
Cameron connection is equally overt: ‘It was not altogether a joke,
sitting to Mrs Julia Margaret Cameron at Freshwater in the sixties,
so Herbert Fisher tells us in his autobiography’ (7). Fisher includes
memories of Henry Taylor and of sitting for his great-aunt, ‘the
creator of artistic photography [...] The most urgent problem when
Aunt Julia was about was how to escape being photographed, for the
exposure lasted 120 seconds and was a sore trial to the patience of a
child’ (1941: 13, 15). ‘The telescope’ continues with a powerful trope
of the searchlight beam, linking light and biographical memory, as
well as past and Woolf’s present, which remains central to all later
versions, ‘That casual remark, like the searchlight prodding the dark
for German raiders, serves to bring back a little scene’ (SxMs-18/2/
B/10/F: 7). Woolf thus engages, as de Gay has noted, in ‘an act of
imaginative reclamation’ of her cousin’s first-hand memory. By
this reference to the flash of light, like the flash of the camera, ‘it
is Cameron’s own art that has enabled Woolf to practise her feat
of time-travel by recalling Cameron as though she had known her’
(2000: 210). Woolf is explicit about Fisher as a source, but fails to
acknowledge her reclamation also of Ritchie’s first-hand memories
of Cameron published in From Friend to Friend (1919), as I discuss in
relation to Freshwater, below.
She also fails to acknowledge her appropriation of Ritchie’s insight
of the power of a photograph, and of the flash or beam of light, to
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trigger memory; which is part of the genesis of the key trope in ‘The
Searchlight’. In Ritchie’s memoir of Tennyson published in 1892,
she remembers a photograph of Emily and Alfred Tennyson and
their sons at Farringford, ‘in which it seems to me the history of this
home is written, as such histories should be written, in sunlight, in
the flashing of a beam, in an instant and forever’ (RTRB: 40).5 Ritchie
memorialises Tennyson’s son in another essay, employing the same
trope but adding an analogy from the new art of moving film, ‘When
I read the address on some letters which have been lately shown me
by the present Lord Tennyson, one of those wonderful mental cinemas we all carry in our minds flashed me back to the panelled rooms’
(1919: 1). Woolf publicly recognises Ritchie’s own skill in using visual
and photographic techniques, her ‘power of creating an atmosphere
of tremulous shadows and opal tinted lights’ (E3: 15). Yet, as with
Cameron, she does not overtly acknowledge the extent of her debt.
In ‘A Scene from the Past’ Woolf actively erases her links with her
forebears. She initially firmly establishes the Freshwater connection,
both overtly and obliquely. Then, when revising her text, Woolf
physically scratched through Cameron’s name and replaced it with
the anonymous ‘the photographer’ (SxMs-18/2/B/10/E: 7). In her
final published version of ‘The Searchlight’, Cameron and her milieu,
including Henry Taylor and Freshwater, are written out entirely.6
However, Woolf cannot erase Cameron’s influence, which remains
strong in Woolf’s story, as finally published. In ‘The Searchlight’
(HH: 263–6), Mrs Ivimey’s retelling of her great-grandfather’s story
is narrated in dramatic, disjointed, anachronic shifts. The syntax
and punctuation typographically recreate individual frames clicking
with each series of dots into the next frame, creating moments of
liminality between each frame, like the trope of the door in Night
and Day. Discourses of Victorian photography, moving images and
light effects, such as those created by the magic lantern or zoopraxiscope, merge seamlessly and flow backwards and forwards with
twentieth-century discourses of cinema and the modern wartime use
of the searchlight.7 Time passing is signified by the Earl’s eighteenthcentury mansion, which morphs into a twentieth-century London
Club. In the opening paragraph it is figured as if the subject of
a Victorian painting or photograph, or a twentieth-century film
freeze-framed; illuminated inside by the harsh glare of the overhead
chandelier and outside by the softness of moonlight. Woolf adds
Julia Margaret Cameron 79
further layers of obfuscation and unreliability. She describes with
detailed, self-consciously poetic, language, the ‘cream coloured
cockades on the chestnut trees’; then playfully reveals that such a
vision is illusory, something which could not have been seen except
in the imagination, as it was a moonless night. But the chestnut
trees are then seen in the cold modern focus of the ‘rods of light’ of
a searchlight, graphically illuminating the London sky, as in C.R.W.
Nevinson’s modernist painting The First Searchlights at Charing Cross.
The beams are linked into cycles of time past, as well as time present,
as the ‘light wheeled, like the wings of a windmill’, or in a Kafkaesque
metamorphosis ‘like the antennae of some prodigious insect’. The
scene is momentarily illuminated by the moving light and then
plunged into darkness like each frame in a magic lantern show, or
click of the camera.
The searchlight beam triggers memory, becomes insight and
vision; highlights what Woolf later theorised as numinous ‘moments
of being’ (Sketch: 70–2). As in earlier versions, the narrative of the
past is framed by the narrative of the present. But in the present,
Mrs Ivimey is framed by the open window, remembering the past –
her great-grandfather as a child living in the tower, gazing each evening through his telescope at the stars. The sightline from the young
stargazer segues into the modern searchlight beam, all focusing, as
Mrs Ivimey’s listeners and Woolf’s readers are directed, on the stars
and into the future. Simultaneously they become part of the unchanging universe, at one in the past with the boy in the tower looking
out over the moors at the stars, in a scene resonant of that describing
Katharine’s stargazing at Stogdon House (N&D: 181), discussed in
Chapter 2. Immediately the slide clicks into a bright June day, speculatively ‘in the year 1820?’ This quickly fades into a sense impression
of the ‘moor rising and falling; the sky meeting the moor; green and
blue, green and blue, for ever and ever’. The scene and the wave-like
rhythms of light and time are both arrested, ‘standing still in the
heat’, yet simultaneously moving over vast chronological and spatial
distances. The narrative breaks up, dislocates, as if a kaleidoscope
has been turned. Identities fragment and reconnect. The narrative
circles back to its twentieth-century framing. Mrs Ivimey is illuminated
briefly by the searchlight beam which then moves onto the concrete
stability of Buckingham Palace. Although Mrs Ivimey’s reminiscences
have come to an end, Woolf’s visually symbolic linking of her with
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her great-grandmother, each having something blue on their heads
or shoulders (HH: 264, 265), means that the Victorians escape their
frame. As Christine Reynier notes, ‘the past keeps haunting or even
inhabiting the present’ and the great-grandmother evoked by the
story ‘lives on in her even if she is not totally aware of it’ (2009: 54);
as Cameron lives on in Woolf’s work.
Cameron and Woolf: recontextualisation, imaginative
retelling and fictionalised auto/biography
Cameron demonstrated not only photographic techniques and a
lexicon which Woolf could use, but, like Ritchie, also a shrewdly
practical methodology. She was noted for producing numerous
copies from her photographic plates. Often these varied in focus,
were lighter or darker, enlarged or cropped. She produced miniature versions, ‘portable galleries’, of her full-size work (Olsen 2003:
226–7). Sometimes the negatives were reversed. Photographs could
be renamed and re-nuanced. The same sitter could be lit from different angles, treated formally for evocative portraits, mythologised,
idealised, or placed in role in dramatic tableaux. Ford notes the many
different versions of her illustrations for Tennyson’s Idylls of the King
(2003: 71–2), as does MacKay (2001: 33–4).
Such recontextualisation of material can be seen in the literary
genetics of ‘The Searchlight’ drafts and in a series of interlocking texts.
All deal with issues around the validity of an imaginative retelling
where the central anecdote is ‘true’ but ‘the exact words must be
imagined. The exact words are for ever lost’ (SxMs-18/2/B/10/E: 16).
All also deal with memory, biography, light, and framing the past
within the present. Notable is ‘The Sun and the Fish’ (E4: 519–24)
based on Woolf’s journey in June 1927 to the Yorkshire moors with a
group of friends, including Vita Sackville-West, to watch an eclipse;
an experience which probably accounts for the locational shift
in ‘The Searchlight’. ‘The Sun and the Fish’ recycles images from
Woolf’s diary entry (D3: 142–4); images which resurface evocatively
throughout The Waves (TW: 3–4, 238–9) and The Years (TY: 183, 265).
Woolf again addresses issues of fictionalised auto/biography,
re-memory and multiple identities in Orlando. In this novel she adapts
Cameron’s use of real people to pose as fictional characters, by the
ludic ploy of inserting real photographs to illustrate her fictionalised
Julia Margaret Cameron 81
account of Sackville-West and her ancestors.8 Also as Cameron would
have done, Woolf enlisted her friends and family to carry out this
in-joke.9 Three of the photographs of Sackville-West, posed as various
incarnations of Orlando, were taken by Duncan Grant and Vanessa
Bell, one by Leonard Woolf, and one was a professional studio portrait of a very formal, air-brushed Vita. In another, Angelica Garnett
is dressed to represent the Russian princess with whom Orlando falls
in love. Others, including the one on the dust jacket cover, are reproductions of Sackville-West’s ancestors from the portrait gallery at her
ancestral home, Knole. As Natasha Aleksiuk has noted, both Woolf
and Cameron ‘use photographic irony to critique the gender and
class categories of their times’ (2000: 127). In Cameron’s performative photographs, for instance, those of her servant, Mary Hillier, are
captioned ‘Sappho’ and ‘Mary Mother’ (Wolf 1998: 54, 55, plate 44).
Hillier was constructed so often as the Virgin Mary that she was nicknamed Mary Madonna (1998: 15). Woolf references Cameron’s irony
and subversion of class by naming her servant girl in Freshwater Mary
Magdalen, playfully reversing her role from saint to sinner.
Freshwater is the apogee of Woolf’s espièglerie based on Cameron,
and, as Lucio Ruotolo has noted, it also recycles ideas and passages
from drafts of ‘The Searchlight’ (F: 45, 76). Freshwater, the Freshwater
drafts of ‘The Searchlight’, and Woolf’s accounts of Cameron and
her circle in her essays ‘Pattledom’ (1925) and ‘Julia Margaret
Cameron’ (1926) recycle material, sometimes word for word. Woolf
appropriates other people’s first-hand memories, seemingly at pains
to suppress just how much material she has taken. Much is unacknowledged by Woolf and surprisingly it is mostly the female sources
whom she renders anonymous. Herbert Fisher is a named source,
as already noted, as is Ethel Smyth (E4: 376), but Emily Tennyson
is written out. Laura Troubridge, Woolf’s cousin who grew up at
Little Holland House and Freshwater, and is thus a valuable primary
source, is given only glancing acknowledgement through ‘Pattledom’
(E4: 280–2), a brief and very partial review of her Memories and
Reflections. Also given only cursory recognition is Henry Taylor’s
daughter, Una, through an even briefer review of her memoir ‘Guests
and Memories: Annals of a Seaside Villa’ which retells the telescope
story (E4: 10–11). Leslie Stephen is implicitly referred to, as material from his DNB entry on Henry Taylor resurfaces several times.
However, Woolf makes no mention of the DNB article on Cameron
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Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
written by Julia Stephen, who must also have been a major source of
many anecdotes. She asked Vanessa for Cameron letters in order to
quote from them (L3: 278). Cameron’s own autobiographical ‘Annals
of My Glasshouse’ is also unacknowledged.
Ritchie as ‘transparent medium’ between
Cameron and Woolf
Woolf never met Cameron and did not go to Freshwater until after
Cameron’s death. Ellen Terry is a transitional figure who spans three
generations linking the Freshwater Circle with the Bloomsbury Group,
as she is portrayed in Woolf’s play.10 However, Woolf’s most prolific
source, her ‘transparent medium’ for the transmission of material
for ‘The Searchlight’ and Freshwater, was again Anny Ritchie. Laura
Troubridge remembered Ritchie’s ‘eyes, at once shrewd and kind,
[which] noted, as we knew, all the eccentricities of Mrs. Prinsep and
Mrs. Cameron, and their eager, somewhat un-English way of life, and
one is not surprised, in her Memoirs, to come across some amusing
descriptions of it all just touched in with a sure hand’ (1925: 40).
Ritchie published her accounts in memoirs, especially From Friend to
Friend (1919), and included her observations in letters to friends:
It is the funniest place in the world. Last night Mrs. Cameron
invited us to tea to meet Mr. Jowett and his four young men
[...] We then went on to the Prinseps’ next door, the four young
men each carrying a candle, and Mrs. Cameron’s three maids
in little knitted waistcoats carrying a huge box of photographs.
There we all sat round a table and looked at the pictures, while
the four young men each had a tumbler of brandy and water [...]
Everybody is either a genius, or a poet, or a painter or peculiar in
some way, poor Miss Stephen says is there nobody commonplace?
[...] Mrs. Cameron sits up till two o’clock in the morning over her
soaking photographs. (Ritchie to Walter Senior, Easter 1865, in
H. Ritchie 1924a: 125–6)
Woolf felt free to plunder Ritchie’s work, such as this, for anecdotes
about Cameron, for use in ‘The Searchlight’, Freshwater, Night and
Day and ‘Pattledom’; sometimes appropriating them word for word,
but without attribution (E4: 381).
Julia Margaret Cameron 83
Fruitful sources too were Ritchie’s Freshwater novels, From an
Island and The Story of Elizabeth, which fictionalise topographical
details of the area. More significantly From an Island is a roman à
clef prefiguring Freshwater not just because of its setting but because
it fictionalises members of the Freshwater Circle. Ritchie’s main
character Lord Ulleskelf is based on Tennyson, Mr and Mrs St Julian
are the Camerons, Watts plays himself and Ritchie writes herself in as
Mrs Campbell with her adopted daughter. The young photographer
Hexham is based on Lewis Carroll. Karoline Leach (2003) explores
this seemingly improbable casting and his friendship with Ritchie.
She notes that some of Carroll’s love poetry functions as intertexts
in Ritchie’s novella. This connection possibly contributes to the
carnivalesque, Alice in Wonderland exuberance in Freshwater, such
as the inclusion of the porpoise or the part for Mitzi the Marmozet
(F: 28–9, 48), which are not characters in From an Island. Like
Woolf’s play, From an Island is a spoof with in-jokes reliant on a
knowing audience. Much fun is made of Cameron’s treatment of her
sitters, but the characters are not caricatures meant to mock their
originals as Woolf creates them. Ritchie’s humour is more gentle
and affectionate and the tone is celebratory of friendship and of a
significant time and place.
Woolf’s representations of Cameron
Woolf planned her play Freshwater as early as 1919, and radically
revised it in 1935 (F: vii–xi), for performance in Vanessa Bell’s studio
to amuse a group of Bloomsberries.11 She originally planned to stage
it using original Cameron photographs and shawls (L3: 73). It is
resonant of the amateur theatricals of which Cameron and her circle
were so fond, and of the Quentin Follies which are still an annual
irreverent source of hilarity at Charleston. It is in the tradition, too,
of the Thackeray family theatricals (Aplin 2010: 152–3). Minny
Stephen, staying with Ritchie and Cameron at Freshwater in 1874,
wrote to Leslie Stephen, ‘The children are going to act a charade
today in which Mee [Laura] is to join. The word is Freshwater & all
the FW characters are to be brought in’ (Aplin 2010: 257). Woolf was
almost certainly aware of this, since she could have heard it from
Ritchie or Troubridge, and she had read her father’s letters, but she
never alludes to it.
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Freshwater has often been considered as a romp, or light farce,
something which Woolf enjoyed as ‘an unbuttoned laughing
evening’ (D4: 274). However, Gillespie rightly reads it as darker and
more serious, a ‘satire of tendencies in the visual and verbal art of
the Victorian era’ (1991: 64). In specifically attacking Cameron and
her friends and dramatising the break-up of their artistic group, it
is certainly bleaker and more vituperative than Ritchie’s precursor.
It can be read as revealing Woolf’s desire to create a rupture and
difference between herself and her past. Woolf is clearly engaging
with Cameron in Freshwater, but the nature of the identification is
problematised by its intended audience, a private coterie, and by
its reconfiguration of Cameron in different drafts. In the 1923 draft
Cameron is positioned in the role of disciple, adulating the great
man, Tennyson. In the 1935 draft the Cameron character is depicted
as a more independent woman artist, but still also a silly, eccentric
fan who wishes to be buried with her head pillowed on In Memoriam
and with Maud upon her heart (F: 9).
Woolf’s other overt engagement with Cameron and her work is
in her 1926 essay ‘Julia Margaret Cameron’ (E4: 375–86), her biographical introduction to Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and
Fair Women. Many observers had commented on Cameron’s eccentricities and her sometimes excessive generosity. Thomas Wentworth
Higginson, for instance, told Ritchie of a visit with Tennyson to
Dimbola: ‘that wonderful house where every maid has a profile &
the master has a picturesqueness beyond what even her photographs
can render’. He found Cameron ‘full of genius & charm beside, &
O! such photographs as she gave me, in spite of my withholding’
(Aplin 2006: 16). The recipients’ response was always affectionate,
accepting and positive.12 In contrast, Woolf’s portrait of Cameron in
Freshwater, and in ‘Julia Margaret Cameron’, is negative, malicious
and highly subjective. Cameron’s generosity to her friends is
satirised, and devalued, through studied use of hyperbole, repetition
and antithesis resonant of some representations of Ritchie, ‘There
was no eccentricity that she would not have dared on their behalf,
no sacrifice that she would not have made to procure a few more
minutes of their society’ (E4: 378).
Woolf employs a highly crafted, deceptively light, mock-heroic
style to disparage Cameron’s art, ‘But the zenith of Mrs Cameron’s
career was at hand’ (E4: 380). It is further deprecated and almost
Julia Margaret Cameron 85
fictionalised through the use of hyperbole, verbal and aural patterning, innuendo, half-truths and inaccuracies (381–2). As Woolf knew,
Cameron claimed that she took up photography aged 48 when ‘my
first lens was given to me by my cherished departed daughter and
her husband’ (Annals: 67). Woolf’s assertion that aged 50 she was
given a camera by her son therefore downplays the empathetic bond
between mother and daughter. Woolf’s further ‘errors’ and revisions,
including a colourful rewriting of the Pattle family history, in part
attributed to a memoir by Ethel Smyth’s father (E4: 376), contravene
Cameron’s own voice and authority. Cameron initially refuses to selfvoice, employing the third person to refer to herself and her work
(Annals: 67). She then moves into the first person, asserting, ‘I feel
confident that the truthful account of indefatigable work, with the
anecdote of human interest attached to that work, will add in some
measure to its value’ (67). However flawed or fanciful Cameron’s selfpresentation, it is her story to tell.13 Woolf includes none of the quotations from her subject’s own writing, including letters and journals,
either directly or in reported speech, which she uses so extensively,
for instance, in her biography of Roger Fry. Woolf is thus effectively
appropriating and rewriting Cameron’s life story, refusing to allow
her to speak for herself. Woolf’s apparent intention, in her essays and
in Freshwater, is to entertain, but the result is to create a very partial,
pejorative portrait of Cameron.
Woolf’s suppression of Cameron’s achievements
As in her representations of Ritchie, Woolf privileges Cameron’s
eccentricities and amateur working methods, at the expense of her
professional art. Woolf’s portrait could possibly be understood as
providing a source of amusement, if it were countered elsewhere by
a serious evaluation of Cameron’s undoubted achievements. Woolf
never provides such a correlative despite the wealth of evidence
available to her. As Wolf asserts, ‘For a Victorian woman to have
the kind of artistic aspirations Cameron had was uncommon.
That she began her career at age forty-eight – late middle age by
Victorian standards – makes her achievement all the more remarkable’
(1998: 25). Cameron’s transformations, from domestic to public life
and amateur to professional, are so extraordinary that Olsen likens
them to those of Orlando: ‘She lived the first half of her life as a
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Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
stereotypical nineteenth-century daughter, wife, and mother. She
gave parties, collected money for charities, and raised six children.
Then one day in 1864 she reinvented herself as a photographer and
put all her formidable energy into pursuing models, money, and
acclaim’ (2003: 3).
By the end of her life Cameron’s use of soft focus still caused controversy, but she had gained much public acclaim and recognition
for both her artistic and commercial achievements. Woolf and Bell
owned, and apparently valued, many Cameron photographs (Lee
1997: 205). Woolf would have known of Cameron’s sales figures,
the medals she had won; the galleries in London, Paris and Berlin in
which she had been invited to exhibit; and the photographs in public
collections such as the British Museum and the South Kensington
Museum. She would also have known of the acclaim she received
from artists and writers such as George Eliot and Victor Hugo, who
owned many Cameron photographs and asserted, ‘No one has ever
captured the rays of the sun as you have. I throw myself at your feet’
(quoted in Wolf 1998: 25). Cameron was the only married woman to
be accorded her own individual entry in the DNB, and was one of only
18 women out of the 420 entries (Ford 2003: 80). In that entry Julia
Stephen had asserted that in Cameron’s hands photography ‘became
truly artistic, instead of possessing merely mechanical excellence’
( JDS: 215). Gernsheim invited the art critic Clive Bell, Woolf’s
brother-in-law, to write an Introduction for his 1948 biography of
Cameron. Bell praised her as ‘a great photographer because she was
an artist [...] with a nice gift for selection and a sure sense of design.
Also she possessed the sensitive vision of a painter. She looked for
significance everywhere and generally found it’ (1948: 7).
The full extent of Woolf’s diminution of Cameron’s status as a professional artist is apparent when comparing her and Fry’s introductory essays to their collaborative edition of Cameron’s photographs,
Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women, published
by the Hogarth Press in 1926. Fry’s ‘Mrs. Cameron’s Photographs’
is a measured, reflective, academic essay. In sharp contrast, Woolf’s
‘Julia Margaret Cameron’ not only lampoons rather than lauds its
subject, as I have argued, but its style is highly inappropriate in the
context of a serious retrospective of Cameron’s photographs. Fry’s
modernist re-evaluation privileges Cameron’s portraits more than
her allegorical or poetical subjects. He rates Cameron highly as an
Julia Margaret Cameron 87
innovator, a ‘considerable’ artist and a biographer/historian of her
period. Her achievements were due to the way ‘the eye of the artist’
directed and focused her camera and to her ‘wonderful perception of
character as it is expressed in form, and of form as it is revealed or
hidden by the incidence of light’. Comparing her portrait of Carlyle
with those by Whistler and Watts, Fry argues that neither ‘come
near to [Cameron’s] in the breadth of the conception, in the logic of
the plastic evocations, and neither approach the poignancy of this
revelation of character. And this masterpiece is accomplished by a
patient use of all the accidents and conditions of Mrs. Cameron’s
medium. For the process she employed was far removed from those
of modern photography’ (1973: 26). Woolf clearly knew Fry’s essay,
valued Fry’s opinion and expertise as an art critic, and must have
discussed his views with him during their collaboration. Her essay
is largely biographical whereas Fry’s is a critique of the work. It is
nevertheless remarkable that none of Fry’s, nor Bell’s, praise and
recognition of Cameron’s status and achievement as an innovative
and professional woman photographer and artist is evident in Woolf’s
essay; nor in any other of her responses to Cameron’s work.
Blurring boundaries: Cameron’s influence
in Woolf’s work
Although Woolf did not overtly acknowledge the status of Cameron’s
work, its influence is pervasive in her own. Photography functions as a nexus between fact and fiction, and past and present, as
I have argued with reference to ‘The Searchlight’ and Freshwater.
Photography also blurs boundaries both within, and between, the
work of Woolf and Cameron. The boundaries I identify are between
amateur and professional standing; in gender issues especially
around the public and private domain; between high and low culture; between realist and modernist genres; and in terms of identity
between the inner and the outer person. However, none of these
areas is discrete – all merge and overlap in creatively productive ways.
Contestations between the status of professional and amateur
photography have gender and genre implications. Humm argues
that ‘domestic photography can contribute to shifts in aesthetic
meanings in the way in which its practice allowed modernist women
to blur distinctions between amateur and artist, and between art
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and the everyday, distinctions which some male modernists such
as Fry wished to keep’ (2002: 18). The question of Cameron’s professionalism is one of the most contentious debates engaged in by
her contemporary critics and in recent critical reassessments of her
work. Fry’s acclaim for Cameron’s art nevertheless raises questions by
noting the amateurish ‘accidents’ for which she was often castigated.
Gernsheim rated her highly, but issued a corrective, ‘It was no doubt
wrong to belittle Mrs Cameron’s magnificent portraits on account of
the faultiness of her technique, but it is equally wrong now to consider her shortcomings as intentional and raise them to a virtue as,
for instance, Roger Fry has done in his critical essay’ (1948: 44). He
also thinks that Cameron was being disingenuous in claiming that
she ‘began with no knowledge of the art’ (Annals: 68). Gernsheim’s
thesis is that, given the difficulty of the wet collodion process, she
could not be a total novice. Taking, printing and developing photographs at that time were ‘Herculean labours and it needed the love
and will-power of an artist combined with the endurance and constitution of an ox to pursue one’s art in the face of it all’ (1948: 49).14
Tristram Powell suggests a transition to professionalism, ‘although
she began as an amateur, Mrs. Cameron ended up a self-conscious
artist’ (1973: 10). However, Seiberling includes Cameron in what she
terms the second generation of amateurs. She ‘worked independently
and found new ways to deal with fields that most amateurs avoided,
such as artistic portraiture and narratives’ (1986: 106). Her professional and artistic status is being more recognised in the twenty-first
century as evidenced by the major exhibition of her work in 2003
which fulfilled Fry’s hope that one day the National Portrait Gallery
would ‘turn to fostering the art of photography’ (Fry 1973: 28).
Whatever was the critical reception of her work, Cameron always
perceived herself to be, and conducted herself as, a professional. She
thus provided both Ritchie and Woolf with a role model of a successful woman, wife and mother, who had ‘a strong sense of the originality and value of her work’ (Powell 1973: 10). She was one of the
first photographers to assert her professional status at a time when
photography was still predominantly an expensive hobby pursued
mostly by men. She applied the new copyright laws to her photography, thus safeguarding and increasing the value of her work. Many
prints are inscribed ‘From Life. Copyright registered photograph.
Julia Margaret Cameron’.
Julia Margaret Cameron 89
Public and private spheres
From the outset photography had its hierarchies, articulated by the
different types of photography on different floors of the 1851 Great
Exhibition (Wolf 1998: 29). As in most Victorian pastimes, those
involved in photography soon organised exhibitions, began journals,
started collections and formed themselves into societies. As a woman,
Cameron was an outsider in this world, but she refused to be marginalised. She transgressed the boundaries of the female domestic sphere
to enter the male-dominated public one, submitting photographs to
the prestigious Photographic Society of London Exhibition in May
1864 and becoming a member of the Society in June that year. From
the moment she entered the public, commercial, world of photography ‘her work was the subject of much controversy, and until her
departure for Ceylon it remained the focal point of public attention’
(Gernsheim 1948: 40). Ford details her energy and determination
to overcome the overwhelming discouragements meted out to her
by the male photographic establishment (2003: 83–4). Cameron’s
response to adverse criticism is typically feisty, ‘The Photographic
Society of London in their Journal would have dispirited me very
much had I not valued that criticism at its worth. It was unsparing
and too manifestly unjust for me to attend to it’ (Annals: 69).
Cameron, like Ritchie, and later Woolf through the Hogarth Press,
oversaw all aspects of the production, publicity and marketing of
her work. Like them, she had a need, or at least a perceived need, to
exploit the money-making potential of her art (Ford 2003: 40–2; Wolf
1998: 208–18; E5: x–xi). In part this was to assert its worth publicly.
Like literature, photography, especially portraiture, was soon caught
up and commodified in the consumer boom of the latter half of the
nineteenth century. Cameron was able to send photographs for sale
and exhibition to Europe, Australia and America. Prints could be sold
either singly or in portfolios and an income similar to that of book
production achieved by those successful and popular enough. She
had a commercial eye for marketing techniques and personalised
her work so that it was instantly recognisable. Her signature is on
the mounts of photographs sold by Colnaghi along with their prestigious stamp. Pragmatically, she harnessed the burgeoning celebrity
culture, augmenting her sitters’, and her own, prestige. If the sitter
were especially famous then she arranged to have their autograph on
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the mount as well. When asked by Tennyson to illustrate his Idylls
of the King she acknowledged openly that, ‘I know that it is immortality
to me to be bound up with you’ (quoted in Ford 2003: 71). She thus
exploits photography’s commodification by moving into the male,
public, commercial sphere, demonstrating shrewd business acumen.
Cameron not only moves confidently between the spheres, she
challenges gender stereotypes in other more subtle ways. She employs
her creative negativity by ‘refusing to focus her images, preferring
instead to look aesthetically pleasing to her own eye’ (Smith 1996:
18). Lindsay Smith conflates ‘focus’, as used in photography,
with its etymological root, meaning ‘hearth’, to argue that Cameron’s
work thus threatens the ‘foundations of Victorian culture’. While
this argument is possibly exaggerated, it does open up the possibility
that Cameron’s challenge to Victorian, gendered, domestic
stereotypes anticipates Woolf’s more direct onslaught on the figure
of the Angel in the House.15 Smith further argues that photography
within the domestic context could be liberating, enabling women
‘to explore important psychic and social questions without having to
negotiate problems of chaperonage and travel’ (1996: 16–17). While
Cameron clearly felt liberated by her photography, it was not because
she felt constrained by such ‘problems’ as chaperonage. Like Ritchie,
she was a well-seasoned independent traveller. Both confidently
practised their art, not only in the domestic context, but also in the
wider business and professional world.
Photography became increasingly codified, masculine and professional. Simultaneously and conversely, as Judith Flanders demonstrates, photography and its consumerism moved from the public to
the private. The ‘Temple of Photography’ was established in the mid1850s in Regent Street, ‘the home of upper-class shopping, making
the perfect link between education, technology and entertainment.
Photographs could be taken away and studied at leisure’ (Flanders
2007: 271). They could be taken home, and in this female sphere
would often be in the form of a family album. Cameron’s use of
photograph albums, as well as photographic techniques, illustrates
her transgressive nature and her unwillingness to be confined in any
single category. Her albums are cannily multi-functional, combining aspects of both male and female, public and private, business
and intimate. She compiled high-status presentation albums which
function simultaneously as public affirmations of herself as an artist,
Julia Margaret Cameron 91
as a personal gift to friends, and as part of her commercial project
by advertising her work to potential sitters and thus boosting sales.
Typical were those presented to her friends Herschel, Watts and
Overstone as gifts; but also in a bid for their patronage and a gesture designed to increase her own artistic status by putting herself
publicly within their illustrious orbit and celebrity culture.
Photograph albums: visual auto/biographies
and family histories
Cameron’s albums, like Ritchie’s, are joyfully eccentric and both
public and private. They are often personalised for their recipients, as
is the one inscribed ‘to Annie Thackeray by her friend Julia Margaret
Cameron’ begun in 1864 (Lukitsh 1996: 32–42). Typical too is that
for Maria Jackson (Mulligan 1994). This green leather-bound volume
which Cameron dedicated on 7 July 1863, very early in her career,
‘For my best beloved Sister Mia’, is not only indicative of the close
relationship between the sisters, but also displays Cameron’s espièglerie and originality. It was mostly blank. Her inscription ‘with a
blessing on the New Years and the old’ marks its on-going status as
family chronicle – a document of the past and present, and with
space to accommodate the future. Cameron invites her sister to collaborate in filling the pages and joint-authoring the family record,
which she did over the following ten years. Cameron continued
to send her photographs, sometimes with inscriptions and precise
instruction where to place them in the album. As Joanne Lukitsh
suggests, this album is ‘a collection used by the Pattle sisters to
invent a narrative supporting their accomplishments within the
norms of upper-class Victorian femininity’ (1996: 44 n. 18). In part
this is done through its idiosyncratic layout which both links, yet
separates, the public and artistic, with the personal and domestic.
Cameron’s own photographs are displayed at the front of the album
but it can be reversed. At the back are photographs from Cameron’s
friends, including Rejlander and Lewis Carroll, thus celebrating her
artistic collaboration with other notable photographers. Its perceived
status as High Art is reinforced by the inclusion of photographed
reproductions of a painting by Millais, a portrait of Virginia Pattle by
Watts, and a watercolour of Adeline Pattle. The album includes some
allegorical subjects but many more portraits of family and friends,
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Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
especially the Pattle sisters. There are 15 specially selected for Mia of
her daughter Julia, mostly by Cameron but also by Rejlander. Also
there are mutual friends such as Henry Taylor and photographs of
Cameron and her family, showing that Cameron was a consumer
of photography before she became a practitioner. Significant are the
many tableaux representing the domestic and quotidian. Servants
are grouped around the doorway with the visiting butcher or the
postman, very reminiscent of the photographs later taken by Woolf
and her siblings at Talland House.16
Woolf, too, unambiguously embraces and celebrates her past
through domestic photography. Her and Bell’s albums are direct
descendants of Cameron’s, both individually and as examples of
sisterly collaboration. For Cameron and her sisters, the album format
‘was not a mere convenience of presentation’ but one which they
‘were capable of using for their own interests’ (Lukitsh 1996: 44).
Merry Pawlowski has explored Woolf’s practice of scrapbooking and
carrying forward ‘from the more private world of family photograph
albums a practice of selection, combination, and arrangement’ (2010:
299). Pawlowski is predominantly concerned with Woolf’s scrapbooks of material for Three Guineas and The Years, and links them to
the Stephen family albums. But this practice can also be seen as part
of her nineteenth-century legacy. Photographs in Woolf’s albums
are as anachronically and idiosyncratically placed as in Cameron’s.
She goes back to her Victorian ancestors at the beginning, including
Victorian cartes-de-visite as well as notables such as Lily Langtry,
and Ellen Terry in the role of Ophelia (Humm 2006: 40–1). Woolf’s
albums too contain the repeated motifs typical of Cameron’s, particularly armchairs and framed spaces such as windows or doors
(2006: 50, 127, 137, 138). Such framed spaces often structure the
paintings of Vanessa Bell (Shone 1999: 60, 217) and are used on her
dust jacket designs for The Waves and Jacob’s Room. Bell’s similarly
idiosyncratic album/scrapbook includes a photograph of Cameron,
taken by her son Henry, many of Cameron’s photos of Julia Stephen
and a photograph of a cutting from The Times announcing Woolf’s
birth.17 Photograph albums are, to use Lévi-Strauss’ term, bricolage:
an assemblage of cultural, economic and aesthetic fragments. They
contain what Woolf calls ‘scraps, orts and fragments’ (BtA: 170, 194).
In this sense they link with Woolf’s project to be like the common
reader in creating ‘out of whatever odds and ends he can come by,
Julia Margaret Cameron 93
some kind of whole – a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory
of the art of writing’ (E4: 19).
Woolf employs photographs both as signifiers of gender and as
trans-generational links. Especially in her earlier work, Woolf associates men with photographs, like Ralph Denham’s and William
Rodney’s, of ‘bridges and cathedrals’, or ‘from the Greek statues’
(N&D: 18, 64, 370). She predominantly links women with photographs of people and with taking snapshots, a new subversive
form of popular culture, as epitomised by Madame Lucien Gravé
whose Kodak is disconcertingly pointed at Jacob’s head ( JR: 209).
Photographs also figure, Dickey argues, conflict between ‘a generation whose men long nostalgically for that past (with their prints of
classical statues), even as its women break with the past through a
more modern form of photography’ (2010: 379). Paradoxically, as I
argue below, women also use the snapshot to connect to the past and
transmit it in albums to future generations.
At the end of her life, Woolf imaginatively recreates portraits and
scenes of her forebears at Little Holland House, admitting that they
are ‘set pieces that I have gathered from memoirs’: ‘Tennyson in his
wideawake; Watts in his smock frock; Ellen Terry dressed as a boy;
Garibaldi in his red shirt – and Henry Taylor turned from him to my
mother [...] I dream; I make up pictures of a summer’s afternoon’
(Sketch: 87). One of Cameron’s legacies is, through her photographs,
to mediate this world for Woolf; and to confirm her identity by
linking her past firmly to her present. Cameron’s albums, and Woolf’s
and Bell’s later ones, demonstrate their function in the construction
and transmission of family history, as well as the collaborative nature
of album making and viewing. Cameron swapped photographs with
friends and family, collating and poring over them as Katharine
and her mother do (N&D: 105–8), and as Woolf and her family and
friends were to do throughout her life (L1: 80; L6: 32). Woolf notes
a ‘rocky steep evening’ among the Bloomsberries when ‘we had the
photographs out’ (D2: 239). She is dismayed at Lytton Strachey’s
response to some of Cameron’s photographs of Julia Stephen, ‘I don’t
like your mother’s character. Her mouth seems complaining” & a
shaft of white light fell across my dusky rich red past’ (239). Sharing
an album not only retrieves stories from the past but constitutes
part of the narrative of a relationship, especially a female one. Woolf
entices Sackville-West by hoping that she will come and ‘look at my
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Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
great-aunt’s photographs of Tennyson and other people some time.
My sister has many of them at her house’ (L3: 4). However much she
might have lampooned them elsewhere, this reveals that Woolf did
covertly understand the status of Cameron’s photographs. Viewing
them was a gift worthy to offer to her new aristocratic friend. In
1930, Woolf still considers that the gift of ‘a book of pictures by a
great Aunt of mine’ (L4: 132) will impress another new friend, Ethel
Smyth.
Cameron and her photographs are fixed as part of the family ritual
and continuities in Woolf’s past. Photographs are part of the cache
of papers belonging to those now dead, retrieved and distributed by
their descendants (L2: 428). It is significant that many of Woolf’s
photos include a photo within the photo. The original, enclosed by
the later, becomes fetishised and memorialised as part of a mourning
ritual, like a lock of hair within a Victorian locket. In one of Julia
Stephen sitting at her desk (Dell and Whybrow 2003: 82) she has
a framed photograph of her own mother on the desk beside her. A
photograph of Woolf, with a black armband denoting her mourning
for her recently dead mother, has the framed photograph of Julia
Stephen taken by Cameron hanging on the wall behind her (Humm
2006: 60).
Photographs, especially when compiled in albums, are thus visual
auto/biographies, functioning in the construction of identity and the
retrieval of memory. Woolf’s cousin, Janet Vaughan, when asked
about her memories of Bloomsbury, ‘got out my mother’s tattered old
scrap book’ (Humm 2006: 13) in which among the faded photographs
were some of Leslie and Julia Stephen with Vaughan’s grandparents.
Woolf asks Ethel Smyth, ‘First I want to make out the genealogy of
your mothers [sic] family. Old Pattle – have you a picture?’ (D3: 291).
When grouped in albums, photographs acquire additional resonances.
As Humm argues, ‘In what would now be termed a form of “life
caching” or “memory prosthesis”, Woolf and Bell used photo albums
extensively as autobiographical narratives’ (2006: 3).
George Duckworth’s widow sent Woolf some of his old photographs of their childhood, which delighted both sisters. Vanessa
asked for the negatives so that she could take more prints to go into
her album (L6: 15). Woolf drew on such family albums as source
material for A Sketch of the Past, particularly those, like George’s,
which ‘brought back St Ives again’ (15). However, while albums can
Julia Margaret Cameron 95
reveal, like auto/biographies they often conceal, as Woolf explores
in Night and Day. Sitters and subjects invent themselves in advantageous poses; or are composed to fulfil the photographer’s purposes,
as Cameron so carefully did. Compilers select and compose their
material to direct the viewer’s gaze and to create a positive, convincing, self-censored fiction. Tension and disarray can be obscured
and people interpolated or written out. Leslie Stephen carefully
constructed his album to perpetuate his version of events in the
Mausoleum Book for his descendants.18 The famous 1892 photograph
of Leslie Stephen, Julia and Virginia, taken by Vanessa Bell at Talland
House, exists in a number of different versions, some with Woolf
airbrushed out (Humm 2002: 19–20, 24). Similarly Woolf’s and Bell’s
albums are carefully selected and edited, like those of their forebears
Cameron and her sister Mia Jackson. As Mulligan argues, viewed
‘either individually or collectively, [they] intertwine reality and illusion, fostering the sisters’ own mythic conception of family life and
its traditions’ (1994: 5).
Woolf’s visual inheritance: identity, perspective
and angles of vision
For Woolf and Bell photography was not only an integral part of their
family life, it was, as Humm suggests, part of their visual inheritance
from Cameron (Humm 2006: 3), which was transposed into their
working practices, often their most collaborative ones. Photography
transgresses genre boundaries, in part because it invites creative collaborations, such as those between Cameron and Tennyson, H.H.
Cameron and Ritchie, Fry and Woolf.19 Woolf and Bell’s first joint
publishing venture, through the newly formed Hogarth Press, was
‘Kew Gardens’. The physical printing of their blocks of type and artwork by Virginia and Leonard Woolf themselves is in the direct tradition of Cameron’s printing of her own work. Lee has noted Woolf’s
early sense of the visual in her apprentice pieces: snapshots of people
and places which were the verbal ‘equivalent of Vanessa’s sketchbooks’ (1997: 169).20 Just as Cameron linked her photographic portraits to painted portraits, Woolf links her word portraits explicitly to
the visual, ‘I will obediently, like a student in the art school – sketch
Sir George [Duckworth]’ (D3: 293). Her biography of Fry is ‘a framed
portrait of Roger in words to summon him back’ (Briggs 2005: 340).
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Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
Woolf recognises significant correspondences between biography
and photography, living when ‘a thousand cameras are pointed,
by newspapers, letters, and diaries, at every character from every
angle, he [the biographer] must be prepared to admit contradictory versions of the same face. Biography will enlarge its scope by
hanging up looking glasses at odd corners’ (E6: 186). She explores
the revelatory effects of this in Between the Acts, as I discuss below.
Woolf’s portraits became more experimentally modernist, concerned
with perspective and angles of vision. Her increasing verbal elisions
equate with the spatial elisions in Bell’s work, such as her famous
1912 portrait of Woolf with its almost featureless face (Shone 1999:
86). Both were paring down their art, increasingly concerned with
form, and with exploring techniques to represent the inner rather
than the outer person and life. Photography was, Humm argues,
‘a tool which Woolf and Bell used, not simply as a documentary
device but as a means of crossing the border between the visual and
the unconscious’ (2002: ix). They preferred to capture ‘the essence of
the individual and to depict people as parts of larger human, natural,
and aesthetic patterns’ (Gillespie 1991: 162).
In attempting to capture this inner essence in the subjects of her
portraits, Woolf was again following the same project as Cameron.
MacKay has identified ‘the double vision’ in Cameron’s portraits,
‘many faces in which eyes are almost decreated – blurred, hidden,
multiply directed’ (1996: 66). Cameron ‘aspired to interpret the
highest Victorian mind in [her] work. To reveal the soul of the sitter
rather than delineate every wrinkle’ (Gould 2006: 11). Cameron’s
portraits of ‘famous men’ show her typically Victorian reverence for
male intellect and genius. She usually poses her subjects in profile,
and uses light effects to focus on those traits which would reveal the
inner life when subjected to a phrenological reading by her knowing
viewers. So Herschel’s and Darwin’s high brows are illuminated and
Tennyson has bags under his eyes to denote his literary ability (Ford
2003: 46–8, 98, 111, 104). It is a mark of Woolf’s attachment to her
Victorian past that while she portrays Jane Harrison as an exemplar
of how the ‘Intellectual Status of Women’ is increasing (D2: 339), she
employs the same phrenological signifiers as Cameron, indicating
Harrison’s intellect by depicting her ‘with her great forehead’
(Room: 21). Woolf is possibly thus playfully suggesting Harrison’s
acquisition of the status of great man.
Julia Margaret Cameron 97
In contrast, Cameron’s portraits of her ‘fair women’ are more
ambiguous than those of her ‘famous men’, radically departing from
Victorian values and demonstrating her own originality. Cameron’s
many portraits of her niece, Julia Stephen, one of her few named
female subjects, are among her most innovative and remarkable.21
As MacKay argues, in both Cameron’s photographs and in her only
published poem ‘On a Portrait’, ‘eyes act as emblems to the ambiguity and paradox that inform her vision’ (1996: 66).22 Wolf instances
one of May Prinsep looking into a mirror, ‘her reflection a disembodied eye [which] may be seen not simply as an allegorical subject or
a vanity pose, but as a contemplation and questioning of woman’s
identity’ (1998: 47). Cameron both constructs and deconstructs identity in her resistance to naming. Her women are often mythologised
as Mariana, The Echo or Mary Mother; or posed in tableaux as The
Rosebud Garden of Girls or May Day. Ellen Terry is labelled ‘Sadness’
(1998: 71).23 Woolf develops such questioning of identity through a
discourse of photography in ‘A Woman’s College from the Outside’
and ‘Portraits’, as discussed below.
Cameron’s proto-modernism: commonalities with Woolf
Cameron’s art is increasingly being reassessed, especially by feminist
critics, as Woolf’s was in the later twentieth century. The result is to
highlight Cameron’s difference from a nineteenth-century, realist
stereotype and to emphasise qualities in her work, such as the ambiguity and paradox in her vision, and construction of problematic
identity, discussed above, which could now be labelled modernist.
Smith asserts that ‘a retrieval of seminal histories’, including that
of Cameron, is necessary in order to challenge what she sees as
the previous reductive versions of the history of photography. In
comparison to male photographers, Cameron’s ‘politics of focus
inscribes an overt sexual politics in a critique and refusal of the brand
of perceptual mastery that geometrical perspective is designed to
guarantee’ (Smith 1998: 16). Smith’s argument emphasises gender as
integral to Cameron’s work. Wolf’s gendered reading also emphasises
Cameron’s divergence from expected Victorian practice. Though
many of her subjects display stereotypical languor and melancholy,
as Wolf argues, these are only some of the complexity of emotions
attributed to them by Cameron. In practice, ‘her portraits of women
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reflect a broader inquiry into human nature and into the expressive
qualities of photography’ (Wolf 1998: 24). Her unconventional use of
lighting, positioning, framing and shape-shifting ‘displays the mark
of an artist with a strong personal vision who was determined to
enlist the medium in the service of her ideas’ (33).
Cameron’s controversial use of soft focus in her portraits has, as
I have indicated, often been seen as accidental or inept.24 It is now
usually considered that she deliberately exploited this piece of serendipity. Her indistinctness, and skill in techniques of diffusion, was
celebrated as a mark of her avant-garde practice in an exhibition at
the V&A, where her work was hung among that of ‘a rising generation of artists who sought to continue many of the Aesthetic ideals,
albeit in a daringly modern way’.25 The fuzzy outlines around her
subjects, and use of highlight and shadow, marked her out, even at
the time, as radically different.
Revisioning Cameron’s work reveals her as being proto-modernist
and brings her practice closer to Woolf’s own, in terms of both
gender and genre. Gender is an integral part of Cameron’s visual
aesthetics, as it has been seen to be in Woolf’s modernist aesthetics
(Humm 2002). In addition, both painstakingly rework and craft their
material in order to challenge genre stereotypes. Ritchie recognised
that Cameron tried to photograph ‘more than a mere inanimate
copy [...] People like clear, hard outlines, and have a fancy to see
themselves and their friends as if through opera-glasses, all complete,
with the buttons, &c., nicely defined. These things Mrs. Cameron’s
public may not always find’ (T&S: 321, 323). Woolf too recognises
that Cameron recrafts her work, destroying hundreds of negatives,
to achieve her object of overcoming ‘realism by diminishing just in
the least degree the precision of the focus’ (E4: 382). Cameron’s move
away from the purely representational in her portraits anticipates the
move from realism to modernism which Woolf articulates especially
in her essays ‘Modern Novels’ (E3: 30–7), ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs
Brown’ (384–9), ‘Character in Fiction’ (420–38) and ‘Modern Fiction’
(E4: 157–65). Woolf borrows the detail of the buttons from Ritchie
to argue her point. She challenges the representation of character
in novels such as those by Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy, in
which there was such realist detail that should the characters come
to life they would be ‘dressed down to the last button in the fashion
of the hour’ (E3: 33). In modern fiction, ‘the accent falls differently
Julia Margaret Cameron 99
from of old [...] and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond
Street tailors would have it’ (E4: 160). Her most famous conceit in
this debate is the representation of Mrs Brown in the railway carriage.
Woolf wonders what happens when the reader begins to search out
her real character for themselves, ‘In the first place, her solidity
disappears; her features crumble’ (E3: 387). Mrs Brown becomes,
in fact, just like a Cameron portrait. The result of such an interest
would be ‘a point of view suggesting a different and obscure outline
of form’ (35). Woolf is wrong in stating that this was ‘incomprehensible to our predecessors’ (35), for she saw it in Cameron’s work, in
her blurring of hard edges and insistence on new angles of vision.
It was through such techniques that Cameron, like Woolf, explores
unstable identity and the inner life of her subjects. Cameron would
not have had the Freudian notion, nor the terminology, of the ‘dark
region of psychology’ (E3: 35) available to her, but it was nevertheless
what interested her.
Woolf’s use of the visual: lines of influence
Woolf’s use of the visual, particularly her experimentation with
lighting effects and unconventional framing and positioning of the
subject, is thus a highly significant legacy from Cameron, which
she continued to develop with an increasingly modernist aesthetic,
and often with a lexicon from photography. In ‘The Lady in the
Looking Glass: A Reflection’ (HH: 215–19) she explores notions of
the reflected gaze and photography’s ability to search out and fix
the essential being of the sitter. The looking-glass in the hall frames
scenes from a woman’s everyday life which are reflected as a series of
tableaux. This Platonic conceit which questions reality is extended
throughout the story. Finally the mirror becomes animate; is the
camera and the photographic process, ‘She stood perfectly still. At
once the looking-glass began to pour over her a light that seemed
to fix her; that seemed like some acid to bite off the unessential and
superficial and to leave only the truth’ (219).
Woolf’s most experimental development of her legacy from
Cameron is in her short story ‘Portraits’ (HH: 236–40), composed
of eight remarkable brief snapshots of character and setting.26
Typographically, with their own subtitles, they replicate captioned
photographs in an album. Characters are composed in a set scene and
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reveal themselves through internal monologues, one-sided conversations and indirect discourse. Interspersed are immobile characters, in
suspended animation; arrested as if posing for a Victorian photograph
or waiting to be ‘fixed’ by the process of development. The unnamed
subject of Portrait 3 looks solid, sitting still in the bright sunshine,
‘The light fixed her. There was no shadow’ (237). The moment of liminality is suddenly broken by her movement. In ‘Waiting for Déjeuner’
two customers are sitting unmoving, unseeing and unhearing, totally
impervious to the bizarre events going on simultaneously around
them. In Portrait 4, the mother at the restaurant table indulges in an
anxious, disjointed, internal monologue, while her son ‘sees over the
rim of the Soho carafe flies dancing, girls’ legs’ (238). The emotional
distance between mother and son is revealed in this defamiliarising
perspective. The reader is distanced from the subjects, repulsed by the
mass of grotesque and unsavoury detail, and disconcerted by oblique,
distorted, angles of vision and strange juxtapositions.
‘Portraits’ reveals Woolf’s on-going exploration of identity, especially fractured, unstable identity. Similarly Cameron’s fictionalisation of her famous sitters results in the creation of multiple selves
and ‘splitting or shattering their public selves, in effect breaking their
singularity into facets’ (MacKay 2001: 22). Subjects, like Henry Taylor,
are no longer only one thing, but are ambivalently themselves (Ford
2003: 107); figures of their own imaginative creation, as when posed
as Van Artevelde; and historical figures, as when constructed as King
David (106, 109). Simultaneously they also embody, and engage the
viewer in constructing and meditating upon, qualities such as power
or authority. Woolf’s on-going exploration of such de-creation and
re-creation of identities reaches its peak in the bizarre final scene
of the pageant in Between the Acts. The audience objects to being
suddenly forced to look at disconcertingly fragmented, disjointed
and misshapen versions of themselves reflected in a variety of shiny
surfaces held up by the capering actors, ‘To snap us as we are, before
we’ve had time to assume ... And only, too, in parts ... That’s what’s
so distorting and upsetting’ (BtA: 165). Woolf’s syntax is fractured.
Trousers, a nose, a skirt become metonymic. Roles are reversed and
destabilised. The audience are forced to gaze at themselves; they
become the play, the subject of the snapshot. Woolf specifically links
the framing, composition and fracturing of identity with photography, which, as Gillespie has noted, ‘undoubtedly reinforced [her]
Julia Margaret Cameron 101
idea that any one perception is incomplete and that only multiple
angles of vision can begin to suggest the complex person’ (1993: 132).
In her exploration of the visual, the gaze and arresting the moment,
Woolf employs forms of photography available to Cameron, but also
moves on from them to new forms such as the snapshot and the cinema.27 She develops her ideas in essays such as ‘Ellen Terry’ where she
represents Terry’s life as a series of scattered, snapshot-like sketches,
and wonders, ‘Which, then, of all these women is the real Ellen
Terry?’ (E6: 289). She develops her ideas on the visual, the gaze and
arresting the moment in her work on film. In her essay ‘The Cinema’
she notes that in this new photographic medium ‘the eye is in difficulties’. Yet the subjects become more real so that we ‘behold them
as they are when we are not there’ (E4: 349). She theorises arrested
‘moments of being’ in A Sketch of the Past, describing life when she
had no part in it; her family before she was born or in early childhood (Sketch: 66–72). The scenes are like a Cameron photograph with
a slight halo effect and fuzzy edges, ‘always including a circle of the
scene which they cut out’ (Sketch: 79). As Marcus argues, ‘Memory
and scene-making are thus shaped in the form of the telescopic or
photographic optic’ (2008: 5).
Issues of vision are axiomatically part of modernism. Moreover,
according to Humm, ‘photographs are fundamentally implicated
in the making of modern identities by bringing together public
and private realms of memory in the defining trope of modernity –
specularity’ (2002: 195). Woolf takes her legacy from Cameron to
push the boundaries of modernism. She again draws on Cameron’s
light effects, especially the out of focus halo effect, and employs the
trope of the mind as a photographic plate, and life as a composition,
to articulate her modernist manifesto, ‘The mind, exposed to the
ordinary course of life, receives upon its surface a myriad impressions
[...] composing in their sum what we might venture to call life itself’
(E3: 33).28 She draws on the ideas of contemporary philosophers and
scientists to explore perception, cognitive and epistemological uncertainty, but still employs photographic tropes, for instance to articulate Jeans’ philosophy through Louis, in The Waves, ‘We changed,
we became unrecognizable, [...] Exposed to all these different lights,
what we had in us (for we were all so different) came intermittently,
in violet patches, spaced by blank voids, to the surface as if some acid
had dropped unequally on the plate’ (TW: 103).29 In this novel, as
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Briggs argues, Woolf ‘turned her back on the outer world, producing
an effect like that of a photographic negative, in which what is “said”
by the characters is actually what they think or feel, while their
actual speech remains out of earshot’ (2005: 238). It is as if Woolf’s
work also has been exposed and the acid which etched Cameron’s
photographic plates and stained her fingers also develops the words
on Woolf’s pages.
Cameron’s influence pervades To the Lighthouse, a novel about
the visual: light, shade, obscurity and photography. It directly links
Woolf’s legacies from both her great-aunt and her mother. Woolf and
Fry published Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women in
1926. Cameron’s photographs, especially of her mother, would thus
have been in her line of gaze while she was writing To the Lighthouse. In
addition, scenes captured informally in family snapshots, of Stephen
sitting in the open window at Talland House, the beehive chair, the
garden, Porthminster beach and the Godrevy Lighthouse are all represented verbally.30 Woolf’s publication date, her mother’s birthday
5 May, reveals the novel as an act of memorialisation. De Gay links
To the Lighthouse with the Mausoleum Book and Leslie Stephen’s photograph album, all composed as acts of mourning and remembrance
with Stephen as the central figure (2007: 98–111). She argues that
Woolf’s portrait of Mrs Ramsay does not simply recall impressions
of her mother, but attempts to deal with both her father’s description and photographic records of Julia Stephen. Woolf was writing
‘The Cinema’ while drafting ‘Time Passes’, and conflates images from
the new visual medium with her recurrent tropes of the searchlight/
lighthouse beam and Victorian optics. Mrs McNab, remembering Mrs
Ramsay, seems to see her projected across a wall, ‘faint and flickering,
like a yellow beam or the circle at the end of a telescope’ (TtL: 112).
Cameron, Stephen and Woolf: arresting beauty
Cameron’s professed desire is to ‘arrest all beauty that came before
me’ (Annals: 68). It is the subject of her poem ‘On A Portrait’, which
ends, ‘Whilst all that we love best in classic art / Is stamped for ever
on the immortal face’ (quoted in Gernsheim 1948: 73). Her aesthetic
vision predominates over her technique, ‘when focussing and coming to something which, to my eye, was very beautiful, I stopped
there instead of screwing on the lens to the more definite focus’
Julia Margaret Cameron 103
(Annals: 69). Leslie Stephen took her claim literally, certainly believing that ‘the beautiful series of portraits taken by Mrs. Cameron’
(MB: 32) had captured Julia Stephen’s beauty and reflected the
classic harmony which Cameron’s poem celebrated. Stephen’s beauty
‘was just the perfect balance, the harmony of mind and body which
made me feel when I looked at her the kind of pleasure which
I suppose a keen artistic sense to derive from a masterpiece of Greek
sculpture’ (MB: 32). Woolf’s work however reveals her ambivalence
to this beauty, exhibiting both reverence and hostility. She quotes
Cameron’s desire to ‘arrest beauty’ but then subverts it by her use
of hyperbole (E4: 382). She satirises it, albeit very humorously, in
Freshwater, ‘I have sought the beautiful in the most unlikely places.
I have searched the police force at Freshwater, and not a man have
I found with calves worthy of Sir Galahad’ (F: 64). In To the Lighthouse
she appropriates the notion of ‘arresting beauty’ by freeze-framing
significant moments, many to do with her fictionalised version of
Julia Stephen, whose beauty is here represented in negative terms,
‘Beauty had this penalty – it came too readily, came too completely.
It stilled life – froze it’ (TtL: 146). However, the artist Lily Briscoe is
aware of Mrs Ramsay’s ability to make life ‘stand still here [...] making
of the moment something permanent’ (TtL: 133). As she completes
her portrait of Mrs Ramsay, the click of Lily Briscoe’s paint-box closing
‘seemed to surround in a circle for ever the paint-box, the lawn,
Mr Bankes, and that wild villain, Cam, dashing past’ (TtL: 46). It
echoes the click of a camera freeze-framing the scene for ever; creating
a pause, a moment of liminality between the past and the future.
In this case it is Woolf herself, fictionalised as Cam, who is arrested in
the moment. Ritchie, and other close friends, often referred to Cameron
as ‘Cammy’, sometimes spelt ‘Camme’ (Aplin 2010: 240, 269). Woolf’s
appropriation of the diminutive ‘Cam’ for her own persona thus
links the two women and implicitly recognises her legacy, and also
Ritchie’s transmission of the nickname.31 All four women meet in this
liminality, paused, yet fixed on Woolf’s page, making of that moment
something permanent.
Woolf was named for her Pattle ancestors, anglicised versions
of Adéline and Virginie. Her beauty came from her Pattle genes,
which, as Leonard Woolf noted, ‘must have been extremely potent’
(1975a: 185). He subverts their beauty as ‘saintly dying duck loveliness’ (186), linking it inappropriately, as it often was, to sanctity.
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Many contemporary references surprisingly made the same link with
Woolf, noting her Madonna-like features (Noble 1972: 29, 62, 171).
Woolf’s, and our, awareness of the beauty of her Pattle forebears
derives from their portraits, especially those by Cameron. In these the
subject assumes a pose and has to hold it unsmiling for the lengthy
photographic process. What is usually missing from these portraits
is their subjects’ vivacity, mischief and laughter. As Ritchie does in
From an Island, Woolf in Freshwater is able to redress that and to
show their espièglerie, humour and wit; valuable legacies which they
bequeathed to her.
5
‘Closer than any of the living’:
Julia Prinsep Stephen
Julia Prinsep Stephen’s influence on Woolf is both more nebulous
and more all-encompassing than that of Cameron and Ritchie. Woolf
frequently felt her presence, ‘there she is; beautiful, emphatic, with
her familiar phrase and her laugh; closer than any of the living are’
(Rem: 40). She draws attention to her through the deictic ‘There
she is’, or ‘there she was’ (Sketch: 81).1 Yet she also denies her, ‘I no
longer hear her voice; I do not see her’ (81). She is an invisible presence, there but not there (80). The paradoxes indicate Woolf’s hugely
ambivalent response. In trying to represent her mother, she is aware
of how difficult it is to ‘single her out as she really was’ (87); and
how easy to leave ‘Julia Jackson, the real person, on one side’ (88).
Constructs of non-corporeality and sanctity misrepresent and efface
her as effectively as do Woolf’s ridicule and caricature of Ritchie and
Cameron. As with those forebears, Woolf further obscures her by fictionalising her and by writing out her achievements. Woolf defines
her by her beauty, and constructs her doubly as her own mother
and as the generalised idealisation of the mother figure, ‘typical,
universal, yet our own in particular’ (82). Stephen’s body of work,
albeit very slight compared with that of Ritchie and Cameron, is
unacknowledged.
These constructs and erasures obscure Stephen’s very solid and
practical legacy. She provided a source of encouragement and inspiration for her daughter’s art; nurtured her early writing; provided
models for her first narratives; initiated explorations of the cult of
female domesticity; provided a creative stimulus especially for To the
Lighthouse, The Years and A Sketch of the Past; and bequeathed Woolf
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a sense of ribaldry and fun, and a love of gossip and conversation; all
key attributes in her personality and writing.
Constructs of Stephen
Stephen now exists almost entirely through other people’s constructs
of her. There is little source material extant in her own voice, with
the exception of Gillespie and Steele’s ( JDS) retrieval of her stories
and articles. Unusually in such a family she apparently did not keep
a diary. She was a copious correspondent but most of her letters have
been either destroyed or heavily edited (MB: 50). In her lifetime she
was the object of the imagination and fantasy of others. Her beauty
meant that she was sought out as an artist’s model, especially within
the Little Holland House Circle. As a child she posed for the sculptor
Marochetti and was drawn and painted by Watts and Burne-Jones.
She is the subject of some of the most remarkable of Cameron’s
photographs, discussed below. After her death these representations
were added to by Woolf’s fictional portraits and by those of her by
the modernist painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Stephen’s
ethereal beauty came to be linked with sanctity, as epitomised in
Burne-Jones’ Pre-Raphaelite representation of her as the Madonna
in The Annunciation. This apotheosis is increased through the agency
of Leslie Stephen in his Mausoleum Book, which links her physical
beauty with the inner beauty of self-sacrifice. She is ‘absolutely faultless’, had ‘superlative beauty’ like the Sistine Madonna (MB: 31). A
mother of seven, she is constructed as impossibly chaste and virginal.
Leslie Stephen falsifies his emotions through a religious discourse at
odds with his, and her, atheism.2 He feels ‘reverence as well as love’
(53), and ‘all that is holy and all that is endearing in human love’
(33). He forces her onto a pedestal, insisting, ‘I have not got any
Saints and you must not be angry if I put you in the place where my
Saints ought to be’ (53). After her death she becomes a ‘stimulating
and elevating power’, in his essay ‘Forgotten Benefactors’ (quoted
in MB: xv). Leslie Stephen’s elegiac memorialisation, the Mausoleum
Book, was transcribed into a heavy leather book with metal clasps.3 So
Julia Stephen is locked within this contradictory, literary artifice and
systematically shaped into his edited version. It was not published in
its entirety until 1977. Though it was labelled ‘Private’ in gilt letters
and supposedly intended ‘entirely for her children’ and ‘could not be
Julia Prinsep Stephen 107
published’, Maitland followed Leslie Stephen’s disingenuous instructions to ‘read the above document’ (Bicknell 1996: 442). He drew on
it for his 1906 biography, as subsequently did Noel Annan, Quentin
Bell and Woolf herself, especially in A Sketch of the Past.
It is therefore Leslie Stephen’s romanticised construct of Stephen
which becomes the controlling version of her. Woolf adopts it and
recycles errors such as that Herbert Duckworth’s death was caused
when gathering a fig (MB: 39; Sketch: 89) as ‘the only facts I know
about those four happy years’ (Sketch: 89) of her mother’s first
marriage.4 The construct of Stephen as ‘weeping widow’, who ‘used
to lie upon [her husband’s] grave at Orchardleigh’ (90), a story which
Woolf attributes to Stella, is equally erroneous.5 However, these
stories, and Leslie Stephen’s construct, have often been accepted
uncritically, and even heightened, by later biographers.
The Angel in the House
Leslie Stephen’s idealisation of her mother had a huge influence on
Woolf; in part because it embodies all the attributes of the contemporary cult of the Angel in the House. I discuss Woolf’s literary use
of the stereotype, and her desire to kill the Angel (E5: 639), below.
Woolf does not explicitly apply the term to Julia Stephen but at
times she continues to sanctify Stephen as her father had done,
substituting her for her own lost saints by placing her within ‘that
Cathedral space which was childhood’ (Sketch: 81). However, to
equate Stephen uncritically with the Angel in the House is reductive
and erroneous. She was not a constraint on the freedom of expression and creativity of the woman writer, but a positive influence.
Stephen did not seek, or connive at, her sanctification. In fact, as
I demonstrate, she actively resisted it. It is a powerful construct
created by artists employing contemporary ideals of beauty, and
actively promoted by Leslie Stephen. It was inherited and perpetuated by Woolf, and continues to have a life of its own through the
now almost axiomatic conflation of ‘Julia Stephen’ and ‘Angel in the
House’ by biographers and critics.6
Woolf’s engagement with this highly mediated construct is
also important because it led to a very conflicted response to her
mother as a woman. Along with the ‘little paper about my darling’
(Bicknell 1996: 442), Leslie Stephen includes a Calendar of his
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wife’s correspondence, and a solipsistic selection of her letters,
many of which he quotes and glosses in his text mainly to show
that they ‘are full of a love for me’ (MB: 50). The extended Stephen
and Pattle families were well used to circulating each other’s letters
but not the private correspondence between an engaged or newly
married couple. Leslie Stephen felt free to turn Julia’s children into
voyeurs not only of his own love affair with their mother but also
of his relationship with his first wife (while excluding her own
daughter from the list of addressees), and of Julia Stephen’s with
her first husband. Leslie Stephen employed Woolf as amanuensis
in the final months of his life so that she had an inappropriately
intimate knowledge of the source material in the Mausoleum Book
at a particularly impressionable age, and during the aftermath of
the deaths of her mother and then her first mother-substitute, the
newly married, pregnant Stella Duckworth (Sketch: 124). Just after
her father’s death, she read through all his letters and those to him
from her mother and from Stephen’s first wife, Minny, copying
selected passages for her biographical collaboration with Maitland
(L1: 151; PA: 219–20, 226). She internalises a highly idealised,
distorted impression of married love, which she then transmits to
the next generation, addressing her 1909 memoir, Reminiscences,
to her nephew Julian Bell (Rem: 28). The pompous, overly formal,
balanced Victorian rhetoric, and inflated religious discourse, of her
father’s voice in the Mausoleum Book, sounds even more false in the
young Woolf, naively claiming to know her mother’s most intimate
feelings. Her mother, Woolf supposes, knew with ‘delighted pride,
that he worshipped in her something as unchallengeably high
as the lofty remote peak [of his intellect] which she honoured in
him’ (Rem: 37). Woolf’s ventriloquising is probably unconsciously
parodic in ‘Reminiscences’. However, by the time she is writing
The Voyage Out she is able to ironise views on marriage and the separate spheres through the persona of Richard Dalloway (VO: 62).
These views echo those of Leslie Stephen praising Stephen’s
‘unremitting care’ for him when he was suffering from the strain
of working on the DNB (MB: 88–9). Leslie Stephen suppresses
almost all evidence of a non-idealised Stephen. He transmits
nothing, for instance, of her very practical and capable support
for his work as evidenced in her correspondence with his publisher
George Smith.7
Julia Prinsep Stephen 109
Woolf did however have evidence of a very different construct of
her mother. Leslie Stephen notes that ‘the beautiful series of portraits
taken by Mrs. Cameron’ give her children an impression of ‘what she
really was. To us, who remember her distinctly, they recall her like
nothing else’ (MB: 32). He seems unaware that these photographs
do not support his representation of an idealised Angel. Conversely,
they strongly resist sentimentality, sanctification or mythologisation.
Though the devoutly Christian Cameron often represented women
and girls as angels or Madonnas (Wolf 1998: 60–3), and her portrait
of Emily Peacock was labelled ‘The Angel in the House’ (47), she did
not cast Julia Stephen in that role. Only one photograph of her, an
1867 portrait ‘My Favourite Picture of All My Works. My Niece Julia’,
is sometimes alternatively titled ‘La Santa Julia’. In context, this
seems a playfully ironic epithet, rather than a serious construct, since
there is nothing saintly in the very modern-looking, unsentimental
close-up of the head of a young woman with immodestly flowing
hair (Wolf 1998: plate 56). MacKay notes the marked difference
in Cameron’s treatment of the newly bereaved Minny Thackeray
and Julia Duckworth. Thackeray is posed conventionally in full
mourning, eyes modestly downcast and head turned partly away
from the camera (MacKay 2001: 51). In contrast Stephen is posed to
focus on the head and profile. As MacKay argues, Cameron’s collection of representations of Stephen ‘constitute a photographic essay
on woman’s resources of both strength and beauty’ (50). Cameron
did not feel the need to stereotypically sanctify motherhood.8 Nor
did she prudishly deny or devalue eroticism, or sexuality within marriage (Wolf 1998: 64–6), as Leslie Stephen had implicitly done by creating Stephen’s ‘holy and tender love’ (MB: 59). In an explicit letter
to her son, Cameron states that ‘a life that has not known the purer
sanctifying influences of love filtering lust is a life that has not yet
had developed in it the God as exalting and intensifying the human
nature and animal side of man and woman which animal side I do
not at all despise’ (quoted in Wolf 1998: 64).
Woolf however perpetuates, and brings into the public domain, the
idealised image of her mother as a ‘Fair Woman’ by including these
photographs under that title in the retrospective of Cameron’s work
which she co-published in 1926.9 There is no suggestion of irony in
her choice of title, revealing her conflicted response to representations of her mother. Woolf also ignores Cameron’s engagement in a
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creative rebellion against contemporary cultural stereotypes, similar
to that which she herself engaged in against the Angel. The majority
of Cameron’s female subjects do not conform to Victorian ideals of
beauty. This is particularly true of over 50 photographs which chart
Stephen’s life from about the age of 18, before her first marriage, to
about 28, before her second. They are not idealised, mythologised,
nor formal studio portraits, such as the elegant ones of her taken
during this period by Rejlander. Though some of Cameron’s taken in
Stephen’s widowhood show a mournful woman they do not falsify
her emotion. Wolf notes that Cameron ‘defied the impulse to generalize female behavior’ (Wolf 1998: 79), very noticeably, for instance,
in her use of women’s hair, which had particular iconographic
resonance in Victorian art and literature. Cameron often subverts
the stereotype of the submissive young woman in her photographs
(MacKay 1996: 70–5), particularly in a startling series of Stephen
in 1867, with loose, unruly hair, tantalisingly flowing free (Wolf
1998: 72–3). In many of these photographs, too, Stephen’s eyes are
wide open, directly and provocatively gazing at the viewer. They are
overtly sexualised: the antithesis of the virginal, docile, subservient
idealisation.
Cameron, like Ritchie, knew Stephen before Leslie Stephen’s relationship with her, or portrayal of her, and in ways which Woolf
could never know her. They knew her, for instance, when, as a
young woman, she broke English conventions. Herbert Duckworth’s
brother, Arthur, was fascinated that, for her first meeting with their
parents and family at Orchardleigh, she wore ‘no crinoline, hardly
any stays, no grease to her hair, drapes pre-Raphaelesque’.10 Stephen
obviously followed her Pattle aunts’ taste in Aesthetic dress, as seen
at Little Holland House. Arthur immediately likes his ‘new sister’,
describes her as ‘graceful, simple and natural’, and judges ‘Mrs
Cameron’s photos’, which Julia and Herbert must have taken to the
Duckworths, ‘good’. Cameron’s fascination with her niece led to her
portrayal in many different ways, but always dressed only as herself;
nuanced and recontextualised but not idealised or objectified as some
mythic or fictional character, or abstraction, as she did for instance
with May Prinsep as La Contadina or Ellen Terry as Sadness (Ford
2003: 130, 139). Wolf notes that ‘Like Cameron’s portraits of famous
men, photographs of [Stephen] are nearly always titled with her
name, but unlike the men, no single portrait is intended to stand for
Julia Prinsep Stephen 111
who she is’ (1998: 66). Even when, as happened rarely, some versions
of a portrait were subtitled, other prints of the same portrait have
her own name. Her malleability is emphasised by the many different
negatives, reverse prints and crops of her with which Cameron
experimented. She is shown as strong, resilient and multifaceted.
In some photographs her deeply hooded eyes, partial lighting or
highlighting of the face, and the softness of Cameron’s focus, lead
to a trance-like effect. As MacKay argues, such ‘portraits without eyes’
create an absence which demands that the viewer ‘explore them
even more significantly as “windows to the soul”’ (1996: 66).11 The
focus thus moves away from the personal to the meta-personal; from
the appearance to the inner life of the subject – a focus which, as
discussed in the previous chapter, Woolf herself espouses in much of
her writing, but rarely in relation to her mother.
Stephen’s achievements: the ‘real’ woman
Woolf obscures Stephen’s real achievements, as she does those of
Cameron and Ritchie. At the end of her life Woolf asks, ‘what reality
can remain real of a person who died forty-four years ago at the age of
forty-nine, without leaving a book, or a picture, or any piece of work –
apart from the three children who now survive and the memory of her
that remains in their minds?’ (Sketch: 85).12 This reductive biography
of Stephen erases Cameron’s photographs, numbers of other paintings
and drawings, and the first person accounts of close relatives and
friends, against which she could have ‘checked’ and ‘grounded’ her
memory of her mother. She listened to and read Ritchie’s; she records
reading her cousin Herbert Fisher’s (Sketch: 153); and she reviewed
Laura Troubridge’s in ‘Pattledom’ (E4: 280–2). This biography also renders invisible the small but significant body of Stephen’s own writing.
Woolf, though actively engaged in reclamation of other women’s
writing, did not think her mother’s work worthy of publication, or
even of comment. Hence it remained in family papers, overlooked by
others ( JDS: xiii). With the exception of her entry for Cameron in the
DNB, and her treatise on nursing, it remained unpublished until 1987.
Stephen was practical and vocational rather than artistic and her work
reveals this. It includes Notes from Sick Rooms, polemics such as ‘Agnostic
Women’, ‘The Servant Question’ and ‘Domestic Arrangements of the
Ordinary English Home’, and many stories for children.
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Stephen’s writing and its influence on Woolf
Stephen’s writing, though slight, is important because it gives an
indication of her philosophy, and her concern for the conditions of
women’s lives, all of which provide a model for Woolf. It is also a corrective to the various idealisations of her. Leslie Stephen diminishes
and de-professionalises her nursing work as acts of kindness which
were ‘a kind of religious practice’ (MB: 82). His view, and discourse,
is inherited by Woolf, who in her childhood newspaper reports
that ‘Mrs Stephen who is really like a “Good Angel” to the poor of
St Ives is now trying to get enough “Filthy Lucre” to start a nurse in
the town’ (HPGN: 118). Stephen’s own writing shows her as actively
resisting the Angel stereotype. Agnostic women ‘are not thinking
that we shall gain a glorious immortality, that we shall be crowned
as saints because we have helped our fellow creatures, but they are
our work’ ( JDS: 243). Such a philosophy is incorporated in Woolf’s
representation of Clarissa Dalloway, who ‘evolved this atheist’s religion of doing good for the sake of goodness’ (MD: 85). From its opening sentence, ‘I have often wondered why it is considered a proof
of virtue in anyone to become a nurse’ ( JDS: 217), Notes from Sick
Rooms debunks Leslie Stephen’s construct of her as a ‘sister of mercy’
(MB: 40). Stephen’s nursing and philanthropy are informed by extensive first-hand experience and by her atheism. She articulates her
position in ‘Agnostic Women’ ( JDS: 241–7), declaring that ‘women
who give up the faith in which they have been educated do so from a
feeling that it no longer satisfies them [...] therefore they are content
to confess not their belief but their ignorance’ (242). Stephen’s article
is a riposte to Bertha Lathbury’s ‘Agnosticism and Women’, published
in Nineteenth Century in April 1880, in which she argues that the rise
in agnosticism in women will have a deleterious effect, particularly
on the nursing and teaching professions. As Gillespie argues ( JDS:
198–9), Lathbury’s is a sentimental, subjective portrayal of women’s
lives. Agnostic teachers and nurses, she fears, will not be able to carry
out their functions properly because they will be unable to promise
their pupils or patients reward or solace in the afterlife. Sensationally,
she suggests that they might even promote euthanasia as a sensible
option. Stephen’s more objectively argued response counters
Lathbury’s concerns and demonstrates that agnostic women will
make just as effective nurses and teachers as women with religious
Julia Prinsep Stephen 113
convictions. It also clearly and firmly asserts the equality of women
with men in making moral judgements, ‘Women are not all blind
followers of men. They have power to think as well’ ( JDS: 246). Her
humour sometimes breaks through, in a style which, though not as
sustained, is reminiscent of Ritchie’s wit in, for instance, Toilers and
Spinsters, discussed in Chapter 3. The reasons which cause women
to become agnostics, she suggests, are ‘no doubt as various as those
which cause them to become wives, and sometimes as frivolous as
those which make them one year consent to be walking balloons, the
next to be bound like a bundle of sticks’ (242). Inexplicably, given its
quality, Stephen’s article was not published (201).
Stephen’s treatise on nursing, Notes from Sick Rooms (Hunting 1987;
JDS: 216–40), was published by Smith Elder in 1883, and provides an
indirect response to Lathbury. It is a manual for home nursing in a
precise, clear and authoritative style, appropriate to its purpose and
intended audience. Her writing shows, as Constance Hunting argues,
‘wit, firmness, and an innate sense of juggling – balancing [and]
exquisite tact’ (1987: 8). In spite of the self-deprecating opening sentences, it reveals Stephen’s wealth of knowledge and practical ability.
Rita Charon notes how Stephen is radical and patient-centred in her
approach, locating ‘the source of her authority in her own clinical
experience and astute observation of other experienced nurses’.13
Her treatise is totally lacking in sentimentality and proves her to be
a professional, dealing in an objective way with topics such as the
right way to give enemas and bed pans, as well as how to deal with
difficult visitors. Her stance is affective; her first concern is the welfare of the patient, physically, emotionally and psychologically.14 She
is pragmatic, urging nurses of terminally ill patients to lie if necessary
to relieve undue anxiety. Her humour shines through, ‘Among the
number of small evils which haunt illness, the greatest, in the misery
which it can cause, though the smallest in size, is crumbs’ ( JDS: 219).
This quotation supports Winifred Holtby’s perceptive argument that
there are ‘more resemblances to Virginia’s later literary style than in
all her father’s immense catalogue of published works. It shares that
peculiar humour, consisting of a mixture of irony and extravagance,
which lights up Orlando and A Room of One’s Own. It displays the
whimsical hyperbole, the half-amused detachment, the trick of remote
and yet illuminating reference, and something of the wondering,
contemplative mind inherited by the daughter’ (1932: 12–13).
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Mia Jackson read her daughter’s treatise ‘with such pleasure – it is
so fresh and bright not a dull page on what might be & generally
is made such a dull subject’.15 Leslie Stephen subtly alters its title
to Notes from Sickrooms, and patronisingly dismisses it (MB: 40). His
biographer Noel Annan also mistitles it as Notes for Sick Rooms, and
denigrates her whole body of work: ‘Julia’s single publication is lost
in oblivion’ (1984: 102). It has been retrieved again by Constance
Hunting (1987), Gillespie and Steele ( JDS) and recently by the Paris
Press (2012), which publishes Stephen’s treatise alongside Woolf’s
essay ‘On Being Ill’, a very illuminating juxtaposition but not a connection made by Woolf.16
Woolf, like Annan, again seems influenced by her father’s assessments of Stephen. She almost never mentions either Notes from Sick
Rooms or ‘Agnostic Women’, though she makes unacknowledged
use of them.17 As Humm suggests, Stephen’s Notes from Sick Rooms
‘presages not only the physical descriptions in The Voyage Out but
also Woolf’s techniques of empathetic narrators and sometimes
exaggerated sensibilities’ (2006b: 247). Stephen’s concern about
fresh milk ( JDS: 234), then often contaminated and a source of
tuberculosis, is reflected in Mrs Ramsay’s desire to provide a model
dairy and a hospital (TtL: 49). Stephen, like Mrs Ramsay, visited the
poor and the sick, even when on holiday. In this too she was practical
and professional. Dr Nicholls of St Ives, in a condolence letter to
George Duckworth, records that, ‘In scores of houses I have heard
people speak gratefully of Mrs Stephen’s kindness and sympathy with
the poor who were in distress through sickness.’18
The assertion made by Leslie Stephen (MB: 40) and perpetuated
by Woolf (Rem: 32) that Stephen’s nursing was only therapy after
Herbert Duckworth’s death, is demeaning. Stephen was the daughter
of a doctor and had a vocation and interest in medical matters all
her life. She is informed and concerned about conditions for nurses,
as seen in a letter to Minny Stephen, addressed ‘Dearest Minnie’:
The Hospt Authorities do nothing for nurses who have lost their
health in their service. The only Hospital that has any nurses [sic]
pension is Batholomews [sic] and there it is only given after 20
years service in the hospital which few live to obtain – the whole
thing is shameful. The salaries of nurses keep being lower than
what most servants get [...] The fact is that a good hospital nurse
Julia Prinsep Stephen 115
is most difficult to get and one does not wonder at it when one
looks at the life and the salary.19
She also shares Minny’s concerns about Anny’s work at the Cancer
Hospital. Inconsistently, Woolf does acknowledge elsewhere that Mia
Jackson’s invalidity meant that Stephen was well used to nursing
from childhood (Sketch: 86). As Andrea Adolph has revealed, Mia
Jackson’s letters show that mother and daughter were ‘a far cry from
the frail and demure Victorian ladies that both women, but particularly Maria Jackson, have been made out to be’ and reflect ‘ways in
which discourses of health and the body have been passed from one
generation to the other’.20 They do not conform to Woolf’s playfully
exaggerated stereotype of Victorian attitudes to sexuality and the
body, suggesting that ‘Love, birth, and death were all swaddled in
a variety of fine phrases’ (O: 219). Stephen and her mother felt able
to discuss both female and male bodies and functions, employing
correct medical and scientific terminology, completely free from
euphemism or prudery, and showing an interest in current developments in health care, for instance the newly developed smallpox
vaccinations ‘from the calf’. In a series of letters to Julia in April
1881, Mia Jackson, unable to travel, desperately tries to get the best
care for her other daughter, Adeline Vaughan. She is concerned that
the doctor should know of her ‘uterine complaint’ which is probably
the source of ‘her retching and bringing up bile’. She is afraid ‘it
might be pericarditis’. She sends glycerine and rosewater to soothe
her dry tongue and ‘an enema in a box’, the ‘best kind with no trap
to collect verdigris’ and ‘no paint’. When Julia finally leaves her baby,
whom she is presumably still feeding, to go to her dying sister, her
mother gives practical advice about her ‘painful breasts’.
Stephen’s professionalism is revealed in Notes from Sick Rooms, ‘The
Servant Question’ and the shorter ‘Domestic Arrangements of the
Ordinary English Home’, which reworks much the same argument.
These texts also place Stephen within contemporary debates in
response to changing demographics and social conditions, conducted
in journals such as Nineteenth Century and the Cornhill. They show
her concern for the conditions of women’s lives and, though her
articles remained unpublished,21 they also position her firmly within
a family tradition of journalistic response.22 Her correspondence
complaining about the withdrawal of the alcohol allowance from
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Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
the pauper women in the St George’s Union, a workhouse she frequently visited and clearly took an active interest in, was published
in the Pall Mall Gazette.23 Stephen was a woman of her time and class.
She took for granted, as did her daughters a generation later, that she
would employ servants, but she gives status to domestic work and
argues forcefully that ‘to serve is no bad office, and the service which
is as valuable and useful as that of our domestic servant should be no
degradation’ ( JDS: 248). It is not the service, whether paid or unpaid,
which is dull, demeaning or degrading, but people’s attitudes to it.
She urges an equal relationship between mistress and servant, with
duties of care, respect and responsibility on both sides.
Woolf grew up aware of her mother’s interest in women’s lives,
and in journalism, both of which she would develop in much greater
depth and detail. The mistress–servant relationship was also one
which occupied her in her fiction and her life. Woolf recasts ‘The
Servant Question’ as ‘the question of Nellie’ and ‘a fine rubbish
heap left by our parents to be swept’ (D3: 220), but as Light (2008)
has shown, it is a question which she never resolves. She revisits it
especially in The Years where, as I discuss in Chapter 6, servants are
always symbolically located in the basements, or written out of her
novel. Stephen, however, is sure of her ground and does not demean
the value of servants’ work by rendering them invisible. She carries
out her philosophy in her everyday life, at least as much as was
possible in the crowded confines of 22 Hyde Park Gate.24 Stephen
attempts to educate her children into the same attitudes. Her children’s stories reinforce her attitude of respect to servants. Mocking
or mistreating servants, as for instance Jem does in ‘The Mysterious
Voice’ ( JDS: 89–106), is shown to be reprehensible.
Stephen’s atheism and philanthropy
Unlike most Victorian stories for children, Stephen’s reflect her atheism
and reject any conventional Christian morality. They promote
humanist values of work and caring for others without any of the
stereotypically Victorian focus on divine blessing for good deeds,
or retribution for bad. Stephen’s beliefs and daily practice privilege
a humanist belief in the importance of friendship and a supportive
community which, as Rosenbaum notes, also informs G.E. Moore’s
philosophy, and would later typify Bloomsbury values (1987: 214–38).
Julia Prinsep Stephen 117
Jem for instance is allowed to be naughty without being punished,
but learns that his misdeeds only lead to his own unhappiness and
exclusion from family and friends ( JDS: 89–106).
Woolf was clearly influenced by these beliefs. In her own work
atheism is more usually linked to female characters and the domestic or maternal sphere. Helen Ambrose fears that in her absence the
nurse might teach her children to pray, when ‘So far, owing to great
care on my part, they think of God as a kind of walrus’ (VO: 20). In
between her embroidering she is reading sentences from G.E. Moore’s
work (26). The famous dinner-party scene in To the Lighthouse has
been read as having ‘distinct overtones of a Eucharist at which
[Mrs Ramsay] is president’ (de Gay 2009: 26–31). However, in spite
of the evident Christian symbolism, Mrs Ramsay is an atheist, ‘How
could any Lord have made this world? [...] there is no reason, order,
justice: but suffering, death, the poor [...] No happiness lasted; she
knew that’ (TtL: 54). Julia Stephen’s philosophy, and the traumatic
impetus for it, Herbert Duckworth’s death, is most fully articulated
by Woolf fictionally, through Peter Walsh’s description of Clarissa
Dalloway, ‘one of the most thorough-going sceptics he had ever met
[...] after Sylvia’s death – that horrible affair’ (MD: 85). He imaginatively constructs her thought processes. Woolf is clearly again drawing
on her father’s accounts of her mother’s mourning and loss of faith
(MB: 39–41), but also recognises a rebellious, subversive streak in this
representation of her mother.
Stephen was concerned to improve the conditions of women’s
lives and provides a feminist manifesto for her daughter to follow,
though she was in many ways not what we might now think of as
conventionally feminist or political. She was actively against the
NUWSS, being one of over two thousand women who signed an
‘Appeal Against Female Suffrage’, published in the Nineteenth Century
in 1889.25 Not all Victorian philanthropy was well conceived or beneficial in its results, as Light’s exploration of the story of Lottie Hope,
Woolf’s servant, shows (2008: 88–96); but it is equally wrong to suggest that Julia Stephen was worn down and oppressed by her philanthropy, as is suggested in the Mausoleum Book or in Woolf’s memoirs
where she portrays her mother sinking ‘like an exhausted swimmer’
under ‘the extravagant waste of such a life’ (Rem: 39). Her philanthropy was resented by Leslie Stephen and by Woolf (Sketch: 133)
probably because they felt that it took her attention away from them.
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In her early memoir Woolf differentiates Stephen’s ‘service of others’
from the ‘mischievous philanthropy which other women practise so
complacently and often with such disastrous results’ (Rem: 34); but
her ironic portrayal of Eleanor’s philanthropy in The Years seems an
implied pejorative comment on the work of her mother and of Stella
Duckworth. Julia Stephen and Stella Duckworth were enlightened,
committed and professional in their attitudes; women of their class
and time, informed and actively involved along with their friends
and extended family in a culture of philanthropy and reform.26 It
was part of their matrilineage, as shown in Mia Jackson’s letter to
Julia asking, ‘Have you read General Booth’s scheme for the succour
of the East End of London? If it could be carried out no doubt great
results would ensue – but the £100,000 down and the 30,000 a year
are difficulties to begin with.’27
I have argued that MacKay’s theories of creative negativity (MacKay
2001: 1–16) allow us to read Ritchie and Cameron differently from
the way they have often been portrayed, especially by Woolf. Their
eccentricity and espièglerie can be seen as powerful, subversive ploys
to undermine the patriarchal systems and voices which attempted
to control, limit and trivialise their work and working practices.
MacKay’s theories have more limited relevance to Stephen, because
her output and professional life are more limited than Ritchie’s and
Cameron’s, but they still facilitate a different reading of her. I would
not suggest that Stephen was eccentric, but, as I have shown, she
could be very unconventional and subversive. She could also be
prankish, as I argue below. She was strong-willed and quietly determined; even, as Woolf suggests in her representation as Mrs Ramsay,
devious and manipulative. In part, I speculate that Stephen’s philanthropy during her second marriage can be seen as her ploy for getting
away from family duties and an over-demanding husband. It creates
a space for herself. The sickroom and the workhouse provide a room
of her own where she can practise her vocation.
Stephen’s mentorship of the young apprentice
Stephen’s influence is also as active support for the apprentice writer.
Woolf famously claims that ‘we think back through our mothers if we
are women’ (Room: 99). She does not acknowledge that she also
wrote back through her; literally using ‘the parent of all pens – the
Julia Prinsep Stephen 119
black J. the pen, as I used to think it, [...] as a child, because mother
used it; & therefore all other pens were varieties & eccentricities’ (D1:
208). Woolf’s pen, like her mother’s, was always filled with purple ink,
the colour which Woolf associates with her, from her first memory of
Stephen’s purple dress (Sketch: 64) to the purple triangle representing
her in Lily Briscoe’s painting (TtL: 45), and the posy of violets which
Rose Pargiter places on her mother’s coffin (TY: 81). Stephen embodies
for Woolf a love of reading and of books. De Quincey’s Opium Eater
was always on her table, and her father gave her a complete set of first
editions of the works of Scott, ‘some remain; others are lost’ (Sketch:
86). Many of her mother’s books remained in Woolf’s library and
some resurface as intertexts in To the Lighthouse (TtL: 86–7).
Possibly her most important legacy is her storytelling. While Leslie
Stephen read to his children from his favourite classics (E1: 127–9),
Stephen told them stories of her own invention. She taught them
that they could be authors of their own narratives, characters in their
own stories, draw on their own experience, and fuse fact and fiction.
Even her fantasy anthropomorphic stories such as ‘The Wandering
Pigs’ ( JDS: 138–65) are firmly located in detailed, realist landscapes,
which become significant intertexts in her work, as they would later
be in Woolf’s. The pigs live in a white house, recognisably Talland
House, in a port which is clearly St Ives. There were ‘plenty of strong
fishing boats, with their brown sails set all sailing straight from
the north [...] There was a long pier which ran out to sea and far
off, rising straight out of the sea, was a white lighthouse on whose
windows the sun was burning fiercely’ ( JDS: 148).28 Stephen’s stories
were not published in her lifetime, though she seems to have contemplated doing so ( JDS: 34, 258 n. 4), and Woolf did not attempt to
publish them later. They are slight, but Alex Zwerdling rightly recognises them as the work of ‘a real writer with a flair for language and
a shrewdly observant eye’. They are not amateurish but by an author
who has ‘thought about characterization, suspense, and narrative
shape rather carefully and who writes with delightful inventiveness
and considerable wit’ (1986: 190).
Above all they are entertaining. Woolf listened and learned. Her
1891 Ghost Story begins, ‘In the north of the little town St Ives
Cornwall there are two houses said to be haunted’ (HPGN: 18). At
bedtimes, as Vanessa remembered, the sisters collaboratively created ‘wild stories’, often about their neighbours the Dilke family
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(Giachero 1997: 59; Sketch: 79). This occupation she later fictionalised. Mrs Ramsay, like Julia Stephen, went to say good night and
found them ‘still making up stories’ (TtL: 50). Woolf’s own first
rambling serial stories made up on her daily walks have recognisable
locations, like her mother’s. They constitute a founding part of her
literary heritage, remembered all her life (Sketch: 76–7).
Stephen taught her daughter that stories could be fun. Hers are full
of in-jokes which must have amused her young listeners, a device
which was later employed by Woolf, in more sophisticated form,
especially in Freshwater and Orlando. In Stephen’s there are ‘lovely
Vanessa butterflies’ ( JDS: 145) and a naughty little girl, Ginia, who
buries her socks and shoes in the sand (47). Stephen taught an awareness of audience and interaction through such personalised stories
and jokes. In ‘The Mystic Voice’ (89–106), Jem and his siblings go to
see their aunt, a fictive version of Sara Prinsep, living in Lancaster
Gate and just returned from India. They are fascinated by the contents of her box full of shawls, exotic jewellery and toys, including
an ivory ‘Chinese puzzle, one ball inside the other’, a family treasure
which would resurface symbolically in Woolf’s Kew Gardens (HH: 89).
As late as 1924, and after many experiments in modernism, Woolf
returns to stories exactly like her mother’s. ‘Nurse Lugton’s Curtain’
and ‘The Widow and the Parrot: A True Story’ (154–5, 156–63) are
typical of Stephen’s style of simple narrative, with anthropomorphic
characters and realist recognisable settings, intended to amuse a
known, and knowing, audience. ‘The Widow and the Parrot’, with
drawings by Woolf on the typescript, was first written for Vanessa
Bell’s children in the 1920s. It is set in Rodmell and includes fictionalised versions of local residents, including the vicar. ‘Nurse Lugton’s
Curtain’ was written for Ann Stephen. Julia Stephen seems to have
collaborated informally with Leslie Stephen; either her stories fitted
some of his frequent animal drawings or vice versa (E1: 127).29 She
thus provides her daughters with a model for their future, much
more formalised and developed, collaborations between text and
illustration.
Woolf’s work valorises conversation, gossip and dialogue, including
internal monologue. She inherits her mother’s delight in small talk
and anecdotes (Lee 1997: 110). She recounts how, while her father
would sit on top of the omnibus in solitary silence, her mother
would deliberately sit to gossip with other passengers or the
Julia Prinsep Stephen 121
conductor (Rem: 37). Stephen was inventive, observant; alert to the
rhythms of speech, character, idiosyncrasy, narrative and dramatic
potential: ‘She stamped people with characters at once; and at St Ives,
or on Sunday afternoons at Hyde Park Gate, the scene was often fit
for the stage’ (35). Woolf remembers her mother seeing off Stella and
her friends on a train and ‘striking out in a phrase or two pictures
of all the people who came past her along the platform, and so she
kept them laughing till the train went’ (36). Woolf inherits this skill
which would later make her one of the greatest essayists and diarists,
as Vanessa Bell noted in relation to the writing of ‘Mr Bennett and
Mrs Brown’ (Giachero 1997: 151–3), where ‘Mrs Woolf’ begins ‘a
whole train of speculation’ (152) about a couple in a railway carriage.
Stephen provided an enthusiastic audience. She listened to, and
read, Woolf’s stories attentively (Sketch: 77). She took her work seriously and actively promoted it by circulating it around family and
friends. Mia Jackson was part of the supportive matrilineage, commenting critically and in detail. She writes to Julia about a recent tea
party, hoping that,
Ginia will give an account of it in her next Gazette. How clever is
the one you sent to me. She so graphically described Aunt Virginia’s
visit and your meeting with Georgie. Lady Somers smiling benignantly on the distinguished assembly of infants. There was animated conversation for about 5 minutes until she declared that she
must go – and she went accordingly, places the scene before one.30
Woolf’s scene-making ability is clear from the start. Stephen encouraged letter writing, family newspapers and all her children’s stories.31
It was she who initiated the Hyde Park Gate News project, recognising
Woolf’s particular talents. Mia Jackson considered that ‘Yr printing
press was a bright thought. I hope to receive a HPGate News!’32 Woolf
remembers her excitement when her mother read her newspaper,
placed on her breakfast plate on Monday mornings. Hidden, she
watched her response, and when it was positive felt an ‘extremity
of pleasure – it was like being a violin and being played upon –
when I found that she had sent a story of mine to Madge Symonds
[Vaughan]; it was so imaginative, she said’ (Sketch: 95).
Her mother’s praise, and active promotion of her work, clearly nurtured her creativity. Like her heroine, the young Jane Austen, Woolf
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loved writing stories to entertain her siblings (E3: 332), as evidenced
by her many serial stories in the newspaper. This was a collaborative
project among the Stephen children, but increasingly Woolf became
the chief and then the sole journalist. Even this early in her writing, however, Woolf is highly selective, deliberately crafting her
material. There is almost nothing about Laura. Her response to her
grandmother is problematic; there is little about her, or her supportive response to her work. Her grandmother’s illness is noted,
and recovery anticipated thanks to ‘her truly beloved Dr. Seton and
the nursing of her devoted daughter’, who has the necessary ‘skill in
plenty’ (HPGN: 47–8). However, Mia Jackson’s death a few days later,
at 22 Hyde Park Gate, is completely unremarked and unrecorded.
Woolf’s juvenilia indicates, as Brosnan argues, ‘the extent to
which she had perceived the implications of writing in sexual and
family politics’ (1999: 20). In her early stories and journalism Woolf
wants both to emulate the paternal profession and to gain maternal
approval. Given that Leslie Stephen also had a continual need for
female approval of his work, this situation is a formative influence
on Woolf’s ‘intricate and contradictory understanding’ of the links
between writing and gender and the feminisation of journalism
(21). Woolf’s pride in her father’s response to her reading is tinged
with an awareness that she read partly because she wanted him to
think her a ‘very clever little brat’ (Sketch: 112). The joy which her
mother’s response gives her, however, seems to go beyond just a
desire for approval. Vanessa Bell remembers how even the briefest
of praise from their mother ‘was enough to thrill her daughter – she
had had approval and been called clever and our eavesdropping was
rewarded’ (Giachero 1997: 65).
Stephen’s legacies: laughter and gossip
Stephen also bequeathed Woolf a legacy of laughter, fun and gossip.
The Hyde Park Gate News was what Lee has called ‘a licensed outlet
for rudeness and aggression [...] Its relish for mischief and in-jokes
would develop into the Dreadnought Hoax, into Orlando and
Freshwater, and into a lifelong ruthless pleasure in satire and gossip’
(1997: 109–10). Juliet Dusinberre notes something similar in To the
Lighthouse, ‘the process of silent disruption’, effected by the younger
children during the dinner party, and ‘a spirit of satire, risibility
Julia Prinsep Stephen 123
and irreverence’ (1999: xv). The Hyde Park Gate News also provides
evidence of Julia Stephen’s prankishness. She tolerated, even encouraged, such subversive ribaldry; often participating. After ‘the usual
buffoonery’ of 1 April the juveniles play a joke on ‘their respected
younger parent’. ‘“Ha ha ha he he he” laughed she with all the
good-natured vehemence of her nature’ (HPGN: 51). The family
paper records many instances of often raucous play and celebration.
One such was for Thoby’s birthday in September 1892 when the
‘super-exuberant’ children and their young friends, along with Julia
Stephen, the Duckworths and their friends, enjoyed large slices of
cake, games and charades which caused ‘uproarius laughter’ and
fireworks which went off ‘rippingly’. The next day the garden ‘was a
scene of ruin and destruction’ but her mother was not angry and no
one was punished (107–8). At the end of her life Woolf remembered
Stephen as ‘omnipresent [...] the creator of that crowded merry world
which spun so gaily in the centre of my childhood’ (Sketch: 84). One
of Woolf’s potent sensory memories is of how her mother laughed,
‘I sometimes end a laugh that way myself’ (81). Woolf recognises that
‘this social side is very genuine in me [...] It is a piece of jewellery
I inherit from my mother – a joy in laughter, something that is stimulated, not selfishly wholly or vainly, by contact with my friends.
And then ideas leap in me’ (D2: 250). Woolf describes laughter as
subversive, disruptive and anarchic. It is ‘bubbling laughter, this
irresponsible laughter: this laughter of mind and body floating away
rules, hours, discipline: immensely fertilising, yet formless, chaotic’
(HH: 141). It is espièglerie; joyous, creative and liberating.
Stephen and her mother had noted the young Woolf’s fascination
with language, and nurtured her growing word-hoard. ‘Tell Ginia I
feel very “supine”’, suggests Mia Jackson.33 It is a gift which Woolf
acknowledges through her fictional persona, that ‘wild villain’
Cam, in a cameo scene with her mother (TtL: 46–8). Mrs Ramsay
is tolerant of Cam’s abstraction in her own imaginative world. She
recognises her ability to fabricate stories from the quotidian, and
her skill as ventriloquist, ‘that parrot-like instinct which had picked
up Mildred’s words quite accurately’ (47). She is also aware of Cam’s
love of words and attracted by the sound of the word ‘Flounder’ (48).
In the final extant edition of the HPGN, 8 April 1895, just a month
before Stephen’s death, Woolf creates a persona for herself of The
Author, and another of The Editor, a middle-aged lady of 40 or 50,
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‘a tall cheery person, a smile lights up her face’ (HPGN: 200–1), who
seems to be another representation of Stephen. She continues her
role of support and facilitator of her daughter’s writing, helping to
solve her writer’s block by offering a rhyming dictionary. The death
of her mother brought a halt to Woolf’s writing. The Hyde Park Gate
News stopped publication. Her Journal entries only begin two years
later.
The absent mother
Stephen’s influence, however, was not dead. She remains one of
Woolf’s ‘invisible presences’ (Sketch: 80), not least because Woolf
turns her own bereavement into a lifelong creative engagement with
a literary tradition of maternal loss. The mother–daughter relationship was always represented as problematic, so much so that Susan
Greenfield argues that ‘at a time when motherhood was becoming
a major subject of public discussion and a litmus test for femininity,
representing its successful enactment remained a near narrative
impossibility’ (2002: 18). The absent/lost mother increasingly became
idealised in artistic representations. As Carolyn Dever argues, ‘the iconography of the maternal ideal achieves its cultural power through
a poetics of abandonment and ambivalence, as the representational
conundrum of the eroticized adult female is accommodated in the
disguise of a dead – and therefore virtuous, pure, noble, and true –
mother’ (1998: xi). This is, as I have argued, a model employed by
Leslie Stephen in the Mausoleum Book, with the double accounting
for the loss and sanctification of both Minny and Julia Stephen.
This Victorian idealisation of the lost mother is a model sometimes
recycled by Woolf, but, ambivalently, it is also one which she resists.
In The Voyage Out and again in The Years Woolf adopts the conventional nineteenth-century narrative which opens with family rupture
caused through the death or absence of the mother. However, in To
the Lighthouse, the novel which engages most autobiographically with
Stephen, Woolf reformulates this structure by placing Mrs Ramsay’s
death, in parentheses, halfway through the novel. This, as Dever
suggests, ‘unleashes Mrs. Ramsay from the constraining opposition
of life and death and suggests that this woman, as a woman and as a
mother, plays a pivotal role in the stories of those around her, even
as she retains a private adventure story of her own’ (1998: 203).
Julia Prinsep Stephen 125
Paradoxically this narrative construction thus allows Woolf the
freedom both to represent and to challenge Stephen’s idealisation.
In her memoir she realised that it would take an artist to explore
the complexity of her mother’s character (Sketch: 85). She had tried
to do this in To the Lighthouse. The artist Lily Briscoe realises, ‘There
must have been people who disliked her very much [...] Fifty pairs of
eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with’ (TtL: 159,
161). Mrs Ramsay, like Stephen, could be impetuous, quick tempered,
imperious and controlling. She could also be fun-loving, companionable and amusing (Rem: 34–40). Stephen had charisma but she
was not angelic, being, according to her friend Elizabeth Robbins,
‘the most beautiful Madonna & at the same time the most complete
woman of the world’ (D3: 183). Vanessa Bell affirms the accuracy
of Woolf’s portrayal, ‘you have given a portrait of mother which is
more like her to me than anything I could ever have conceived of as
possible’ (L3: 572).
Woolf’s engagement with the Angel in the House
Intrinsic to Woolf’s exploration is the figure of the Angel in the
House. Patmore’s eponymous poem was a material part of Woolf’s
matrilineage. The inscribed copy which he gave to his close friend
Mia Jackson, was bequeathed to Julia Stephen and then to Woolf.
By the 1870s the cult was widespread and hugely popular, as Ian
Anstruther argues (1992: 66–73, 95–100), though largely based on
a misrepresentation of the poem.34 By the fin de siècle the figure of
the Angel was being deployed to do battle with the New Woman
in cultural debates around the two spheres. The poem was first
published in two volumes in 1854 and 1856, and reprinted in one
volume in 1923, bringing the figure once more into contemporary
debates about patriarchy, including Woolf’s own in her speech to
the National Society for Women’s Service, 23 January 1931 (E5:
635–48). As Briggs suggests, this ‘reworked in comic mode the conflict between the Victorian “Angel in the House” – the internalized
voice of her mother, or of Mrs Ramsay – and that of Lily Briscoe, or
herself as artist’ (2005: 269–71). Woolf’s engagement culminates in A
Room of One’s Own, Three Guineas and The Years.
Woolf absorbs and appropriates the figure of the Angel in the
House; but in relation to her mother the stereotype is problematic.
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Woolf never explicitly applies the term to Julia Stephen but she
does often associate her with the attributes of an idealised female
domesticity, identical to those of the Angel. This is apparent, for
instance, in her discussions of Stephen’s training at Little Holland
House (Sketch: 86–8); and her conjunction of the tea-table tyranny
(Sketch: 118; N&D: 1–5; TY: 9–11) with the problems of the writing
woman. In her manuscript notes for her 1931 speech, Woolf argues
that while writing and even publishing are comparatively easy for a
woman, writing honestly is difficult since it can offend masculine
sensibilities. Woolf values ‘the naked contact of a mind’. To succeed
she decides to adopt ‘the pouring-out-tea attitude [... the] Sunday
afternoon attitude’ (TP: 164). This oblique approach and her advice
to women writers to mask their anger indicate that she too could
subversively employ what MacKay would term creative negativity.
Her association of the tea-table with the ‘Sunday afternoon attitude’,
the day on which Stephen was At Home, suggests that she could also
have observed such a devious ploy in her mother, if not at the time
then with adult hindsight. However, she allows us only a glimpse of
this, deciding not to pursue this analogy. It is erased in her spoken
and published versions of the speech where she adopts a direct, violent response to the threat posed by the Angel: ‘If I had not killed her,
she would have killed me – as a writer’ (E5: 640).35
Woolf does though explore ambivalence in the figure of the Angel
through her fiction, and recognises ‘the double-edged nature of
nineteenth-century descriptions of domesticity’ (Blair 2007: 1). It is
clear in Mrs Hilbery’s praise for Katharine’s skills in household organisation which she raised to an art form, ‘Poetry the wrong side out’
(N&D: 36). Katharine’s success in making sure that the household
runs smoothly (35) can also be seen as a ploy to earn the time and
space for her furtive, ‘unseemly’, ‘unwomanly’ life of mathematics
which is ‘directly opposed to literature’ (37). Similar ambivalence
is apparent in Woolf’s representation of Mrs Ramsay, first portrayed
as an iconic madonna, with her child by her knee, framed by the window, as in several family photographs of Julia Stephen. Mrs Ramsay is
fixed as such in Lily Briscoe’s painting and by her representation
as a purple triangle (TtL: 45, 164), symbolic of the female and the
Virgin Mary.36 However, this figure is subverted by Woolf’s reversal
of another conventional image of female fecundity and sacrificial
nurturing, the pelican pecking at its own breast to feed its young;
Julia Prinsep Stephen 127
which is turned into the patriarchal, destructive, phallic symbolism
of the ‘beak of brass, barren and bare’ (TtL: 33).
Mrs Ramsay’s representation as an Angel is also problematised
by her own discomfort with this nurturing persona and conflicting
desire to ‘be herself, by herself’ (TtL: 52). Images from nature, natural
cycles and a pulse beat represent Mrs Ramsay’s awareness that ‘the
effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her’ (69). But
employing her ‘rain of energy’ (33) means ‘there was scarcely a shell
of herself left for her to know herself by’ (34). Both Mrs Dalloway
and Mrs Ramsay follow what Blair identifies as ‘the heroic pattern
of meditative withdrawal and then ambiguously rededicated return’
to their social and domestic roles (2007: 221). Such self-questioning,
Heather Ingman suggests, ‘provides a window on to the future when
the next generation, her daughters, will go further in deconstructing the Victorian myth of motherhood’ (1998: 134). Already Prue,
Nancy and Rose ‘could sport with infidel ideas which they had
brewed for themselves of a life different’ from their mother’s (TtL: 9).
In The Years Woolf returns explicitly and more systematically to this
deconstruction.
The Angel, photography and ways of seeing
Woolf again draws on her legacy from Cameron in her exploration
of the figure of the Angel in the House and of roles for women. She
both articulates, and further problematises, Mrs Ramsay as figuring
the Angel through a discourse of photography and ways of seeing
which privilege similarities and co-operation between male and
female, rather than conflict and opposition. At the dinner party, Lily
Briscoe is deliberately placed to support the socially inept Mr Tansley.
Sitting opposite him she could see ‘as in an X-ray photograph, the
ribs and thigh bones of the young man’s desire to [...] break into
the conversation?’ (TtL: 74–5). Lily initially resists her role, but
eventually compromises in order to gain Mrs Ramsay’s approval. But
Woolf shifts the perspective. Lily reluctantly acknowledges that the
burden of such social codes is also borne by men (75). Mr Tansley
equally resents the compromises he must make: to leave his work
and socialise, to dress for dinner and ‘talk the sort of rot these people
wanted him to talk’ (70). Attempting to please Mrs Ramsay by fitting
into a socially expected role he felt ‘rigid and barren’ (73).
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When her nurturing role is succeeding, Mrs Ramsay ‘wore her
golden haze’ (TtL: 80), appearing angelic. She is arrested in a moment
of liminality, as in a photograph, ‘she hovered like a hawk suspended
[...] holding them safe together’ (85). The guests, too, are composed,
forming a tableau around the dining table with Rose’s ‘still life’ of
fruit in a shell at the centre. But nothing is stable; perspectives vary,
edges are fuzzy and reflections distorted. Mrs Ramsay is aware that
Mr Carmichael’s way of looking is different from hers. The lit candles
obscure the outside world, creating rippled reflections on the window glass in which objects ‘wavered and vanished, waterily’ (79–80).
Woolf further represents instability and ambivalence through the
figure of the artist Lily Briscoe. Patricia Laurence reads her ‘Chinese
eyes’ (17, 74, 85) as a metaphor for different ways of seeing: both
the complexity of Mrs Ramsay, and the plurality of different perspectives, including that of the Orient, as part of modernism (2003: 241,
351–8). Staying with the Ramsays, Lily was ‘made to feel violently
two opposite things at the same time’ (TtL: 83) and uncomfortably
perceives that Mrs Ramsay ‘somehow laughed, led her victims [...] to
the altar’ (83), a religious, yet threatening, image already embedded
in the hawk simile.
Retrieving the lost mother: invisible presences
Woolf’s writing reveals a concern not only to portray the lost mother,
in whatever guise, but to retrieve that mother figure. In this she
was influenced, as Ingman suggests, by the anthropologist Harrison’s
work into matriarchal myths (Ingman 1998: 125–44). Harrison’s
argument, that the ‘buried great goddess is a symbol of the buried
artist in all women’ (126) is particularly apposite. In To the Lighthouse,
patriarchal challenges to women’s creativity, and the concomitant
trope of retrieval of the mother, are also portrayed through the artist
Lily Briscoe, a fictionalised fusion of Woolf, ‘the shadow-writer’,
behind the painter, Vanessa Bell (Rosenman 1986: 93). Lily finally
silences the male taunt that ‘Women can’t paint, women can’t write’
(TtL: 42). But gender politics around creativity and the mother/child
image are highly ambivalent. Mrs Ramsay, too, had thought that
‘one could not take [Lily’s] painting very seriously’ (17).
In the first section of To the Lighthouse Woolf creates a presence:
the solidity and humanity of Stephen fictionalised as Mrs Ramsay.
Julia Prinsep Stephen 129
In challenging the idealisation constructed by Leslie Stephen in the
Mausoleum Book, Woolf frees Julia Stephen. Mrs Ramsay increasingly
feels the need to be silent and alone, to become ‘oneself, a wedgeshaped core of darkness, something invisible to others’ (TtL: 52).
The final two sections of the novel become about creating a presence out of an absence. While writing the end of the novel, Woolf
was haunted by the phrase ‘Where there is nothing’ (D3: 111).
The drawing-room steps where Stephen was often photographed,
and Mrs Ramsay was painted, are suddenly empty and ‘the whole
wave and whisper of the garden became like curves and arabesques
flourishing round a centre of complete emptiness’ (TtL: 147). As Mrs
Ramsay, Stephen is transcendent in Briscoe’s painting and immortalised in Woolf’s novel. She becomes an enduring, complex, though
invisible, presence. Although the mother is killed, she has been, as
Vanessa Bell recognised, ‘raised from the dead’ (L3: 572).
While contemplating To the Lighthouse, Woolf engaged in another
highly ambivalent and problematic appropriation and memorialisation of her mother, again also linked to the legacy of Cameron. She
was photographed in 1923 for Vogue magazine wearing typically
Victorian dress. There is nothing in the article to confirm that this
is in fact her mother’s dress but it has been accepted as such by
many biographers and critics.37 The photo was published in May
1924 (Garrity 2000: 201), when Woolf was one of the nominations
for The Hall of Fame, thus confirming her burgeoning celebrity
status and, by the significant date, memorialising Stephen’s death.
More bizarrely it was taken in the studio of Thomas Woolner, Julia
Stephen’s rejected suitor. The photograph thus links the two women,
implicating Stephen in Woolf’s rise to fame. But the caption writes
Julia Stephen out: Woolf is nominated because ‘she is the daughter of
the late Sir Leslie Stephen and sister of Vanessa Bell’. Her published
novels are listed and ‘in the opinion of some of the best judges she
is the most brilliant novelist of the younger generation’. Additional
reasons for the nomination are that she is ‘a publisher with a prose
style’, ‘writes admirable criticism’ and ‘with her husband she runs
The Hogarth Press’.38
As Garrity argues, ‘the photograph works to signal that Woolf is
a modernist who is haunted by her Victorian past’ (2000: 202); but
it is unclear why Woolf colluded in such a representation in this
context. Her bizarre choice of dress and uncomfortable, downcast
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gaze mark her out as radically different from the other nominations,
especially the stylishly modern Sitwell siblings photographed on the
same page, whose mother as well as father are given as one of the
reasons for their nomination. Her clear discomfort works against any
speculation that she is being deliberately playful or ironic, and apart
from the ill-fitting dress there is nothing Victorian about the pose,
staging, lighting or tone of the photograph. However, Woolf must
have had input into the choices of dress and location. No explanation is given in the magazine, nor in Woolf’s diaries or letters apart
from an entry in October 1924, ‘Vogue, (via Dadie) is going to take
up Mrs Woolf, to boom her’ (D2: 319). There is silence about where
the dress came from, when her mother had worn it, whether it had
been kept by herself or Vanessa, what its significance was for Woolf,
and most importantly why she chose to wear it.
Even more unaccountably Woolf authorised this photograph to
be reprinted in Vogue May 1926. This time it is blown up to full size
next to Woolf’s review of the letters of Walter Raleigh. Garrity notes
that Woolf is the only modernist woman to be ‘exhibited’ in Vogue
in Victorian dress – a disturbing juxtaposition with the caption
which again celebrates her status as a leading writer of the younger
generation and daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen. Garrity speculates that
this ‘inherent ambiguity’ has much to do with Vogue’s ‘precarious
position in the 1920s, poised between a desire to celebrate women’s
artistic achievements and unable fully to incorporate their intellectual authority and importance’, but it leads to Woolf being portrayed
‘in terms of a historically regressive model of femininity’ (2000: 204).
In May 1925 another photograph of her was published in Vogue
(206), which accompanies a review by Edwin Muir of The Common
Reader. Although this time dressed in her own clothes, Woolf has
an averted, downcast gaze and a prominent display of gloves, both
anachronistic in fashion photographs of the period, and highly
revealing of her troubled relationship with her past.
In December 1926 Vogue published a Cameron photograph of
Stephen (Garrity 2000: 203; Wolf 1998: plates 60 and 61). Woolf
deliberately exploited and commodified both her mother and
Cameron by allowing the publication of this photograph as part of a
marketing campaign to advertise the Hogarth Press’ limited edition of
‘a very beautifully produced volume of Victorian Photographs’ (quoted
in Garrity 2000: 217 n. 30): Fry and Woolf’s Victorian Photographs of
Julia Prinsep Stephen 131
Famous Men and Fair Women by Julia Margaret Cameron (1926). Though
the photograph is captioned ‘Mrs Leslie Stephen’, it is one of a series
taken in 1867 just before her marriage to Herbert Duckworth when
she was still Julia Jackson. She is very young and serene, dressed in
modest Victorian dress with hair carefully smoothed and tied back
into a bun at the nape of her neck. It is again unclear what the
significance of Woolf’s selection of this particular Cameron photograph was for her but, ambiguous as they are, this series of Vogue
photographs does indicate the strength and complexity of Woolf’s
on-going engagement with her past.
Woolf claimed that when she had written To the Lighthouse she was
no longer obsessed by her mother and supposed that she had done
‘what psycho-analysts do for their patients’ (Sketch: 81). She was well
aware of Freud’s work in this field, since from 1924 the Hogarth Press
began publishing translations by psychoanalysts Alix and James
Strachey. She was also aware of challenges to Freud’s phallocentric
theories in favour of mother-centred developmental theories by
women practitioners such as Melanie Klein.39 Woolf’s use of Stephen
as an intertext in To the Lighthouse means that her exploration of
mother/daughter theories remains individualised and conflicted,
tied to her own filial relationship. She does not generalise them or
explore them in the depth that many other women novelists, such
as May Sinclair, were doing. Woolf’s attempts at self-analysis and
exorcism proved futile. She remained obsessed with her mother even
after ‘killing’ her in To the Lighthouse, as is evident in the cycles of
matricide and resurrection in The Years. Frequent references to her
continue in her diaries and even at the end of her life she recorded
the anniversary of her mother’s birthday (Oldfield 2006: 24–5).
Living life through from the start: reimagining Stephen
Her obsession is creative rather than pathological; reconnecting with
her mother, and her past, gives meaning to her own present. In 1939
she began imaginatively to live her life through from the start for
her memoir A Sketch of the Past. Julia Stephen is fundamental to the
project of actively retrieving memories and imaginatively creating
scenes of family life, ‘very merry, very stirring, crowded with people;
and she was the centre; it was herself’ (Sketch: 84). From the perspective of hindsight and maturity, Woolf revisits and reshapes Stephen
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yet again. She self-consciously crafts her potent first memory of
sitting on her mother’s knee and of the red and purple flowers on
her mother’s dress. She is unsure if they were in a train or a bus,
going or returning from St Ives. She is aware of the fallibility of
her memory and its fictive qualities, consciously selecting what is
‘more convenient artistically’ (64). Woolf’s first sense impressions
of Stephen and St Ives are articulated in highly gendered, semiotic
language, ‘The buzz, the croon, the smell, all seemed to press voluptuously against some membrane; not to burst it; but to hum round
one such a complete rapture of pleasure’ (66).
As primary source material for our knowledge of Woolf’s Victorian
childhood, A Sketch of the Past is a very unreliable document. She did
not begin to write it until she was nearly 60 so that it is inevitably
subject to the fallibilities of her own memory. It is also subject to
endless revisions and rewritings and, like Ritchie’s journal, was
deliberately crafted from selected early diaries and letters. She dipped
also into her father’s memoirs and old letters, but was anxious to
avoid losing ‘my childs [sic] vision & so must stop’ (D5: 345). The
later sections were written after she had met Freud and, in spite of
Woolf’s assertions that there should be ‘Nothing turbulent; nothing
involved: no introspection’ (345), they seem consciously selfanalytical, as Briggs suggests (2005: 369). A Sketch of the Past is a very
edited and controlled version of how she wanted to present herself
and her family for the record, though left incomplete as a series of
handwritten papers and typescripts. Moreover, Briggs has identified
inconsistencies and omissions in Jeanne Schulkind’s 1975 edition
(2005: 367–9), a major source for Woolf scholars.40 Woolf’s memoir
self-consciously draws attention to such fallibility and to the way
that memory changes according to our perspective, ‘My mother,
I was thinking had 2 characters [...] I see father from the 2 angles.
As a child condemning; as a woman of 58 understanding-I shd say
tolerating. Both views true?’ (D5: 281). It links with questions of the
fluidity of identity which she explores in The Years. Rose felt herself
to be ‘two different people at the same time’ (TY: 159).
Woolf explores not just how childhood experience has formed the
future adult, but how it has formed the future writer. As a writer,
what is important is not the memory of the experience itself, but
the numinous impact of these moments of being, which she then
makes ‘real by putting it into words’ (Sketch: 72). Like Lily Briscoe,
Julia Prinsep Stephen 133
she makes up scenes, ‘tunnelling her way into her picture, into the
past’ (TtL: 142), through a series of snapshots. In order to capture her
early memories she imagines herself as a painter, but could easily be
a photographer with Cameron’s fuzzy soft focus, creating womb-like
evanescent images ‘showing the light through, but not giving a clear
outline’ (Sketch: 66). At the end of her life, she again draws attention
to her mother’s presence by use of the deictic. She acknowledges
that Stephen is central to her childhood; to her lasting, crafted, and
often fictionalised, memories of childhood; and to her formation as
a writer, ‘Certainly there she was, in the very centre [...] there she was
from the very first’ (81).
6
‘Let us be our great grandmothers’:
Heredity and Legacy in The Years
Woolf’s desire to identify with her forebears, to imaginatively
‘become the people that we were two or three generations ago’, to
‘be our great grandmothers’ (TP: 8), is expressed in The Pargiters,
the genetic precursor to The Years, in her fictional First Essay.1 It is
followed by an extract from a novel, a work in progress, which, in
a complicated multi-valenced conceit, the narrator reads to her audience of young women in order to project them imaginatively into
the lives and times of their nineteenth-century forebears. Woolf’s
understanding that ‘we cannot understand the present if we isolate
it from the past’ (8) is emphasised by her repeated images of cycles
of time, ‘Slowly wheeling, like the rays of a searchlight, the days, the
weeks, the years passed one after another across the sky’ (TY: 4). This
trope both enacts continuity and recurs, with the interconnected
figures of the lighthouse and the telescope, throughout her work,
wheeling through Night and Day, ‘The Searchlight’, To the Lighthouse
and into The Years.
Close reading of The Years (1937), and comparisons between it and
Night and Day (1919), reveal Woolf’s on-going, ambivalent engagement with her past, and with the legacies of Ritchie, Cameron and
Stephen. They show the same cycles of affiliation and rejection; and
the same tensions in her interrogation of literary realism; her play
between fact and fiction; the ontological uncertainty of identity and
of memory; her use of the visual and the visionary which extends her
lines of inheritance from Cameron. Her fascination with life-writing
and the retrieval of family histories, which she explores in Night and
Day especially through Mrs Hilbery’s/Ritchie’s biographical writing,
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Heredity and Legacy in The Years
135
portraits and photographs, is developed in The Years through these
media and a much wider network of genealogical, geographical,
temporal and historical links.
Recreating family histories: The Years and
A Sketch of the Past
Most importantly, Woolf continues to recycle, and to construct,
variant narratives of her own past, and that of her three forebears,
particularly Stephen and Ritchie. Woolf is, as Light identifies, ‘a
resurrectionist, raising her family from the dead in her novels, and
saving people from extinction both as a biographer and an obituarist’
(2008: 50). Narratives from her earlier works circulate in The Years,
often with slight slippage. For some source material she went back to
two early memoirs, ‘22 Hyde Park Gate’ (MoB: 164–77) and its sequel
‘Old Bloomsbury’ (181–201). These cover the season of 1903, and
then from 1904 to 1914, with many interspersed earlier childhood
memories. They were read to the Memoir Club in either 1920 or
1921, and in 1922, so were intended to amuse and startle her close
friends. They remained unpublished until edited by Schulkind in
Moments of Being (1985). Though written earlier they thus post-date
the time frame of A Sketch of the Past, and provide further evidence
for Woolf’s lifelong retrospective and creative reworking of her past
and her family.
Such engagement was heightened by her reflections on the same
auto/biographical material for A Sketch of the Past with which The
Years circulates. While Woolf stated that she began to write her memoir on Sunday 16 April 1939 (Sketch: 64), it seems evident from many
close correspondences that she was already working on it well before
this, while writing The Years. Passages in The Years pre-echo some in
A Sketch of the Past, as I indicate below, and evidence how closely the
extended Pargiter family is based on recollections of her own family.
In her memoir, Woolf contemplates, theorises and constructs
scenes to explore what makes up a life, wondering, like Eleanor,
‘Oughtn’t a life to be something you could handle and produce? [...]
But I’ve only the present moment’ (TY: 348).
Ambivalently, Woolf attempted to resist the notion that The Years
is a family saga, a form she associated pejoratively with middlebrow
fiction, deliberately changing the title from The Pargiters to avoid
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comparison with contemporary popular sagas such as those about
the Herries and the Forsytes (D4: 176). Nevertheless, like a saga, it
follows a family through the generations. The strong sense of auto/
biography and of literary realism is highlighted by the specifically
dated sections which virtually span Woolf’s own life. She planned it
to run from 1800 to 2032, but when published it dates from 1880,
two years before Woolf’s birth, to ‘The Present Day’, 1937, three years
before her death.2 Woolf was aware of significant coincidences and
her own close identification, ‘I hardly know which I am, or where:
Virginia or Elvira; in the Pargiters or outside’ (D4: 148). Mitchell
Leaska suggests that, in chronicling the Stephen family, her ‘lyrical To
the Lighthouse had been a masterpiece, but in it she had not told the
whole truth: the story of Cam’s intense, unnatural love for her father,
her ambivalence for her mother’ (1998: 303). It was this which she
attempted, but repeatedly drew back from, in The Years. Revisiting her
past with such intensity caused an almost catastrophic illness so that,
as with Night and Day, she was writing against the nightmare of
mental breakdown (D5: 25). She excised more than half her material,
and wrote out Elvira, in order to disguise unpalatable facts, and, as
Leaska argues, ‘tell the truth [...] without blackening the Stephen
family history and a social system from which she herself had sprung
and of which she herself was altogether a product’ (1998: 375–6). In
1936, part of Leonard Woolf’s cure for this ‘terrifying time’ was to
take her back to St Ives where at dusk they trespassed in the garden of
Talland House and ‘Virginia peered through the ground-floor windows
to see the ghosts of her childhood’ (L. Woolf 1975b: 154).
Woolf develops some of the autobiographical resonances in detail.
Eleanor, for instance, exhibits recognisable qualities of Stella, ‘the
buffer between her and the intensities and strifes of family life’ (TY: 13).
Dr Malone is based on Woolf’s cousin Herbert Fisher, the Warden
of New College Oxford. Others are only glancing comparisons not
widely known outside Woolf’s immediate circle, yet of significance
to her. Woolf’s apparently odd assertions that October was the birth
of the year (TY: 88, 91; D3: 161; PA: 213) come directly, along with
her working title Dawn, from her cousin James K. Stephen’s poem
‘The Dawn of the Year’.3 Kitty’s beetle-wing head-dress (TY: 125, 179)
recalls the beetle-wing dress worn by Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth.4
Some incidents, especially those rooted in her childhood, are taken
almost word for word from Woolf’s memoirs, such as watching the
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137
party in the house opposite (TY: 127; PA: 164–7) or walking on shells
by the Round Pond (TY: 87; Sketch: 76).
The 1880s section of The Years relies, even more heavily than does
Night and Day, on Woolf’s imaginatively transformed memories of
22 Hyde Park Gate, and of Julia Stephen’s central role in her life
there. The round tea-table is the centre of lively social family life in
Night and Day and in Woolf’s memories of when her mother presided
over it, ‘with its pink china shell full of spice buns’ around which
eminent old gentlemen were conversing and there was a ‘ravishing
stream of female beauty’ (MoB: 164, 165). Its representation in The
Years reveals both the continuity of Woolf’s dialogue with her past
and the difference in tone of the two novels. The Years, product of
the 1930s, is much more pessimistic, bleak and nihilistic.5 In Night
and Day, Katharine Hilbery, though resentful, manages her role as
hostess effectively. Mrs Denham has successfully evolved a new
model to replace the traditional drawing-room tea (N&D: 359). The
Pargiter daughters, however, are portrayed as trapped by, and inept
at, their rituals of tea-drinking (TY: 15). Transposed from The Pargiters
into Three Guineas the tea-table becomes, as Humm discusses (2002:
201–2), a space to display photographs of atrocities and a centre for
Woolf’s anti-war effort (TG: 164).
The Years returns to the theme of heredity, and especially patriarchal entrapment, from which Katharine attempts to escape, as
Woolf felt she had escaped ‘the cage – 22 Hyde Park Gate’ (Sketch:
116). Family life is portrayed as even more unremittingly negative
and destructive than in Night and Day. The Years is structured to
emphasise periodicity, generations and continuities. The family is
a dynamic evolving organism, with tentacles which stretch out for
their prey (TY: 358–9). It has an animal ferocity, red in tooth and
claw, to claim and protect its own, as North realises when looking at
Maggie’s hands (361).
The past is again figured as a Victorian house, or two houses,
since events, conversations and images are replayed in both the Abel
Pargiter and Digby Pargiter houses. Woolf generalises her representation, portraying the houses and family life there as typical. Rose
wonders what could be more ordinary than a large family in a large
house going on and on (TY: 161). Yet there is also a closer personal
identification than in Night and Day. The Pargiter houses, crowded
with children, are much closer to Woolf’s experience in 22 Hyde Park
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Gate than is the spacious Hilbery house with its only child. It is ‘an
abominable system, [...] all those different people had lived, boxed
up together, telling lies’ (212). Similarly, Woolf felt that her home
‘seemed tangled and matted with emotion’ (MoB: 183). Damage caused
by the patriarchal family is figured by physical damage in the child.
Sara’s deformed shoulder was injured when she was dropped as a
baby; as Woolf’s cousin Hervey Fisher’s lifelong severe disability was
caused by being dropped by a nursemaid. At the end of the novel
Delia defiantly voices the hatred and aversion felt for their childhood
by all the elderly Pargiter siblings, ‘It was hell!’ (TY: 396), a reprise
of Woolf’s memory of the maid’s accusation to Julia Stephen about
conditions in the basement kitchen (Sketch: 116).
Resurrecting Julia Stephen
Most of all Woolf cannot let go of Julia Stephen. She is both more
present and more absent than in Night and Day, which does not deal
with the loss of the mother. The extent of her ambivalence about her
mother, and the strength of Stephen’s continuing invisible influence
and of Woolf’s sense of loss, is revealed in competing images of matricide and resurrection. She claimed to have stopped being obsessed by
her after symbolically killing her as Mrs Ramsay and memorialising
her in To the Lighthouse. Yet Woolf resurrects her again in the persona
of Rose Pargiter, only to exclaim with satisfaction, ‘I have just killed
Mrs P’ (D4: 173) in the first section of the novel. The portrayal of Rose
Pargiter’s extended illness, its effect on the family and the deathbed
scenes are a conflation of Julia Stephen’s death and her children’s
responses to it, as well as Leslie Stephen’s long illness and death,
again taken sometimes almost word for word from Woolf’s memories
in Reminiscences and A Sketch of the Past. The extravagant histrionics
of mourning reflect ‘a period of Oriental gloom’ (Sketch: 40) which
descended on her father and 22 Hyde Park Gate after her mother’s
death. However, Woolf resurrects and kills the mother yet again in the
figure of Eugénie Pargiter. There is no replay of the deathbed scenes.
She dies in unexplained circumstances between sections, almost in
parentheses like Mrs Ramsay. She is happy with her daughters and
her social life in the summer of 1907, but Martin reflects that she
has been dead for a little more than a year in March 1908. It is the
emotional effect of the loss which occupies Woolf, not strict temporal
Heredity and Legacy in The Years
139
accuracy. It is also possible that Woolf intended this discrepancy to
mimic the inaccuracies of memory, and the ways Eugénie is remembered differently by different people (146–7).
‘The Servant Question’ which occupied Stephen still occupies her
daughter. Light (2008) explores Woolf’s problematic and tempestuous relationship with her own servant. Woolf ironically regrets
that no Lives of maids are to be found in the Dictionary of National
Biography (TG: 390–1), and had once proposed to redress this by
writing an account of her turbulent, ambivalent relationship with
her maid Nellie (D3: 274). In The Years she achieves this objective by
devoting virtually the whole of the 1913 section to Crosby. Stephen
was concerned for the welfare of her servants, but had a Victorian
assurance in their differing roles and status. Woolf’s own feelings of
the awkwardness of the mistress/servant relationship, especially as
it is in flux in the twentieth century, are mediated through Eleanor
and Martin. Crosby’s excruciating visit to Martin’s lodging after she
has retired (TY: 210–12) is based on Woolf’s visit to their retired cook,
Sophie Farrell in Brixton (L5: 133). When the Pargiter house is being
cleared, Eleanor has a rare moment of insight, seeing things from
Crosby’s perspective. She becomes aware that Crosby had known the
house and its solid objects ‘from her knees, as she scrubbed and polished’ and that moreover Eleanor’s family were Crosby’s entire world
(TY: 206). During the war Maggie and Renny relocate to the security
of the basement, where they dine ‘because we’ve no servants’ (269).
Eleanor’s response that this is to be preferred reflects Woolf’s own
view when Nellie was gone, ‘Rooms empty of servants; to sit quietly;
[...] no unreal condescending talk’ (D3: 311). In enjoying having ‘no
servants’, Maggie renders invisible the nursemaid upstairs looking
after her children, and the daily skivvy who will come in to scrub
floors, wash up and prepare food; as Woolf does her gardener and
daily cleaner who inhabit the two staff cottages the Woolfs owned
in Rodmell.
In both Night and Day and The Years, Lee suggests that ‘Victorian
life is thick with things’ (1997: 46), but the ‘things’ derive from the
material reality of Woolf’s own life where the ‘patriarchal society of
the Victorian age was in full swing in our drawing room’ (Sketch: 153).
Eleanor’s inherited position is symbolised by her sitting at her dead
mother’s desk with the panic-inducing account books, knowing that
presenting them will draw down paternal wrath (TY: 19), as Woolf
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had seen Stella and then Vanessa terrorised on ‘bad Wednesdays’
(Sketch: 144–5). Solid objects, family possessions, crowd the rooms,
endlessly repeating themselves from fact into fiction. The crimson
armchair with gold claws which reappears in different Pargiter
rooms through the generations is resonant of Woolf’s description of
her mother’s chair (84). The tea kettle with the faulty wick remains
one of many symbolic recurring images representative of damage
and failure; and subject to fluctuation. It acquires a malign personification, ‘Deviously ascending from the basement’ (TY: 3). In 1908
Eleanor is still having to poke the wick to light it (144–5). By 1910
it has become a collective family memory (159), and in 1913 is part
of the shared sense of loss when the house is sold and the family
and servants dispersed (205). Solid objects eventually exist only as
palpable absences; shadows of themselves. Looking round the empty
house, Eleanor saw the marks on the wall where furniture had stood
(206). On leaving her family home, Woolf too noted how she could
‘write the history of every mark and scratch in my room’ (MoB: 183).
The Years and Night and Day
In The Years Woolf continues her exploration, begun in Night and
Day, of oppositions between inner and outer, and the transgression
of boundaries, through the trope of the door, originally borrowed
from Ritchie. Opening the Door, A Tap at the Door, The Open Door and
The Knock on the Door were all working titles for the novel during
her many revisions, and her draft needed ‘a great shove to swing it
round on its hinges’ (D4: 149). Bradshaw and Blyth’s suggestion that
Woolf could have been thinking of the Open Door movement (2012:
xxix), which campaigned for women’s equality in the workplace, is
appealing as it resonates with Ritchie’s concern for women’s working conditions.6 Doors are still mental as well as physical portals,
‘Some gust blew open a door: one of the many millions in Eleanor’s
seventy-odd years [...] and now one door opened and then another’
(TY: 312, 315).
At the end of The Years, after the party, the door again bursts open
to let in happy, young, dishevelled guests (TY: 412), in what seems
like a playful parody and recycling of Ritchie’s claim that the rising
generation no longer knock but ‘burst in, leaving the doors wide
open to admit the draughts from outside’ (FtP: 28). The draughts in
Heredity and Legacy in The Years
141
Ritchie’s scenario are energising but in The Years the younger generation has come only to say goodnight, and close the door again after
leaving. Eleanor watches two strangers across the street returning,
possibly from honeymoon. He ‘opened the door and they stood for
a moment on the threshold [before] the door shut with a little thud
behind them’ (TY: 413). Eleanor, like Katharine, is left in liminal
space. Life, especially fertile, creative life, is going on elsewhere.
Woolf’s vision of future liberation and choice for women, optimistically expressed in ‘Professions for Women’, A Room of One’s Own,
Orlando and To the Lighthouse, is in The Years negative and bleak. As
in Night and Day, Woolf explores a range of conditions and options
for women, but gender politics are even more highly conflicted than
in the earlier novel and reveal how much more pessimistic is Woolf’s
1930s mindset. Flight from the paternal home is at least a strong
possibility for Katharine, but the young women in Woolf’s imagined
audience seem to have regressed. They have achieved rooms of their
own and are creatively occupied writing or painting within them;
but paradoxically they are more enclosed and trapped, passively
waiting for liberation, ‘You will hear somebody coming. You will
open the door’ (TP: xxxxiv).
The Pargiter women are freed when, after the deaths of Digby and
Abel Pargiter, the patriarchal homes are sold and the doors flung
wide open. Woolf, however, represents their liberated lives in negative terms. Peggy, a successful doctor, has gained a university education, a room of her own and a profession; but her achievements are
not celebrated. She feels tired, lonely and worn down, with an utterly
bleak view of the brutality and tyranny of the world around her
(TY: 369). Eleanor is active outside the home in both philanthropy and
politics. However, her work is derogatively termed, and she is one of
the ‘virgins and spinsters with hands that had staunched the sores of
Bermondsey and Hoxton’ (3). Her charity work and dreams of a better
future are shown to be futile.7 The roof on one of her newly built
houses for the poor is leaking, and the sunflower plaque, a signifier
of optimism, is cracked (97, 348). After housekeeping for her tyrannical father until his death, Eleanor finally gains a room of her own,
but it is up six flights of stone stairs, cramped and shabby. Sara, in
earlier drafts one of the most politically dynamic of the women, lives
alone in poverty and increasingly in her dreams. Her outlook is the
most bleak, imagining her room as a ‘cave, this little antre, scooped
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out of mud and dung’ (180). She repeats the image when sheltering
from the air raid in Maggie’s cellar (279). Eleanor echoes it, wondering when the promised new world will come so that they can ‘live
adventurously, wholly, not like cripples in a cave’ (282).
Kitty Malone succumbs to parental pressure and her grooming,
making a ‘brilliant’ marriage and becoming Lady Lasswade. She
lives a life of privilege and luxury, but in old age, widowed and
thwarted of her ambition to become a farmer, she lives on her
crumbling northern estates, aware that ‘Nothing of this belonged to
her’ (TY: 265). Delia’s fanaticism for Parnell and Irish nationalism
leads to marriage to Patrick, but she is disillusioned, ‘Thinking
to marry a wild rebel, she had married the most King-respecting,
Empire-admiring of country gentlemen’ (378). Rose, characterised as
the heroic Pargiter of Pargiter’s Horse, a suffragette imprisoned for
throwing a brick, achieves only a medal for her war work, of which
we are told nothing. All we hear of Nelly Robson, a bright academic
working-class girl, who seems to have a promising future, is that she
‘Died, I think’ (402). Her friendship provides Kitty with a glimpse
of an alternative warm, informal, happy family life (65–71), but
Woolf writes the Robsons out of her novel after the opening 1880
section. The cook, Crosby, liberated from her basement kitchen, lives
unhappy and unwanted in a small back room in a lodging house surrounded by discarded Pargiter family memorabilia, reduced to having
to clean ‘the blob of spittle that the Count had left on the side of
his bath’ (288). This disgusting image echoes Sara’s experience of the
line of grease from ‘the Jew having a bath’ (322).8 The most positive
portrait in the novel is that of Maggie, happy in her domestic
and nurturing role with her husband and two children; but this
conventional model is not one which Woolf would usually advocate.
Nowhere does Woolf offer a paradigm of a successful, happy, woman
artist, in spite of all the models available to her from her forebears
and from contemporaries.
Roles and outcomes for the male characters are equally negative, reflecting the inclusivity of this novel. They too are shown as
deformed and corrupted by the institutions which they represent.
Abel Pargiter has lost two of his fingers in his work for the Empire.
None of the male characters has shone in his profession or realised
what seemed to be early potential. Relationships are mostly infertile,
providing little hope for producing the next generation. Edward,
Heredity and Legacy in The Years
143
a bachelor, ‘had the look of an insect whose body has been eaten out,
leaving only the wings, the shell’ (TY: 385). North is alone and feels
himself an outsider. Martin is in love with a woman but resists giving
up his freedom to be with her (234). Nicholas is openly homosexual
so can offer Sara no fulfilling relationship. The men have bachelor
rooms of their own, but often sordid, furtively entered ones, like Abel
Pargiter’s ‘dingy little hole’ (8) in which his mistress Mira’s ‘duty was
to distract him’ (7), or the room where Martin and his friends used
to meet to smoke cigars and tell smutty stories (212). With the exception of Maggie and Renny, the characters, both male and female, are
ineffectual, deformed personalities, almost case histories, reflecting
the damage inflicted by the patriarchal family and society.9
Woolf ends one draft of her novel with qualified optimism,
emphasising continuity through a process of accretion, ‘And now
a new moment was coming into being: made of that past, made of
those million lives, made of the dust of generation after generation’
(quoted in Lee 1997: 657). Her published ending is more equivocal.
It is dawn, another of her working titles, but the new day holds
little optimism or promise for any change unless it resides in the
anonymous young couple (TY: 413). She refuses to date her final
section, labelling it simply ‘The Present Day’, but readers cannot be
unaware that in 1937, Woolf’s Present Day, the forces of fascism,
represented by the insistent sounds of hectoring voices, marching feet, hammering, bombing and gunfire, which have pounded
through every section of The Years, are getting relentlessly closer.
The final section consists of a party and dancing, stereotypically, as
in a Shakespearean comedy, representing harmony, everyone in step
with the right partner. However, the novel actually ends with the
couples dispersing, carrying on their previous lives, and Eleanor left,
like Katharine in Night and Day, alone on the threshold gazing out.
While for Katharine there exists at least the possibility of a happy
and procreative future with Ralph, there is no such possibility for the
elderly Eleanor. The novel strongly resists closure, and her repeated
question ‘And now?’ is unanswered.
Night and Day and The Years also reveal Woolf’s generic lines
of inheritance, and show that renegotiating literary realism was
her positive choice. When beginning work on what became The
Years, she asserted that ‘after abstaining from the novel of fact all
these years – since 1919 – & N.&D. indeed, I find myself infinitely
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delighting in facts for a change’ (D4: 129). Her intention, avowed
to her fictional audience and factually carried out for her novel, is,
like Ritchie and Mrs Hilbery, to base her life-writing on painstaking
research (TP: 9). To continue her Victorian retrospect she reread old
diaries, letters and memoirs; looked again at family photographs,
read volumes of history, and compiled bulging scrapbooks of newspaper cuttings, to furnish the dense materiality and historicity of
this, her longest novel. She was ‘in possession of quantities [of facts]
beyond counting’ (D4: 129).10 She creates a strong, linear, chronological narrative in order to be ‘objective, realistic, in the manner of
Jane Austen: carrying the story on all the time’ (168). The Years is far
more wide ranging than Night and Day, or any of her other novels,
creating an interactive network of family, social, political and economic connections, on the scale of many of the nineteenth-century
novels. Like George Eliot in Middlemarch (1871–72), she planned to
include ‘the whole of the present society – nothing less’ (151). While
Katharine Hilbery is an only child, the Pargiters are stereotypically
Victorian in their fecundity. The Years includes many sibling relationships as in Victorian novels, such as Dickens’ Dombey and Son
(1847–48) and Ritchie’s Old Kensington (1873). As in such novels, the
extended Pargiter family, like the Stephens, spreads out to the Empire
and across the regions of Great Britain. Street haunting in London is
not just in the West End and Bloomsbury but south of the river and
in the East End. Her cast includes upper-, middle- and working-class
characters.
In Night and Day and in The Years she wanted to encompass what
she called both being and non-being, as achieved she thought
by nineteenth-century realist novelists such as Austen, Trollope,
Thackeray, Dickens and Tolstoy (Sketch: 70). To achieve this generic
tension and hybridity in The Years she took ‘liberties with the representational form which I could not dare when I wrote Night & Day’
(D4: 142); and included ‘facts, as well as the vision. And to combine
them both. I mean, The Waves going on simultaneously with Night
& Day’ (151–2). In spite of this assertion, I have argued that in Night
and Day Woolf was already ‘taking liberties’ and that this novel too
is an amalgam of realist and modernist techniques, but the balance is
now towards the modernist. The Years is a reworking of her modernist
project in The Waves in that it covers much the same time span and
some of the same diversity of perspective. The novels have many
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145
of the same tropes and natural rhythms, especially in the interlude
sections. Similarly there is no single hero or heroine, no guiding
narrative voice, little focalisation. Bernard’s disgust at the end of
The Waves at the stains and degradation around him, the brutish
nature of mankind and his sense of the futility of life, mirror Sara’s
(TW: 241; TY: 180).
In Night and Day Woolf is concerned with lack of communication,
as seen in the halting conversations between Ralph and Katharine,
and the silences and incomprehension between generations. She
was aware of the increasing discontinuities caused by new technology
such as the telephone, explored in the gaps and elisions in the conversation between Katharine and Ralph (N&D: 296–7). In The Years
the characters are even more unable to fully articulate their own
thoughts, even to themselves, or to communicate with each other.
Conversations and sentences remain incomplete, with aposiopesis,
lacunae and ellipses, lacking response; or circular and iterative with
repetition, slippages and wide-ranging allusion and intertextuality.
Surrounded by party guests, North felt he had been in the middle
of a jungle, ‘in the heart of darkness [...] provided only with broken
sentences, single words’ (TY: 391). The resonances of the repeated
‘heart of darkness’ references (368), for instance, clearly derive from
Conrad’s novel. The beginning of The Years is layered with the first
lines of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Both openings signal texts in
which expectations are subverted; the sordid, unstable and infertile
privileged; and people alienated.
Street music and echoes of Ritchie
But Woolf is also always looking back to her roots and her nineteenthcentury legacies. Ritchie’s presence is as strong in The Years as in
Night and Day, though more oblique. She is connected to the trope
of the door, discussed above, and also present through multi-layered
connections with music, and through her intertext Old Kensington.
Music was another of Woolf’s working titles for The Years, deriving
from her collaborations with the composer and feminist activist Ethel
Smyth, another of her nineteenth-century ‘large connection’. The
two women shared the platform on 21 January 1931 to give their
talks on ‘Music and Literature’ (E5: 635–6; D4: 6–7), which can be
seen as the beginning of Woolf’s work on The Years and related texts.
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The ‘eclectic urban soundscape’, to which Snaith has drawn attention in The Years,11 is there too in Old Kensington. Both Ritchie and
Woolf link aural and visual images to represent class and economic
difference through spatial and sensory difference of location. Dolly’s
beloved schoolroom at the top of her aunt’s house, ‘when the bells
were ringing, and the sun-flood came in and made shadows on the
wall, [...] used to seem to her like a chapel full of music’ (OK: 5). In
Mira’s lodging house, street music, the muffin man’s bell and children
playing can clearly be heard (TY: 6, 164–5), as they can in Ritchie’s
happily noisy streets, translucently lit by sunsets and gaslight filtered
through fog (OK: 88–9). Privilege buys space and silence: ‘now and
then some quiet West End carriage would roll by’ (89). Dolly lives
with her aunt Sarah in ‘the quiet old suburb’ of Kensington. Her large
house has ‘its many windows dazzling as the sun travelled across the
old-fashioned housetops to set into a distant sea of tenements and
echoing life’ (1).
Silence, for both Ritchie and Woolf, can be seen as pleasant, but
also as sterile and joyless. The Pargiter house in 1880 is both dark and
silent, in this case because of impending death as well as its privileged
location. As the daughters move away from it their rooms become
smaller and less insulated from the sounds in neighbouring rooms
and from the noisy streets. In 1910, outside Maggie and Sara’s room,
the ‘night was full of roaring and cursing; of violence and unrest, also
of beauty and joy’ (TY: 180). They hear the drunken man hammering repeatedly on the neighbouring door, a woman’s voice shrieking
abuse, doors slamming and lurching footsteps on the stairs. The huge
windows in the opposite factory are lit with reflected light (182).
Outside a man wheeling a barrow shouts the news that the King is
dead. In The Years the soundscape becomes increasingly unpleasant
and discordant, yet still intermingled with harmony and song. In
Sara’s room in the Present Day, while she is entertaining North, the
noise from a passing lorry makes her table and walls tremble (303).
The lugubrious tune of a street trombone player changes to a jig to
which Sara sings along; she rings the bell and thumps the floor but
no servant appears at this summons. However, even in the Present
Day the working-class street often still sounds like the Victorian ones
described by Ritchie; wheels are turning, brakes squealing, mothers
shouting for their children, hawkers crying their wares and ‘a barrelorgan was playing’ (301).
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The barrel organ provides a potent link with Ritchie. Woolf constructs it as emblematic of her, and, as I have discussed in Chapter 3,
celebrates her transgressive and idiosyncratic character and voice in
‘The Enchanted Organ’ (E3: 399–403). The story is retold by Woolf
from Ritchie’s recollection, of ‘some place near Russell Square, of a
fine morning, of music sounding, of escaping from my nurse and
finding myself dancing in the street to the organ with some other
children’ (H. Ritchie 1924a: 1–2). The music of the barrel organ is
also a ubiquitous and pleasant sound in Woolf’s streets in The Years,
from the Victorian to the Present Day. It is first heard in the 1880
section, outside Mira’s room (TY: 8). It continues in 1891 when one
is playing ‘Sur le pont d’Avignon’ outside Eleanor’s room while she
is attempting to do her accounts (88). In 1914 in the West End,
Martin hears a barrel organ playing a jig and sees a servant girl run
up from a basement and give the Italian organ grinder a penny (214).
It remains in his mind, becoming conflated with the organ music
coming out of the open door of St Paul’s (215, 217). It is still there
outside Sara’s room in the Present Day, sounding evocatively both far
away and never-ending (301).
The link between Ritchie and Woolf is reinforced in their shared,
non-typical response to the barrel organ. From the period of Ritchie’s
childhood, street music was increasingly seen as a source of nuisance.
Campaigns of the 1860s for tighter regulation of street musicians
culminated in a petition against them signed by Carlyle, Dickens,
Tennyson and many other eminent Victorians, and eventually
Parliamentary Acts.12 Their increasingly vitriolic objections centred
on the noisy intrusion into their professional working lives. Woolf
portrays Carlyle vainly retreating to an attic study where even walls
of double thickness could not exclude ‘the rattle of a barrel organ
and the raucous shouts of street hawkers’ (E5: 295). Objections were
also based on an increasing xenophobia and class prejudice since
the musicians were almost always impoverished foreigners, mostly
Italian or German. Ritchie’s behaviour as a child, and her portrayal,
for instance in Old Kensington, of street music as pleasant, is therefore transgressive, and an early indication of her espièglerie. It is
an attitude also taken by Woolf in her 1905 essay ‘Street Music’,
in which she elevates street musicians to the status of ‘artists’ and
implicitly equates herself, and I would include Ritchie, with them
in their disregard of adverse criticism (E1: 27). Woolf also celebrates
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street musicians as resisting patriarchal regulation and institutions;
a link developed in Three Guineas, where she urges the daughters of
uneducated women to dance in the street and sing, ‘“We have done
with war! We have done with tyranny!”’ (TG: 275).
She notes the function of music and rhythm to civilise and calm,
even to regulate by encouraging people to walk in time. In the ‘wild
discord of cabs and carriages’, the ‘crude and emphatic rhythm’ of a
barrel organ or a band would be more effective than any policeman
(E1: 31). Regulation through rhythm and harmony and ‘whatever
of melody is natural to each’ however would be beneficial, nonpatriarchal (31). At the end, Woolf’s essay portrays what Snaith calls
‘a utopian vision of an unfettered and deregulated city, with music
playing on every street corner’.13 In The Years the cityscape is much
more ambivalent, incorporating, as I have argued, both freedom and
violence, harmony and discord. However, the sound of the barrel
organ, with its echoes of Ritchie, is always a positive, liberating and
pleasant acoustic.
For Woolf, the barrel organ would also have echoes of Julia
Stephen. Her moralistic story ‘The Monkey on the Moor’ ( JDS: 47–64)
is also about freedom and otherness. It is inspired by her humanist
ideas and philanthropy, by the landscape in and around St Ives, and
by typical family life at Talland House. It begins with the children,
including the youngest, Ginia, playing on a beach which is recognisably Porthminster. While they trap crabs in their buckets to look at
they always let them go. Similarly, bees collected in the garden to
be inspected under a glass are also set free unharmed. The children
meet a homeless, orphaned Italian boy who earns a precarious living
playing his barrel organ, to which is chained his pet monkey. The
children’s mother gives food and eventually a home and employment to the boy. The children help him to find his monkey which
has escaped onto the moor. They teach the young organ-grinder that
the monkey does not need to be chained, but will willingly come
back to him if treated well.
As well as the significant sound of the barrel organ, there is a wide
range of musical allusion throughout Old Kensington and The Years,
including classical music, formal recitals and performances, ballads,
popular songs, nursery rhymes and hymns. Voices, upper-class,
working-class and foreign, are heard murmuring, shouting, chanting or conversing. These are interspersed with the sounds of clocks
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striking, bells ringing; of work, traffic, machines; rooks cawing,
pigeons cooing, and the wind rustling trees or water. In both, music
is a material part of family history and a symbol of continuity and
affiliation. George finds some sheets of music in an old box. The
tunes remind Lady Sarah ‘of the past that was her own, and of the
future that was to be for others’ (OK: 82).
The narrator, in Ritchie’s own voice, remembers her home in
Young Street, lightly fictionalised, ‘Dear Old Street! where an echo
still lingers of the quaint and stately music of the past, of which the
voice comes to us like a song of Mozart, sounding above the dreamy
mutterings of a Wagner of the present!’ (OK: 4). In The Years, Wagner’s
music becomes a multi-layered conceit but among other things it is
one of Woolf’s symbols of continuity: the opera Kitty attends is from
The Ring Cycle (TY: 174–7). Lady Sarah in her shabby cloak and basket
on her arm, trudging round the narrow back street dispensing food
from her basket (OK: 118–19), is resonant of Eleanor’s philanthropic
sorties into the East End. The rhymed doggerel about ‘Come, cookey,
come’ and bring ‘your bones’ that Lady Sarah sees plastered up on
the wall (119) is like the children’s chants in The Years (TY: 408) and
as incomprehensible to the outsiders. Night and Day, which has so
many echoes of Ritchie, does not employ these rich acoustics. There
are silences, some sound of traffic outside the hushed interiors of
the Hilbery house, and sounds of typewriters in the suffrage office.14
However, in Night and Day locations are almost entirely portrayed
through their visual attributes, especially chiaroscuro. It is as if
Ritchie’s voice sounded louder to Woolf as time passed.
Yorkshire roots
Woolf’s many references to Yorkshire in The Years circle her back to
her apprentice roots with her mentors Ritchie and Madge Vaughan,
and again link her biographically and intertextually with Ritchie. The
references initially appear arbitrary. Miss Craddock’s flowers come
from the Yorkshire moors (TY: 63). The cousins Rose Pargiter and
Mrs Malone come from a Yorkshire background, as do the Robsons.
Kitty is amazed by Sam Robson’s accent and their typically Yorkshire
high tea (66–9); later her beloved estates are there (259–65).15 Abel
Pargiter was stationed in Scarborough, and proposed to Rose on
the moors there (79–80). The references become significant if read
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against Ritchie’s life, Old Kensington and Woolf’s early visits to Madge
Vaughan in Settle, discussed in Chapter 3. Woolf had felt an immediate affinity to the county, which reminded her of Cornwall (L1: 156),
and made her want to write a book about the place (PA: 302). She
was struck by its sense of continuity and stability (303). Striding over
a hillside above Settle, she feels herself to be ‘Stephen Brontëised’
(L1: 221), and imaginatively mapped London onto the Yorkshire
moors to compare the scale, ‘planning the countryside into
Bloomsbury & Piccadilly, & setting St James Streets & Marble Arches
on all the hills & valleys’ (PA: 303). The Years is in many ways finally
her book of the place.16 Kitty similarly conflates Yorkshire and
London, ‘The sky, blown into a blue open space, seemed to be looking down not here upon streets and houses, but upon open country,
where the wind brushed the moors, and sheep, with grey fleeces
ruffled, sheltered under stone walls’ (TY: 71).
Woolf declared that one of her reasons for visiting the Vaughans was
to have an expedition to the home of the Brontës (E1: 6). It resulted
in Woolf’s first published essay, ‘Haworth’, discussed in Chapter 3,
in which she ponders the legitimacy of such pilgrimages to literary
shrines (5). There is, however, a complete silence in any of Woolf’s
letters or diaries of an earlier literary pilgrim. Ritchie recounts how
she reached Haworth and ‘visited the shrine to which such hundreds
of pilgrims have climbed in turn [...] The days of which I am speaking are so long ago that the host was still alive who had known the
Brontës’ (FtP: 18–19). Woolf could have had numbers of other precursors on whom to model her account, since it had long been a popular
literary destination,17 but she specifically constructs Mrs Hilbery/
Ritchie as an avid and acquisitive ‘pilgrim to a sacred shrine’, in this
case Shakespeare’s tomb (N&D: 411, 461–2). The obvious similarity in
diction, the insertion of the self into the narrative and the digressive,
anecdotal style of their two accounts of visits to Haworth suggest that
Woolf’s essay contains unacknowledged borrowings from Ritchie.18
In addition, Woolf was well aware of Ritchie’s connections and
frequent visits to Yorkshire. She would have heard the story of how
Thackeray, in April 1863, a few months before his death, took his
daughters to Hampsthwaite, to visit the graves of Thackeray ancestors
in the churchyard there (Aplin 2010: 160), probably also the occasion
of Ritchie’s first visit to nearby Haworth. Ritchie had numerous family
and friends in the county, basing her story ‘Little Sisters’, which I discuss
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151
in Chapter 3, on some of them, and she sent her son to school in
Sedbergh. She conflates Hampsthwaite and Haworth in her fictional
locations Pebblesthwaite and Smokethwaite in the Yorkshire sections
of Old Kensington, thus providing further intertextual links with The
Years. Kitty’s nostalgic visit to her Yorkshire estates (TY: 261–5) is
resonant of Frank Raban’s to Pebblesthwaite (OK: 375–93), though he
arrives in a horse-drawn cart rather than a fast car. Both are fed local
information by their drivers, and both feel the divide between the
south they have left and the north in which they feel at home.
Recovering family histories: Woolf and Ethel Smyth
A key figure in Woolf’s life when she was working on The Years and
Three Guineas was Ethel Smyth.19 Woolf used Smyth not only as a
source of material for her novel and polemic but also for her family history, especially for A Sketch of the Past. Woolf and Smyth first
met in February 1930, when Smyth was 72, so that their stormy,
melodramatic relationship was inter-generational. Smyth was, as
Tracy Hargreaves argues, ‘caught up with Woolf’s relationship with
the Victorians’ and ‘an atavistic reminder’ of a bygone age.20 She
functions as mediator for a network of influences on Woolf: a focal
point drawing strands together like Eleanor’s blot pattern (TY: 88),
discussed below. Smyth had the shared Anglo-Indian background of
Julia Margaret Cameron, Anny Ritchie and Julia Stephen. Woolf had
read Smyth’s autobiography, Impressions that Remained, when it was
published in 1919 (D1: 315). It includes lurid references to James
Pattle. In her first letter, even before meeting Smyth, Woolf asked
about her great-grandfather (L4: 130), and their first conversation was
about him (D3: 291). Before this meeting Woolf sent a present calculated to impress Smyth: her and Fry’s celebrity album of Victorian
Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women by Julia Margaret Cameron
in which she had quoted Smyth’s opinion of James Pattle (L4: 132).
Endings and continuities
At the end of her life, Woolf can thus be seen as increasingly reflecting on her past and engaging with her nineteenth-century legacies in
a process more of affiliation than rejection. The Years, Old Kensington
and Night and Day are alike in the oppositions they enact but then
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subvert with dissolving boundaries. In all, the final image is of continuity, harmony and inclusivity, even though in Night and Day and
Old Kensington I have argued that it is tentative.
The Years is the most complex, profound and wide-ranging in its
explorations of the relationships between the Victorian past and the
present. The tensions and oppositions are disrupted yet held even
more firmly together than in the earlier novels by repeated motifs
and complex patterning. Woolf returns to the searchlight which
‘rayed round the sky’ (TY: 266), a trope which she first introduced in
Night and Day and which recurs throughout her work. It is resonant
of the Godrevy Lighthouse and childhood holidays with her mother
at St Ives; and of Julia Margaret Cameron and her influence on the
visual. Woolf associated the telescope with Cameron, through her
story ‘The Searchlight’, and included it as one of the ‘heterogeneous and ill-assorted objects’ piled up in a hideous monument to
Victorianism (O: 221–2). Yet it became part of her present as well
as her past. The Woolfs had bought a telescope in August 1937
and spent evenings watching Jupiter and Saturn (D5: 109, 110).21
Replaying events in ‘The Searchlight’, Kitty remembers being kissed
by a farm-hand near a haystack (TY: 69). The searchlight beam also
links issues of fact and fiction, the Victorian and the modern, as in
the newspaper article Kitty and her mother read (77) from an actual
article in The Times on 16 April 1880 about the first use of an electric searchlight from a ship to illuminate a shore location, the Rock
of Gibraltar.22 Both literally and figuratively the image creates light
and dark, continuity and interruption, time passing and inevitable
recurrence. It features in all these ways in the war scenes (286) and
in memories of the war (297). It was part too of Woolf’s memories
of World War I, and the backdrop to Night and Day. In her diary for
January 1918 she gives a description of London at dusk. Her romanticised representation of street life is disrupted at Hyde Park Corner
when ‘the search light rays out, [... and] someone, as the moon came
into view, remarked upon the chance of an air raid’ (D1: 111).
The searchlight, ‘a broad fan of light’ sweeping across the sky
(TY: 285), is only one of many instances of such a spray pattern; the
statue of Queen Anne is at the centre of radiating spokes (215), and
Eleanor drew a dot with strokes raying out (88), just as Woolf doodled
it at the beginning of her chapters or essays in her original drafts
(TP: 28, 59; and others). Eleanor draws a similar mark during her
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meeting (TY: 167–70) and remembers it when looking at the mark
left by the writing desk (206). In the Present Day she philosophically
contemplates change, continuity, memory and identity through this
image, ‘Perhaps there’s “I” at the middle of it, she thought; a knot; a
centre; and again she saw herself sitting at her table drawing on the
blotting-paper, digging little holes from which spokes radiated’ (348).
It is an image recycled from Night and Day. Katharine likes Ralph’s
dot with flames around it (N&D: 474) which ‘represented by its circumference of smudges surrounding a central blot all that encircling
glow which for him surrounded, inexplicably, so many of the objects
of life, softening their sharp outline, so that he could see certain
streets, books, and situations wearing a halo almost perceptible to the
physical eye’ (475). Ralph’s vision has the soft focus and fuzzy-edged
halo effect of a Cameron photograph, and indicates yet again how
much Woolf’s use of the visual derives from her.
Here and elsewhere, Woolf’s work privileges boundary crossings
over fissure, as seen in these iterated images which enact both
convergence and continuity. Daily, the loaded carts trundle from
around London to the focal point of Covent Garden, ‘like caravans
piled with the goods of tribes migrating in search of water’ (TY: 124).
The Caravan was another of Woolf’s working titles. The family, ‘the
Pargiters in the flesh’, are like a ‘caravan crossing the desert’ (164).
She explored the notion of society and history as an endless procession in Jacob’s Room, figured by the processions down Whitehall and
Long Acre ( JR: 239–44), where it passes two barrel organs playing
by the kerb. Similar ‘interminable processions of shoppers in the
West End, of business men in the East, paraded the pavements, like
caravans perpetually marching’ (TY: 3). In Three Guineas educated
men process ‘like a caravanserai crossing the desert’ (TG: 241) with
women traipsing behind (254). In her 1931 speech she links the trope
of the caravan to that of the Angel in the House, who was ‘a dream,
a phantom – a kind of mirage like the pools and palm trees which
nature places in the desert to lure the caravan across’ (E5: 638). Woolf
edited this reference to the onward march of civilisation and the lure
of the Angel out of her published version of the speech ‘Professions
for Women’, but it was clearly in her mind when writing The Years. In
Between the Acts she continues the trope. Memories and possessions
are, Isa thinks, ‘the burden that the past laid on me, last little donkey
in the long caravanserai crossing the desert’ (BtA: 139)
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In The Years continuity is further represented by endless circular
patterns and references: the searchlight wheeling across the sky, the
Serpentine, the Round Pond, the moon as a gold coin. Time passing
is expressed through the imagery of film, ‘In the country it was an
ordinary day enough; one of the long reel of days that turned as the
years passed from green to orange’ (TY: 153). In the city the ‘roar of
London encircled the open space in the ring of distant but complete
sound’ (230); from the city came ‘the sound of the eternal waltz [...]
like a serpent that swallowed its own tail, since the ring was complete
from Hammersmith to Shoreditch’ (124); Martin and Rose tease each
other continually ‘like a kitten catching its tail’ (341). Such images
of circularity disrupt the linearity of the chronological narrative
structure and periodisation. Firm boundaries are splintered. As in an
impressionist painting, dappled, reflected and refracted light creates
patterns; all of which defamiliarise, fracture, yet paradoxically also
integrate, the component parts: sunlight through leaves caught the
woman in the park ‘in a net of light; as if she were composed of lozenges of floating colours’ (230); ‘the water glowed with sunset light;
twisted poles of lamplight lay on the water’ (236).
Julia Margaret Cameron: the continuing
influence of the visual
In The Years, as well as aural effects, Woolf is thus still very concerned
with the visual and with light effects, deriving from the influence
of Julia Margaret Cameron and photography. Lee suggests that in
this novel Woolf ‘made an X-ray of her childhood as a prototype of
Victorian patriarchal repression’ (1997: 96). She was emulating the
mixture of fact and vision, the double process of ‘the photograph
and the poem’ (E6: 11), which she admired in Turgenev’s work. It
resulted in the fusion of disparate objects and sense impressions into
‘one moment of great intensity’ (E3: 316–17).
The many discrete tableaux in The Years, and the episodic structure
with ‘curiously uneven time sequence – a series of great balloons,
linked by straight passages of narrative’ (D4: 142), give the whole
novel the likeness of a series of frames in a silent movie or snapshots
surrounded by white space in an album, especially an idiosyncratic
one like those of Cameron and Ritchie. There are ‘family photographs’ such as that of the older generation of Pargiters at the end
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of the novel who appear to be posing in their evening dress, arrested
momentarily, framed by the window (TY: 411). Such group photographs would have formed the repository of family history passed
down through generations. In The Years this bricolage is memorialised by the retired servant, Crosby, whose room, stuffed with Pargiter
family photographs and memorabilia (208), is reminiscent of the
Alardyce shrine, though less formalised (N&D: 6–9). Woolf clearly
modelled this on Sophie Farrell’s room which she remembered was
similarly full of photographs, ‘Her mind is like a family album. You
turn up Uncle George you turn up Aunt Maria [...] She goes back far
far into the past. She represents a world that has gone’ (quoted in Lee
1997: 49). Farrell had treasured letters and photographs from Julia
Stephen which she gave to Woolf. Paradoxically such family photos
recreate the class differences represented in The Years. As Light
notes, ‘Though mistresses and maids were constantly in each other’s
company, they seem never to have been photographed together.
They never could appear side by side’ (2008: 159).
Key issues of the instability of identity and of memory are explored
through tropes drawn from photography. North wonders how much
of Sara he really knows, ‘These little snapshot pictures of people left
much to be desired, these little surface pictures that one made, like a
fly crawling over a face, and feeling, here’s the nose, here’s the brow’
(TY: 300). Peggy constructs photographs in her mind while listening
to Patrick’s memories, imagining faded snapshots of cricketers and
shooting parties posed on the steps of country houses (334).
Cameron’s influence is also clear in the many portraits which
appear in different rooms but especially in those of Rose Pargiter,
which closely resemble those she took of Stephen. Rose Pargiter is
first introduced through her portrait of a red-haired young woman
hung over the fireplace (10). Woolf here constructs her mother as
angelic, dressed in white muslin in an elevated position smiling
down on her family.23 It is resonant of Stephen’s apotheosis in The
Mausoleum Book. Later, the portrait flanked by lighted candles creates
an altar piece (44). Delia rants at this image, transposing her anger at
her mother on to her portrait, ‘So you’re not going to die, she said,
looking at the girl balanced on the trunk of a tree; she seemed to
simper down at her daughter with smiling malice’ (37). The subject
of this portrait is differently posed from the first, echoing a different
one of Julia Stephen taken by Cameron of her in a long cloak leaning
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against a tree (MacGibbon 1997: 52). After her death, Rose Pargiter
remains a palpable presence throughout the novel largely through
her portrait, an emblem of continuity through the generations. It
is one of the solid objects which appear and reappear in different
rooms, undergoing subtle changes, remembered and misremembered
by its viewers. Martin and Eleanor question if there had been a blue
flower in the grass (TY: 143, 152, 308). Ten years after Rose’s death
Martin looks at the portrait again, but ‘it had ceased to be his mother;
it had become a work of art’ (143). The portrait serves to emphasise
genetic inheritance. Martin had the same red hair as the ‘woman in
the picture’ (11). It is an inheritance Peggy, looking at the portrait,
attempts to resist, ‘She wanted to be dark and aquiline: but in fact
she was blue-eyed and round-faced – like her grandmother’ (308).
The influence of Cameron’s use of the gaze, of light and shade, of
unusual angle, is clear in Woolf’s word portraits of impressive men,
highlighting their phrenological attributes. Eleanor, sitting in the
Law Court, could see the profile of Morris’ face, ‘the wig squared his
forehead, and gave him a framed look, like a picture [...] with such
a brow, with such a nose’ (TY: 105). Woolf develops this theme in
Three Guineas, including actual photographs of ‘the clothes worn
by the educated man in his public capacity’ (TG: 177).24 Many of
Woolf’s portraits and her street scenes reflect her melding of past
and present. They continue to pay homage to Cameron while simultaneously reflecting the tones and techniques of Sickert’s paintings,
which she admired. The scene outside Sara’s room is framed and
lit like a photograph; but the subjects are, like Sickert’s, exposed in
immodest, unflattering poses, set in a depiction of sordid and violent
urban life illuminated by lamplight. Sara’s face ‘looked cadaverous
and worn, as if she were no longer a girl but an old woman worn out
by a life of childbirth, debauchery and crime’ (TY: 180).
Street life is often portrayed from inside, framed by an open door
or window, or from above. In one remarkable cinematic scene which
repeatedly pans out and zooms in, Woolf gives us an aerial view
of London, similar to that used for the cover of her first American
edition. Eleanor and her niece Peggy look down from their window
over gardens towards distant hills, ‘like a map of London; a section
laid beneath them’. The sun is setting and lights coming on. Pointing
upwards, Eleanor remembers, ‘That’s where I saw my first aeroplane –
there between those chimneys’ (TY: 311). Simultaneously this conflates
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Woolf’s many oppositions: youth and age, inside and outside, day
and night, near and far, light and dark, noise and silence, rural and
urban, tradition and modernity, visionary and realist.
Cycles, liminality and Woolf’s ‘third space’
Late in the genesis of The Years, Woolf added the interludes. Structurally,
these further emphasise continuities, creating atmospheric settings
which introduce situations later resolved in the following sections of
narrative. They further integrate both linear and circular structures;
vision and fact; symbolic and realist discourses. The novel begins, as
does The Waves, with the first interlude so that there is an absence,
but an indication, of something coming before. The reader is plunged
straight into ‘an uncertain spring’. The focus moves from the sky
to the land, from country to London, then swiftly and seamlessly
through a typical day involving all areas and all classes: shopping
in the West End in the morning, business conducted in the East End,
visiting clubs in Piccadilly, afternoon visits in landaus and victorias
‘for the season was beginning’, to the basement kitchens where tea
is being prepared. Such diverse areas as Marble Arch and Bermondsey
are linked by street music and birdsong. In the evening when the sun
is reflected in the Round Pond and the Serpentine, diners go out in
their cabs, the moon, ‘a polished coin’, later illuminating the scene.
The interlude ends with the all-encompassing searchlight image.
Each interlude continues through elemental cycles of the seasons,
the weather, days and the year; echoing the natural cycles of the
generations; living, dying and inheriting. The final chapter, with
the long party ending at dawn, seems to continue from the end of
the first interlude so that the whole novel completes a circle. What
is being emphasised is continuity, wholeness. Eleanor wonders,
‘Does everything then come over again a little differently? [...] is
there a pattern; a theme, recurring, like music; half remembered,
half foreseen?’ (TY: 351). Woolf’s location, as towards the end of
Night and Day, is neither past nor present but gesturing towards
some transcendent third place. The final, very brief, interlude
moves into the liminal, the visionary and ahistoric, ‘The sun had
risen, and the sky above the houses wore an air of extraordinary
beauty, simplicity and peace’ (413). The space after the interlude is
invitingly empty.
Conclusion: ‘Invisible Presences’
and ‘Transparent Mediums’:
Virginia Woolf’s NineteenthCentury Legacies
At the end of her life, in her Victorian retrospect A Sketch of the
Past, Woolf acknowledges that her mother is still a presence in her
life, one of those forebears who ‘play so important a part in every
life’ (Sketch: 80). She recognises the power of the past and realises
that ‘if we cannot analyse these invisible presences, we know very
little of the subject of the memoir; and again how futile life-writing
becomes’ (80). It would indeed be ‘futile’ to consider Woolf’s lifewriting, and her writing life, without analysing the important part
played by Julia Prinsep Stephen and those other ‘invisible presences’,
Anny Thackeray Ritchie and Julia Margaret Cameron, on Woolf, ‘the
subject of the memoir’.
In trying to understand influences from the past, Woolf is attempting to understand her self. She reflects on the power of this influence,
which she concludes is rarely analysed in conventional biographies
and autobiographies. She admits the difficulty she has in describing
her mother and accounting for her feelings for her (Sketch: 80). She
is aware of her highly conflicted response, employing the trope of
the magnet to signify cycles of attraction and rejection, and figuring
herself as ‘a fish in a stream, deflected; held in place’ (80). This powerful liminal position is one which I have identified as crucial to
Woolf’s work, seen at the end of both Night and Day and The Years.
It is inclusive, allowing for all possibilities. She is poised to project
herself imaginatively backwards into her past, and simultaneously to
contemplate a visionary future. And she can remain arrested in the
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Virginia Woolf’s Nineteenth-Century Legacies 159
moment, as in a Cameron photograph, contemplating the platform
on which she stands. It is a pivotal position, represented linguistically in her frequent construction, ‘But, you may say’ (Room: 3),
which signals a change of direction in her argument, and a rhetorical
circling back. It is also figured in her trope of the door through which
one can go in, and out, and remain on the threshold; a trope linked
specifically to Ritchie, and recurrent throughout Woolf’s writing.
Woolf’s ambivalent responses to Cameron,
Ritchie and Stephen
Woolf’s responses to Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen are, I have
argued, characterised by ambivalence. Ambivalence, in Woolf’s
lexicon, is not a negative term, nor a pathology. It is dynamic, productive, and essential to her aesthetic. It is inherent in the fluidity
of her language and her digressions; the ontological uncertainty of
her created identities and narrative voices; her hybrid genre melding
realist and modernist techniques; her transgression of all boundaries
and construction of them as permeable and blurred; and her circulation of texts. She is never content with only one thing and is always
aware that there are other possibilities. She recognised many of these
qualities in the work of Cameron and Ritchie, and in the espièglerie
of all three forebears.
Ritchie’s, Cameron’s and Stephen’s legacies are strong and solid.
Woolf engages with them throughout her writing life, but almost
always obliquely through fictionalisation and allusion. The extent of
her manipulation shows that she is not predominantly concerned to
portray her forebears with strict accuracy. Through her creative transformations they become a positive part of her aesthetic. However,
this manipulation and ambivalence, which fails to acknowledge the
achievements of her forebears, reveals that she also felt that they
posed problems for her; and it shows the disservice which she did to
them and to their reputations.
Woolf pursues a systematic and deliberate strategy to obscure the
accomplishments of her forebears, thus constructing herself as free
from their influence, while ambivalently engaging with significant
lines of descent. Her relationship with each is different. She never
met Cameron, she knew her mother only from a child’s perspective, but she knew Ritchie well into her adult life. However, her
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construct of all of them as invisible presences, paradoxically there
and not there, is similar. In the relevant chapters I have explored how
Woolf engages with their biographies and their work, while simultaneously and ambivalently emphasising their insubstantiality and
non-corporeality. Ritchie becomes a ‘transparent medium’ (E3: 18).
Woolf creates them all as fantasies, in the cases of Ritchie and
Cameron as figures of fun and eccentric amateurs, and in Stephen’s
case as variously idealised or demonised. All three are resolutely
fictionalised. They are subject to Woolf’s ‘resurrectionist’ tendencies
(Light 2008: 50) in cycles of matricide, revival and memorialisation;
in fictions such as Night and Day, Freshwater, To the Lighthouse and
The Years, essays such as ‘The Enchanted Organ’ and ‘Professions for
Women’, and memoirs such as Reminiscences and A Sketch of the Past.
Ritchie and Cameron pose particular problems for Woolf. She must
negotiate not just their legacies as Victorian antecedents, but also as
successful Victorian women artists. As I have shown, she subverts
Ritchie’s professionalism by repeatedly figuring her as a bird dropping ‘some little hint or fact or fancy’ (E3: 18), and recycling Leslie
Stephen’s constructs of her supposed amateurism. She omits Ritchie’s
DNB article on Elizabeth Barrett Browning from the source material in
her Notes for Flush. She edits Fry and Bell’s recognition of Cameron’s
status as an artist (Powell 1973: 26 and Gernsheim 1948: 7) out of
her own essay on Cameron. She makes no mention of Julia Stephen’s
DNB article. She strikes through Cameron’s name on her draft of ‘The
Searchlight’ (SxMs-18/2/B/10/E: 7), rendering her anonymous as ‘the
photographer’. Beer reminds us that, since Freud, ‘individuals’ acts
of forgetting are interpreted as purposeful, rather than as part of a
general process of evanescence’ (1989: 15). Omission, or ‘forgetting’
to include, can thus be seen as strategies actively employed by Woolf
in controlling her version of the past; a process of self-censorship and
conscious fabrication which she explores explicitly in Night and Day.
Woolf is engaged in a lifelong complex iteration of rejection and
attraction to Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen. She mocks or denies
what she has inherited. Yet she also feels a strong sense of connection with these three precursors and her matrilineage. Throughout
her life she retains their material legacies. Family possessions, such
as a diamond and ruby ring and a sapphire brooch inherited from
their great-great-grandmother, Thérèse de l’Étang, form the topic of
conversation when Woolf’s cousin, Florence Maitland, first visits 24
Virginia Woolf’s Nineteenth-Century Legacies 161
Gordon Square. Woolf boasts to Violet Dickinson that ‘She was a rich
old Lady, and most of our things apparently descend from her, and
are old French’ (L1: 154).
Her mother’s letters and papers are stored and pored over; Ritchie’s
books are in her library; Cameron’s photographs are lifelong prized
possessions shown to friends (L3: 4; L4: 132). Cartes-de-visite and
photographs of Victorian ancestors inhabit her family albums
(Humm 2006: 40–1, 188–90). Woolf implicitly admits the value of her
legacies by her extensive and varied use of them, through continual
fictionalisation and memorialisation. This places all four women
within a tradition of female artistic inheritance and mentorship.
However, while Ritchie, Cameron and Stephen were mutually creative and supportive, promoting each other’s work and professional
reputations, Woolf resists overtly celebrating and transmitting theirs.
She implicitly acknowledges and values their work by her use of it.
Accounting for Woolf’s response
Woolf’s dynamics of ambivalence means that it is difficult fully to
account for her response within prevailing theories of influence.
Her conflicted representations of Ritchie, Cameron and Stephen
reveal the ambivalence in her constructs of artistic inheritance in
general; advocating a female literary tradition on the one hand, but
concerned about loss of creative autonomy on the other. Her obscuration of her legacies and support fits with Howard Bloom’s theory
explored in The Anxiety of Influence (1997) that the successor always
has a sense of belatedness from which they must escape. In order
to assert their own originality they must resist the influence of the
precursor. However, this Freudian-derived, stereotypically masculine,
confrontational model of inheritance, as it is usually applied, does
not account for the dynamics of attraction and inclusion which
Woolf also feels for these maternal forebears, and her strong sense of
nostalgia for her Victorian past.1 In Arguing with the Past Beer rejects
Bloom’s model as antithetical and conflicted; instead privileging
collaboration by suggesting that a good reader must also be a good
listener, respecting voices from the past (1989: 4–5). This model is
closer to Harrison’s work on myths, in which, as Ingman argues,
‘matriarchal society is communal, co-operative and life-giving: it
encourages women’s independence and creativity’ (1998: 126). It
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more accurately theorises Woolf’s famous assertion that ‘a woman
writing thinks back through her mothers’ (Room: 127). Woolf had a
lifelong concern with the construction of a female artistic tradition
from her early story, ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’, to her
fully developed argument in A Room of One’s Own. Since her death
she has been given iconic status in a continuing female tradition.
Yet this model of thinking back through our mothers does not
encompass Woolf’s highly selective responses to Ritchie, Cameron
and Stephen. While she links herself artistically to literary ‘mothers’
such as Jane Austen and Emily Brontë (Room: 97), her mutual
creativity does not extend to include her own matrilineage. Cameron
was an artist rather than a writer and Stephen wrote little, but Ritchie
deserves a place in Woolf’s literary tradition not least because Woolf
was building upon Ritchie’s own construction of just such a female
tradition in A Book of Sibyls. In this, and other works, Ritchie celebrates and retrieves the work of other women, both precursors and
contemporaries, and promotes mutual creativity. Her 1913 Address,
‘A Discourse on Modern Sibyls’ (FtP), anticipates Woolf’s arguments
in A Room of One’s Own. Ritchie recognises Gaskell’s seminal role in
promoting the work of Charlotte Brontë, ‘No more spontaneous honour was ever offered by one woman of genius to another’ (FtP: 16).
Woolf’s poetics of reclamation and obscurity are even more conflicted
if one considers that in rescuing earlier writers she first had to engage
in what Alison Booth describes as ‘the convention of performative
mourning for the “lives of the obscure” which effectively deepens
that obscurity’ (2000: 25). She first had to construct them as obscure,
and also had to again render obscure some of the Sibyls previously
retrieved by Ritchie, such as Edgeworth and Opie. Booth argues that
‘most of the women featured in Woolf’s own multivolume records of
women’s lives were kept in contemporary currency in collections
of biographies published between 1880 and 1930 alone’ (25). Of these
biographies, existing, as far as Woolf was concerned, ‘in spectral form’
on the shelves (25), many would be by Ritchie.
Harrison’s work on matriarchal myths, and theories of female literary influence deriving from it, privileges the myth of Demeter and
Kore. The relationship of one artistic woman with a precursor is often
figured through that of mother and daughter. However, this model
of inheritance, as positive and fulfilling, again breaks down since
Woolf’s representations of mother–daughter relationships subvert the
Virginia Woolf’s Nineteenth-Century Legacies 163
paradigm. They are in the main surrogate, dysfunctional, restrictive
or confrontational. In her novels mothers are often absent, dying
before or near the opening, as in The Years, her most sustained exploration of maternal inheritance. In The Waves it is Susan, an earthmother, ‘who first became wholly woman, purely feminine’ (TW:
207), but her fecundity and that of surrounding nature is ‘hateful, like
a net folding one’s limbs in its meshes, cramping’ (224). Katharine
Hilbery must escape her mother’s influence to explore her own creativity. Clarissa Dalloway’s daughter is alienated and searching for her
mother-substitute even while her own mother is alive. Lily Briscoe
can only find creative resolution when her surrogate mother is dead.
Woolf represents Madame de Sévigné as loving her daughter to excess,
with ‘a passion that was twisted and morbid’, forcing the daughter to
curb her mother in order ‘to assert her own identity’ (E6: 498). She
mocks the relationship between Ritchie and her daughter Hester,
who was her amanuensis, literary executor and biographer, through
the representation of Mrs Hilbery and her daughter. She devalues the
relationship of Cameron with her daughter Julia, by writing out the
daughter’s seminal gift of a camera (E4: 381; Annals: 67).
Such constructs, I suggest, reflect Woolf’s own ambivalent relationship with her mother, and with her maternal forebears and
surrogates; so that, as Rosenman argues, ‘her actual daughterhood
[complicates] the task of “thinking back through our mothers”’
(1986: 71). It is also complicated by the fact that Stephen represents
both her own particular mother, a generalised embodiment of all
mothers (Sketch: 82), and the maternalised figure of the female literary precursor. Woolf’s relationship with Stephen is variously constructed as feminine and inclusive, so that Julia Stephen is ‘the whole
thing; Talland House was full of her, Hyde Park Gate was full of her’
(83); yet also as aggressive and destructive, stereotypically masculine
qualities. Much of Woolf’s own sense of ‘the horror of family life,
& the terrible threat to one’s liberty’ (D3: 194) is transformed into
Delia’s sense of her mother as ‘an obstacle, a prevention, an impediment to all life’ (TY: 21). Woolf constructs her mother-in-law as just
such a tyrannous, stultifying presence, ‘And then, they ask, why
women dont [sic] write poetry. Short of killing Mrs W. nothing could
be done’ (D3: 195).
This violent verbal attack resonates with that on the Angel in the
House, who has ‘strangled and killed’ (E5: 640) writers and painters
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and so must be murdered to save the woman artist. As I have argued
in Chapter 5, Woolf never represents Stephen explicitly as the Angel,
as recent critics have done; but she does feel a threat to her artistic
freedom from the values represented by the Angel, some of which
she also saw in her mother, and which she figures as the tea-table
tyranny at the beginning of Night and Day and The Years, in ‘22
Hyde Park Gate’ (MoB: 165–6) and A Sketch of the Past (Sketch: 88,
118). With hindsight she modifies her view, ambivalently recognising some positive qualities in the Victorian code of social behaviour
(150). She also values her legacy of conversation, gossip and humour
which flourished around that table (MoB: 35). She realises that her
mother’s ‘Victorian manner’ influenced her apprentice writing.
When rereading her early Literary Supplement articles she attributes
their constrained suavity and politeness to her ‘tea-table training’,
but conversely also recognises positive outcomes, ‘the surface manner [allowed her] to slip in things that would be inaudible if one
marched straight up and spoke out loud’ (Sketch: 150). The tea-table
training enables her to ironise her subject through the cultivation of
an urbane surface manner and a sidelong approach. It encourages
ambivalence and duality.
Woolf’s unresolved conflict with her past
Ambivalence is a positive creative strategy in Woolf’s literary aesthetics; but in her life and relationships it is more problematic. Her
responses to Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen reveal the ambivalence
of her responses to her past in general. In particular they challenge her image of herself as original; her desire to free herself from
Victorian patriarchy and gain full independence; and her construct
of herself as an outsider.
Woolf felt a need to obscure the influence of Ritchie, Cameron,
and to some extent Stephen, because as precursors they challenged
her sense of herself as exceptional, an innate writer of originality
and genius. She claims the importance of precursors in the creation
of genius in her correspondence in the New Statesman with Desmond
MacCarthy, Ritchie’s nephew by marriage, ‘you will not get a big
Newton until you have produced a considerable number of lesser
Newtons’ (D2: 341). Yet paradoxically, the more she acknowledges
any assistance, or influence, or attributes any borrowing, the more
Virginia Woolf’s Nineteenth-Century Legacies 165
that self-image is threatened. I have shown how much Woolf took
from her precursors Ritchie, Cameron and Stephen, while overtly
failing to acknowledge her debts. I have recovered the so far unacknowledged and little explored role of Stephen, and of Woolf’s
maternal grandmother Mia Jackson, in encouraging and facilitating
Woolf’s childhood writing – by developing her love of words, taking her work seriously, providing an attentive and critical audience,
and starting the Hyde Park Gate News. Woolf also edits out of later
accounts any recognition of the supportive role of the women who,
along with Anny Ritchie, nurtured her apprenticeship, for instance
Madge Vaughan and Violet Dickinson. They boosted her confidence
and introduced her into their professional networks to establish and
promote her career in journalism. Yet she refused to go to Vaughan’s
funeral for, ‘Rustling among my emotions, I found nothing better
than dead leaves’ (D3: 46). Holton rightly argues that ‘Woolf’s distancing of Ritchie into deep Victorian unModernism was a symptom
of her crusading need to persuade of her own originality’ (2008: 51).
Leonard Woolf colluded in this lack of acknowledgement of past
influence by omitting Woolf’s early journals from his edition and
selection of her diaries; adding to the illusion that she arrived fully
formed as a writer.2 The extent of that illusion is being increasingly revealed by publication, in the last 25 years, of early drafts
which show the genesis of her later work. This includes the previously unpublished autobiographical writings edited by Schulkind
in Moments of Being (1985); of apprentice pieces such as A Passionate
Apprentice (1990; 2004 second edition including the 1909 notebooks)
and the Hyde Park Gate News (2005); and the final two volumes of
the essays (2009; 2011), especially Clarke’s retrieval of the Additional
Essays 1906–24 (E6: 301–400) and numbers of early drafts. In
Becoming Virginia Woolf (2014), Barbara Lounsberry reveals the extent
to which Woolf used earlier diaries to construct her own diary entries.
Woolf inhabits a pre-eminent place in the canon of literary modernism. She reveals how strong is her desire to be novel and exceptional by obscuring her debts to her precursors, but also by denying
the influence of many contemporary writers. Yet even here she is
ambivalent, as Light recognises, ‘Like other modernists experimenting in the art of fiction, Virginia Woolf often wrote from the darkest
places in herself and from her least acceptable feelings; she frequently felt disconnected from others and feared the solipsism which
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resulted. She hoped to transform what separated her from others
into forms of connection through art’ (2008: xix). This ‘connection
through art’, with both their peers and their precursors, is one which
is important for modernist women writers, as Sydney Janet Kaplan
argues citing Katherine Mansfield’s ‘affiliation complex’. Mansfield,
she suggests, ‘demonstrates repeatedly her imaginative interaction
with nineteenth century precursors’ (1991: 86). Woolf did exhibit
such an imaginative connection with many literary precursors, as
she explores in A Room of One’s Own, and as de Gay (2007) and Ellis
(2007) have argued. But this was again very selective and ambivalent.
It did not extend overtly to the legacies of Ritchie, Cameron and
Stephen, nor did it extend to her female contemporaries. Rather than
feeling connected to, and creatively collaborative with, her peers,
such as Mansfield, Woolf, unusually, openly admitted the challenge
she felt in the face of her genius and success (D2: 226–7).
Woolf’s writing about women’s lives, especially her polemical A
Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, is often considered as her most
iconic and innovative. But Woolf does not acknowledge the influence of her forebears’ work and writing in this area, which anticipates
many of her own concerns. The proto-feminism of Ritchie’s essays
such as Toilers and Spinsters, Cameron’s photographs of women,
and Stephen’s philanthropy, reveal that Woolf’s explorations of the
conditions of women’s lives is not exceptional and ground-breaking,
but is deeply rooted in a prevailing culture and discourse of suffrage,
feminism and patriarchy, which spans the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Woolf was just one of a number of women novelists who
were exploring situations which had arisen out of their mothers’
lives, and their own formative, nineteenth-century childhoods. Night
and Day and The Years, like Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African
Farm (1883), Winifred Holtby’s South Riding (1936) and May Sinclair’s
The Life and Death of Harriet Frean (1922), engage with issues of
unequal treatment in the education of sons and daughters, restrictions on unmarried daughters at home, and barriers to work, careers
and financial independence for women. Sowon Park has explored
the extent of Woolf’s borrowings in her feminist polemics, citing, for
instance, Elizabeth Robbins’ discussion of a woman’s language, Ray
Strachey’s manifestos on suffrage and women’s economic independence, Mary Florence’s use of the phrase ‘woman has no country’
and Helena Swanwick’s writing on patriarchy and militarism (Park
Virginia Woolf’s Nineteenth-Century Legacies 167
2005: 123–5). Swanwick, Robbins and the Strachey family were close
friends of Woolf’s parents, especially Julia Stephen, and part of her circle
of influence. Woolf gives no attributions to these women writers and
obscures their influence, as she obscures the work of her forebears,
both practical and artistic, on the conditions of women’s lives.
Woolf was often concerned to construct herself as an independent,
bohemian woman, breaking free from the confines of her Victorian,
patriarchal incarceration. Her ambivalence reveals the impossibility
of such a project; since it involved constructing her forebears as different and other, in spite of all the evidence available to her of their
similarities. As Lee argues, ‘though she spends her life strenuously
establishing and defining herself as an autonomous and exceptional
individual, she recognises to the last day of her life that she is part
of the fabric of a family history and character, and carries in her own
life traces of “a world that has gone”’ (1997: 49). Ritchie was a living
reminder, but was increasingly sidelined in Woolf’s life, her offers of
help and friendship rejected.
Woolf often represents change as leaving a Victorian house, as
she did in both Night and Day and The Years. Biographically it was
figured as leaving Talland House and 22 Hyde Park Gate, both
removals intimately linked to the death of a parent. Woolf continually reconfigured these houses and her life in them. In her memoirs
and novels such as To the Lighthouse and The Years, the narrative of
Talland House increasingly becomes romanticised and elegiac; conversely, moving from 22 Hyde Park Gate to Bloomsbury becomes a
narrative of escape from Victorian patriarchy and oppression. Her
contemporary accounts however reveal a very different picture, and
a reluctance to leave her childhood home. Just a few days before
her father’s death, she claimed ‘we have all been so happy together
and there never was anybody so loveable’ (L1: 124). She tells Violet
Dickinson that they have been tramping around house-hunting but
are finding Bloomsbury dreary, cold and gloomy, ‘Really we shall
never get a house we like so well as this, but it is better to go’ (119).
Such hesitancy is figured by Katharine in liminal space at the end of
Night and Day and later expressed in ‘Street Haunting’, ‘to escape is
the greatest of pleasures’, but it is also comforting to return to the
security of an old familiar home (E4: 491).
Woolf’s responses to financial independence, and earned income
from writing, are equally ambivalent. She famously asserts that
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women need a room of their own and £500 a year in order to be
able to write (Room: 137). Paradoxically, Woolf’s independence of
income depends upon nineteenth-century financial legacies: £2500
from her aunt Caroline Stephen (L1: 391), from Laura Stephen’s trust
fund,3 and from the rent and sale of 22 Hyde Park Gate, a house
bought by Julia Stephen with legacies from the Duckworth family.
Contradictorily she celebrates, in the same work, the role model for
future women writers provided by Aphra Behn, the first woman to
become financially independent by her pen. Though this might be at
the expense of the quality of her writing, it is an achievement which
outweighs the value of anything she wrote (Room: 82), for ‘Money
dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for’ (84). Yet Woolf castigates
numbers of other women for writing for money. Mrs Humphrey
Ward is derided for compromising her intellect by forsaking ‘a hard
life of unremunerative toil’ writing a great history, choosing instead
to write bad novels ‘at breathless speed’ to earn the ‘cheques for
£7,000 [which] dropped out of George Smith’s pocket before breakfast’ (E3: 381, 382). Mrs Oliphant, Woolf asserts, ‘sold her brain,
her very admirable brain, prostituted her culture and enslaved her
intellectual liberty in order that she might earn her living and educate her children’ (TG: 287). As Blair argues, ‘Woolf’s ideas about
the publishing woman have shifted by the late 1930s once she has
securely established her own position in the field of literary production’ (2007: 8). In suggesting that women need private space and an
income in order to write, Woolf obscures the financial imperative of
her first attempts at journalism. Her diary reveals her pleasure when
she received her first cheque for Guardian articles (PA: 219). She also
obscures the many women from all classes, both precursors and contemporaries, who wrote and published without the advantage of a
private room and an independent income.
Woolf’s vituperative attack on Oliphant is complicated by layers
of resentment and innuendo. It can be read as incorporating a concealed attack on Ritchie. Oliphant was Ritchie’s close friend, mentor
and literary precursor, regarded by her as one of the ‘Torch-bearers
of the Early Victorian days’, whose lack of recognition by ‘the rising generation knocking at the door’ saddens her (FtP: 28). In ‘A
Discourse on Modern Sibyls’ (3–30), Ritchie covers the same ground
as Woolf would visit, but sees Oliphant’s tireless writing and care for
her family and friends as positive attributes, not pejorative as does
Virginia Woolf’s Nineteenth-Century Legacies 169
Woolf. Ritchie was writing and earning in precisely the same way.
As Blair has shown, Oliphant had a very conflicted friendship and
professional relationship with Leslie Stephen (2007: 113–26), which
in many ways mirrors that of Leslie Stephen and Ritchie. Oliphant
was attacked by him as a hack writer (125–6), in terms which Woolf
later recycles and which resonate with similar attacks on Ritchie for
her amateurism.
Woolf’s nineteenth-century financial legacies, supplemented by
increasingly substantial earnings, allowed her to buy the time to
write by employing domestic servants. She argues that the ‘extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman’ (E5: 29), but as Light
argues, it is ‘the figure of the servant [who] reminded Virginia Woolf
that this enabling fantasy of independence, the idea of the fully
self-directed, autonomous individual, remains just that, a fantasy’
(2008: xx). Though a pacifist, Woolf admits that conditions for
women’s independence and intellectual freedom had changed
thanks to the Crimean and European wars which opened doors for
them (Room: 141). Woolf’s ambiguity about servants and female independence is apparent in The Years, where she notes how, post-war,
the red-haired servant girl (TY: 288) has choices other than skivvying available to her. Yet many women, like Peggy, though university
educated, financially independent and with a successful profession,
remain unhappy and unfulfilled. It is visible too in Three Guineas,
especially in her discussion on income and education (TG: 209–76).
After laboriously retrieving the achievements of women such as
Gertrude Bell, Josephine Butler and Anne Clough, she is apparently
surprised to find that ‘nineteenth-century women were not without
ambition it seems’ (264). The abundant ambitions and professional
independence of Cameron and Ritchie are again obscured. Her
denunciation of the Victorian woman who would undertake voluntary employment, and ‘do the work for the sake of doing the work’
(264), similarly devalues and obscures Stephen’s philanthropy, based
on precisely this humanist principle.
Ambivalence also reveals the provisional nature of Woolf’s construct of herself as an outsider, famously in Three Guineas. As a
woman in a patriarchal society she was an outsider, but this construct of otherness is subverted by her class, through which she was
an insider. Indeed she limits membership of the Outsiders’ Society to
‘educated men’s daughters working in their own class’, recognising
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that they could do no other (TG: 310). Her attempts to step outside
her own class, such as her ventriloquising the voices of the working class in ‘Kew Gardens’ or The Years, are always awkward and
unconvincing.
However, within her extended family circle she was in many ways
an outsider. Cameron and later Ritchie and Stephen, her Duckworth
siblings, and her Pattle aunts, uncles and cousins, were very much
insiders; but, as Rudikoff has shown, ‘the younger Miss Stephen was
excluded from the custom of the Edwardian weekend. She was not
among guests writing letters on the heavy, creamy – perhaps crested –
house writing paper, or out in the afternoon in a tweed skirt, or
changing into a tea gown’ (1999: 137). She was excluded by her
age from her mother’s Sundays ‘At Home’, still in the nursery when
guests such as Burne-Jones and Henry James were welcomed. She
did not accompany Stella, George and Gerald riding in The Row,
nor was she, like them, invited to Orchardleigh, Eastnor Castle or
Highclere. Her teenage response to such exclusion, when George and
Gerald Duckworth, acting in loco parentis, tried to initiate her into
the mores of their circle, was initially to reject that circle. Yet connections with the aristocracy, ‘two dukes and quite a number of earls
and countesses’ to which in the nineteenth century ‘the beauty of
our great aunts had allied us’ (MoB: 169), remain a source of fascination and fantasy for her; as Rudikoff (1999) explores, and she herself
considers in ‘Am I a Snob?’ (MoB: 204–20), echoing Thackeray’s The
Book of Snobs.
Woolf was also initially outside the Cambridge circle of her
brothers’ friends, a resentment which fed into her polemics. But she
was excluded because of concerns about her health, and not by her
sex. Similarly she was not excluded from the Library or the lawn
because she was a woman, as she claimed (Room: 7–9), and others
have continued to claim on her behalf, but because she was not a
member of the College. Men who were not members would have
been similarly excluded. Women at Newnham and Girton could go
into their library, and as Kathleen Raine joyously remembered, ‘over
the sweep of the lawns upon whose green cedar-shaped carpet I was
now no trespasser, but one of the happy and thrice-happy permitted
to walk’ (1978). In spite of Woolf’s debate about Arthur’s Education
Fund (TG: 278), there was no lack of finance, nor parental opposition
in principle. Vanessa was allowed to follow her chosen path by going
Virginia Woolf’s Nineteenth-Century Legacies 171
to the Slade. Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen provided models of
female artistic, rather than academic, aptitude and interest. However,
Woolf knew many women from her own familial circle, such as
Lettice Fisher, Karin Stephen, the Strachey sisters and Margaret
Llewelyn Davies, who proved that, though there were still many
inequalities of opportunity, women like her were not excluded from
an Oxbridge education. Moreover Snaith’s recent research reveals
that she did have some formal academic and university education
(2012: xii–xiii, lvi–lvii).
Daugherty explores Woolf’s ambivalent embodiment of simultaneous outsider/insider positioning in terms of her father’s influence
on her early reading, ‘Tom Brown’s School Days, with its assumptions about insider status, and Three Generations of English Women,
with its hints at outsider status, both come from the shelves of
the insider’s library [...] She carried traces of the books from Leslie
Stephen’s library with her precisely because they propelled her out of
it’ (2010b: 61). Similarly, Rudikoff notes the influence of her father’s
library and his essays in allowing Woolf to assimilate an insider voice
which would facilitate publication of her early work, ‘The daughter
of Leslie Stephen might adopt an alienated role many years later,
but she was not an outsider and could not deliberately choose to be
one. Throughout her life, she was part of a network of associations,
whether or not she had explicitly chosen them’ (1999: 102). This
network of associations led into the Bloomsbury Group, since many
of its earliest members, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, Mollie and
Desmond MacCarthy, were the offspring of Stephen and Ritchie’s
friends or relations.4 As Woolf claims, ‘one approaches Bloomsbury
through Hyde Park Gate’ (MoB: 181). Within the intellectual circle of
the Group, Woolf remained very much an insider.
Boundaries and boundary crossing
The ambivalence of Woolf’s responses to her past in general, and to
Ritchie, Cameron and Stephen in particular, is heightened because
her own narratives of her life are not static, but subject to flux,
change and endless renegotiation. In order to construct herself as
different, independent and free of influence, Woolf creates a series
of temporal fissures: pivotal moments marking a break with the past
and a change of direction. However, as I argue below, these fissures
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Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
are subject to the same distortions and ambivalence discussed above;
and actually reveal competing dynamics of both closure and continuity, rejection and affiliation. Her responses to her forebears change
with her increasing maturity and distance from formative events and
relationships. Her narratives are further complicated by changes in
the Zeitgeist, and periodisation imposed, and then endlessly renegotiated, by cultural historians. In accounting for Cameron, Ritchie and
Stephen, Woolf both constructs, and then crosses, her own boundaries; and conforms to, but subverts, literary genres and periods.
The first of these fissures is located in 1904 with the move to
Bloomsbury. At the time Woolf was hesitant about such relocation,
as I have argued, but the move to Bloomsbury was not the radical
change she often constructs it. In 1904, Bloomsbury was not bohemian or slightly risqué.5 Rather, as Rudikoff shows, it ‘was where families of middle-class professionals lived in quiet, bourgeois comfort.
A single woman could go alone to dinner at a friend’s house with
perfect ease and confidence. Gordon Square, [...] with its church, its
theological library, its physicians and solicitors, was as residential as
Hyde Park Gate’ (1999: 124). After the move to Bloomsbury, Woolf
records her busy social round which continued among many of
the same families, such as the Prinseps, Fishers, Pollocks, Stracheys,
Flowers and Booths, as it had during her mother’s lifetime (MoB:
185–6). The extended family was invited to the house-warming party
(L1: 179–80). Fundamental domestic rituals continued unchanged
because they depended upon servants. Sophie Farrell cooked and
served the meals at 46 Gordon Square, as she had done throughout
Woolf’s childhood for Julia Stephen at 22 Hyde Park Gate, and Talland
House. Moreover, as Lee notes, ‘Some of the furniture – mental
and physical – which gets into the new room may be left over
from the old houses. So, Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs
of Julia Stephen are put up on the walls of Bloomsbury houses;
and the Victorian family provides the furniture of Virginia Woolf’s
modernist novels’ (1997: 47). Woolf’s forebears moved with her,
through their books and portraits. Cameron and Stephen remained
‘invisible presences’. Ritchie, whose own roots were in Bloomsbury,
also had a physical presence in Gordon Square, about which she was
‘enthusiastic’ when visiting (PA: 228).
Woolf’s complex relationship with these forebears reveals internal
contradictions which cannot be accounted for in a polarised,
Virginia Woolf’s Nineteenth-Century Legacies 173
antithetical construction of difference. Ellis rightly resists both the
‘reactionary figure found in the pages of Quentin Bell’s biography’
and the ‘entirely progressive, democratic and even “socialist” Woolf
that turns this very formulation of Bell’s precisely on its head’ (2007:
3–4). Woolf’s ambivalent, nuanced response is more accurately
inscribed by his portmanteau term ‘Post-Victorian Woolf’ (1–3), paradoxically suggesting simultaneous connection and distance. Woolf
was born and bred a Victorian, as Beer argues, and ‘the Victorians
are not simply represented (or re-presented) in her novels [...] the
Victorians are also in Virginia Woolf. They are internalized, inseparable, as well as held at arm’s length’ (1989: 139).
Woolf’s artistic move into the Bloomsbury Group is often figured
as a break from the past into the avant-garde; from the 1860 model of
Victorian Society in which she still claimed to be living (Sketch: 147)
into the twentieth century; and from the realist to the modernist.
However, as with the physical move to Gordon Square, it actually
involves both change and continuity. The Victorian period, as Grace
Moore suggests, ‘had been so long, so successful and so inventive that
for their immediate successors it was an extremely hard act to follow
and presented real problems for the creative and innovative mind’
(2003: 8). One solution was to reconfigure the Victorians as ‘other’,
and the twentieth century as progressive and modern. Revisionist
historians, such as Matthew Sweet in Inventing the Victorians (2001),
have revealed the many erroneous stereotypes constructed in the
pursuit of such a project. Kate Flint, discussing nineteenth- and
twentieth-century artistic influences on Woolf, argues that the term
‘Victorian’ is further destabilised since for Woolf ‘it connotes a style,
rather than an accurate dating’ (2010: 31). Lytton Strachey’s Eminent
Victorians was another way of subverting past achievement; as was
Woolf’s erasure and caricature of the professional careers of Ritchie
and Cameron. There are, however, many continuities, not least
between what Virginia Nicholson calls the ‘radicalism of the great,
late Victorians’ and the similarly ‘profound questionings’ of the
Bloomsbury Group (2002: xvii). Moreover, as Flint argues, the bright
white light in Gordon Square after the rich red gloom of Hyde Park
Gate ‘did not just serve to symbolise the end of an era, but served to
illuminate the past’ (2010: 33).
Woolf famously locates a fissure, ‘on or about December 1910’
(E3: 421). That month her espousal of the new is epitomised by
174
Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
her enthusiasm for Fry’s iconoclastic Post-Impressionist exhibition;
but her acquisition of the first home of her own, evocatively named
Little Talland House, confirms her simultaneous desire for continuity
and for affiliation with her past. In her essays she links this fissure,
which she terms a ‘particularly sharp’ break between one generation
and the next (E3: 387), to her debate about literary realism and modernism, which extends through ‘Modern Novels’ (30–7), ‘Mr Bennett
and Mrs Brown’ (384–9) and ‘Character in Fiction’ (420–38, 501–17).
Woolf cites Joyce’s ‘breaking up the old traditional form of the novel’
(515) as characteristic of the ‘smashing and crashing’ destructive
force of the new (515). While many critics have included Woolf in
such iconoclasm, she figures her own relationship with her literary
precursors as ‘respectful hostility’ (384). In these essays she is critical
only of the Edwardians, such as Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy, in
whose work she thought ‘character disappeared’ (385). She considers
this inevitable in comparison to the rich Victorian inheritance of an
‘astonishing vividness and reality’ of characterisation, as exemplified by Thackeray’s Pendennis (385). Such appreciation of the literary
achievements of the Victorians involves skipping a generation, in
line with her argument in ‘On Re-reading Novels’ where ‘in spite
of the mischief-makers, the grandchildren, it seems, get along very
nicely with the grandparents’ (336), as Katharine Hilbery feels an
affinity with her grandfather. The ‘grandparents’ would, in this
analogy, include Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen.
Woolf’s critique in these ‘Character in Fiction’ essays is not therefore proposing a fissure between realism and modernism, as is often
suggested, but is much more nuanced.6 The essays can be seen as
a continuation of the nineteenth-century Art of Fiction debates
engaged in by Besant, James, Stevenson, Hardy and Zola which
renegotiate literary realism, as I argue in Chapter 2. Close reading
reveals Woolf’s work to be fluid, disregarding generic boundaries
and amalgamating both realist and modernist techniques, as I
argue in relation to Night and Day and The Years in particular. The
work of Cameron and Ritchie equally problematises any suggestion of a fissure between realist and modernist, and reveals much
inter-generational boundary crossing. I have explored techniques,
particularly of soft focus, in Cameron’s work which give it qualities
which Woolf recognised ‘overcome realism’ (E4: 382) and could now
be labelled modernist. Ritchie, too, recognised that Cameron’s work
Virginia Woolf’s Nineteenth-Century Legacies 175
was not purely representational, but was seeking to portray the inner
life of the subject by producing ‘more than a mere inanimate copy’
(T&S: 321). Ritchie’s work displays similar proto-modernist qualities,
especially, as I have discussed, her blurring of generic and ontological
boundaries, her espièglerie, her use of what Woolf would later define
as ‘the psychological sentence of the feminine gender’ (E3: 367), and,
at times, her avoidance of narrative omniscience.
Conversely, Woolf’s attachment to her forebears supports a reading
of Woolf’s modernism as different from many contemporaries, especially Joyce. Her domestic photography and albums, direct descendants of Cameron’s, reveal gendered differences in models of early
twentieth-century modernism. Ellis notes how far ‘a Woolfian piety’
towards the models of writing with which she was brought up, which
would include Ritchie’s and through her Thackeray’s, ‘modified her
embrace of modernism’s proclamation of the “new”’ (2007: 2). In
particular Woolf inherited an awareness of the power of the common reader to ‘bring to bear upon the novelist [...] the pressure of an
audience’ which will ‘encourage the novelist to find out [...] what it
is that he means and how best to show it us’ (E3: 344).
In retrospect Woolf labels another fissure, 1919, ‘the sacred year’
(TG: 182) because of the unbarring of the professions to women. It is
also the year of the culture shock of Fry’s African Art exhibition, and
the Hogarth Press’ publication of Eliot’s modernist Poems and Woolf’s
‘Kew Gardens’. Woolf debates ‘The Modern Novel’, but Janus-like, is
looking both ways. The death of Ritchie creates a huge rupture in her
life, breaking the last physical link with her Victorian past; but the
publication of Night and Day ensures Ritchie’s continuing ‘invisible
presence’. Woolf is already concerned with the memorialisation
of her forebears, not only of Ritchie, fictionally and in her essay
‘Lady Ritchie’, but also of Cameron and the comic potential of the
Freshwater Circle (D1: 237).
Continuities and lines of descent
From then on Woolf does not construct deliberate fissures but is
increasingly, though hesitantly and still very ambivalently, more
concerned with continuities and lines of descent. In the 1920s Woolf
is still excited by the new, continuing her experiments in modernist
fiction in ‘Monday or Tuesday’, ‘Blue and Green’, Jacob’s Room and
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Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
Mrs Dalloway. She writes to Gerald Brennan about the modernism
of Joyce, ‘The human soul, it seems to me, orientates itself afresh
every now and then. It is doing so now. No one can see it whole,
therefore. The best of us catch a glimpse of a nose, a shoulder, something turning away, always in movement’ (L2: 598). There are strong
resonances here of the techniques which she had seen in Ritchie’s
subversive portraits, especially of famous men (CfSM: 67, 68), but she
does not make the connection with Ritchie overt. While celebrating
the fragmentary and partial, and the differences she identifies in
modernism, she ambivalently simultaneously advocates a connection with the past in ‘How it Strikes a Contemporary’ (1923) (E3:
353–60), aware that ‘the difference is on the surface; the continuity
in the depths’ (359). As part of this continuity, she begins the selfconscious review of her past which she would continue for the rest
of her life, commencing with ‘22 Hyde Park Gate’ (1920) (MoB:
162–77) and ‘Old Bloomsbury’ (1921/22) (179–201). In particular she
is engaged, not only in reflecting upon, but also publishing about,
Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen. While this is done in ways which
do not overtly celebrate their achievements it nevertheless ensures
their continued presence in the public domain. She reads Ritchie’s
collected letters and a number of family memoirs including those
by Laura Troubridge and Herbert Fisher for source material for ‘The
Enchanted Organ’ (1924) (E3: 399–403) and ‘Pattledom’ (1925) (E4:
280–2). Freshwater is written and performed. She mines old letters
and diaries, and revisits Talland House for To the Lighthouse, published on the anniversary of her mother’s death in May 1927. She
retrieves Cameron’s photographs, including those of her mother,
and publishes them in 1926, with a biographical introduction, as
Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women. She is photographed for the Hall of Fame in avant-garde Vogue magazine, in May
1924, incongruously in Victorian dress – a visible icon of her connection and another of the material possessions inherited by her. She
collaborates in the publication of Cameron’s photograph of Stephen
in the December 1926 issue of Vogue.
In the 1930s and to the end of her life she is even more concerned
with a systematic retrospective of her own family and of society, as in
The Years. Alexandra Harris argues, in Romantic Moderns (2010), that
alongside the iconoclastic avant-garde, modernism also included a
strand of nostalgic Englishness which valued an unbroken tradition.
Virginia Woolf’s Nineteenth-Century Legacies 177
She identifies ‘the meticulousness of Woolf’s memorial house building’ (2010: 261) at the beginning of A Sketch of the Past where she
systematically remembers the material detail of each room in 22
Hyde Park Gate. Harris notes how this ran counter to the turmoil
of the conditions in which Woolf was writing, displaced from her
home in Tavistock Square and then Mecklenburgh Square, ‘With her
world in boxes around her, Woolf’s writing became more and more
concerned with tracing continuous lines between past and present’
(261–2). This recovery of the past can be seen in Woolf’s increasingly
strong sense of community and comradeship and a desire to go back
to her roots – national, literary and familial. She incorporates a history of England in the pageant in Between the Acts; and in ‘Anon’ (E6:
580–607) begins a history of English Literature in which she aims to
reveal connections and ‘tap the reservoir of common belief’ (583). In
‘Anon’, as in Between the Acts, Woolf shows how parts come together
to create a whole. Traditionally the audience ‘was itself the singer’
and everyone joined in the song ‘and supplied the story’ (581).
David Bradshaw has noted Woolf’s panoptic vision of her fiction
in the 1930s, reflecting her desire to see the whole.7 This is evident
in The Years and in her many aerial perspectives. In her personal retrospective, A Sketch of the Past, she explores the formative influence
of her nineteenth-century legacies on her present, and on herself as a
writer. She reconnects with her past, while writing The Years, through
her new friendship with the long-lived Ethel Smyth, one of the AngloIndian network who knew the Pattles. Woolf sends Smyth some
Cameron photographs, ‘a book of pictures by a great Aunt of mine,
in which I quote your opinion of my great grandfather’ (L4: 132).
There is a strong sense of nostalgia and loss, expressed for instance
in a letter to Smyth in 1939 in which she comments on rereading
a nineteenth-century novel while listening to enemy planes flying
over. She tells her enviously, ‘What a happy life you had – in the very
cream and marrow of the 19th Century. I had a glimpse too, but not
a long look’ (L6: 326). Janis Paul contends that ‘in each of her novels
she posits some kind of rebellion against the world of English culture
and tradition, and she ends with a return to that world, reaffirming
Victorian values of time, place, history, society and things in themselves as the only points of survival and unity in a fragmenting world’
(1987: 6). Her rebellions against her past, like Katharine’s in Night and
Day, are usually only tentative and ambivalent.
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Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
Ambivalence: Woolf’s nineteenth-century legacy
Ambivalence can have negative connotations, and can be read as
such in Woolf’s ploys to avoid facing up to the challenges posed
by the past and by the legacies of Ritchie, Cameron and Stephen.
Paradoxically, the ambivalence which patterns Woolf’s writing
reveals the strength of her affiliation with her forebears, for, as
Rosenman recognises, ‘an intense attachment induces ambivalence’
(1986: 14). Moreover, as I argue below, it is one of her lines of inheritance. In Woolf’s work it is a positive, creative, quality. It incorporates what Keats termed ‘Negative Capability, that is when man is
capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any
irritable reaching after fact & reason’ (quoted in Gittings 1987: 40–1).
Negative capability privileges indeterminacy and lack of resolution.
It resists the unimaginative imposition of order which Keats suggests will ‘Unweave a rainbow’ (149). It is a concept now axiomatic
in postmodernism and recent scientific theories of Uncertainty,
Complexity and Chaos. Josephine Carubia, reading Woolf through
Chaos theory, notes that for her ‘the emancipatory value of a pattern
lies both in its hidden symmetries and in its ultimate indeterminacy,
its recursive self-similarities and its unpredictable perturbations’
(1997: 267). Ambivalence allows for flexibility and boundary crossing. Woolf’s intention is, as Harold Nicolson understood, ‘to depict
the fluidity of human experience, the insistent interest of the inconsequent, the half-realised, the half-articulate, the unfinished and
the unfinishable’ (quoted in Briggs 2005: 264). Ambivalence opens
up possibilities, allowing for multiple readings; encouraging a both/
and, rather than either/or, approach. It becomes part of Woolf’s aesthetic, experimented with, for instance, in her use of synchronicity,
which encourages the simultaneous habitation of multiple spaces
and times, and in her unreliable and multiple narrative positions.
With Woolf everything is subjective. Writing from a constructed
child’s point of view she is aware of an Alice in Wonderland view
of the world as unstable and constantly changing, ‘the feeling of
everything approaching and then disappearing, getting large, getting
small, passing at different rates of speed’ so that ‘no sooner has one
said this was so, than it was past and altered’ (Sketch: 79).
Woolf’s ambivalence is also one of her nineteenth-century legacies.
Neither Cameron nor Ritchie felt any need to pin themselves
Virginia Woolf’s Nineteenth-Century Legacies 179
down to just one way of seeing or being. MacKay’s notion of creative negativity (2001: 3–7), itself drawing on Keats’ theory, which
she applies to Cameron and Ritchie, highlights their propensity
for rule breaking and their subversive, enabling, ploy of espièglerie.
Ritchie playfully transgresses generic and ontological boundaries,
merging biography and autobiography, fact and fiction. Cameron,
MacKay argues, engages in ‘double accounting’ for her defining use
of soft focus which ‘both obscures and highlights a technique that
“focuses” on eyes [which] act as emblems to the ambiguity and
paradox that inform her vision’ (1996: 66). She blurs the boundaries
between amateur and professional, and between domestic and public
spheres. Stephen’s public ‘tea-table manner’ obscures her disruptive
laughter and ribaldry. It reveals the tension, which Blair identifies
in Mrs Dalloway and Mrs Ramsay, between the ‘socially constructed
and the genuine self’ (2007: 223). Woolf inherited both the tension
and the laughter.
Woolf’s paradoxical construction of her forebears as enduring
‘invisible presences’ reveals that her relationship with her past is ultimately defined not by fissure but by flow. She structures continuity
into her fiction especially in her use of circularity and synchronicity.
Both The Waves and The Years begin and end with an interlude, gesturing to a time before and a time after. There is continuity between
texts. Characters migrate, like Crosby between The Years and its gloss
Three Guineas, the Dalloways from The Voyage Out through several
short stories to Mrs Dalloway. There are genetic lines of descent in her
texts, as I have shown especially in ‘The Searchlight’. The Pargiters,
The Years, ‘Professions for Women’ and Three Guineas circulate round
and into each other. The Waves and The Years prefigure much of what
is theorised in A Sketch of the Past. Woolf was increasingly concerned
to make connections and see patterns. She imagines a sort of radio
which she can plug into the wall and listen to the past, allowing her
to ‘turn up August 1890’ (Sketch: 67). This is, as Harris suggests, one
of her ‘brilliant visions of how the modern world might give access
to the old’ (2010: 263).
Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen are all intimately associated, literally and symbolically, factually and figuratively, with Woolf’s most
significant connections: the iterated tropes of the searchlight, the
lighthouse and the open door. Ritchie’s alter ego drifts wraith-like
from Night and Day into Mrs Dalloway’s party, ‘It was Mrs Hilbery,
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Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
looking for the door [...] But there were so many doors, such unexpected places, she could not find her way’ (MD: 209). Like Cameron’s
photographic processes, these tropes are to do with chiaroscuro,
focus, perspective, aperture and framing. They function also as part
of her pattern making, and their endless recurrence, like the beam of
the lighthouse, figures continuity.
The transmission of Cameron’s photographs, and albums modelled on hers, ensures continuities in family histories. The Mia album
was assembled by Cameron for her sister, Mia Jackson, Woolf’s maternal grandmother. Ostensibly, Mulligan argues, it ‘stands as a record
of the sisters’ immediate and extended family’ but it was also ‘conceived to transcend its own time, to assume a place in the hands and
minds of succeeding generations’ (1994: 5). Woolf’s awareness of the
past, and, as Humm speculates, ‘a longing for a confirmed familial
world’ (2006a: 8), is evident in numbers of Victorian photographs in
the albums assembled by herself and Leonard. Moreover the album’s
‘lack of chronological logic [...] illustrates the intertextuality of past
and present’ (2006a: 9), and echoes similar anachronisms and disjuncture in Cameron’s and Ritchie’s albums. It is through a discourse
of photography that Woolf articulates her ambivalent relationship
with her past, ‘For the present when backed by the past is a thousand
times deeper than the present when it presses so close that you can
feel nothing else, when the film on the camera reaches only the eye’
(Sketch: 98). Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen inhabit Woolf’s albums
and their portraits are hung in her homes, so that they everlastingly gaze at each other. Nigel Nicolson recalled, when Woolf first
visited Vita Sackville-West, that she particularly liked the feeling of
continuity created by the ancestral portraits which formed ‘a sort of
second set of occupants of the house watching their descendants’
(quoted in Humm 2006a: 8).
Cameron, Stephen and Ritchie become that second set of occupants in Woolf’s life. Engaging with them allows her to explore her
self. They hover around her as in spirit photographs. She is haunted
by them, ventriloquising the voices of the dead in her life-writing.
Constructing them as disembodied and transparent not only distances their reality, but paradoxically ensures that they remain with
her for ever. Like Mrs Ramsay, Julia Stephen becomes an essence,
‘Ghost, air, nothingness, a thing you could play with easily and
safely at any time of day or night’ (TtL: 146). Rendered transparent,
Virginia Woolf’s Nineteenth-Century Legacies 181
Ritchie remains a medium between the past and the present. Though
Woolf overtly obscures them, the legacies of her nineteenth-century
forebears are intrinsic to her life and work. Her biographical constructions, albeit partial and fictionalised, of Cameron, Ritchie and
Stephen; intertexts and lines of descent from their lives and work into
hers; and her transmission of their portraits and photographs, ensure
that these nineteenth-century antecedents continue as ambivalently
absent yet present; obscured yet memorialised; transparent yet made
visible; erased and yet enduring.
Notes
Introduction: ‘Born into a Large Connection’
1. Briggs employs genetic theory in her biography Virginia Woolf: An Inner
Life (London: Allen Lane, 2005). She was also instrumental in setting up
the Time Passes Project, an interactive genetic exploration of Woolf’s texts.
See www.woolfonline.com.
1
‘And Finally Virginia’: Cameron, Ritchie, Stephen
and Woolf’s Constructs of her Ancestry
1. There are many different versions of his origins, exploits and even
his name, which changed further as it was handed down through the
generations. ‘The Chevalier de l’Étang (1757–1840) and his Descendants,
the Pattles’ by Hugh Orange, revised by John Beaumont (2001) is useful
but contains inaccuracies. Ronald Lessens (2009 and 2010) fills some
gaps and reveals misconceptions by Woolf and other biographers. More
remains to be uncovered of this colourful story.
2. Woolf suggests the term ‘Pattledom’ was coined by Henry Taylor (E4: 280,
377). Beaumont attributes it to Thackeray (unpublished research paper,
‘Thackeray in Pattledom’, Dimbola Museum, Freshwater, Isle of Wight), as
does Brian Hill (1973: 19).
3. The best recent biography of Cameron is by Victoria Olsen (2003). Wolf
(1998) and Ford (2003) have excellent introductions to her life and work.
4. There is currently no full biography of Stephen. Diane Gillespie and
Elizabeth Steele ( JDS) have a useful biographical introduction.
5. Winifred Gérin’s (1981) biography of Ritchie is useful as is the more quirky
Anny (2004) by Henrietta Garnett. John Aplin’s (2010; 2011) biography of the
Thackeray family makes extensive use of previously unpublished material.
6. For discussion of the Freshwater Circle see Elizabeth Hutchings (1998),
Veronica Gould (2006) and Charlotte Boyce et al. (2013).
2
‘Knocking at the Door’: Heredity, Legacy and
Transition in Night and Day
1. I discuss periodisation in Woolf’s changing response to her Victorian past
in the Conclusion.
2. The Datchets are resonant of the Llewelyn Davies family, and the AngloIndian Otways of the Stracheys. Rudikoff suggests Katharine Horner as a
model for Katharine (1999: 59–66) and Lady Dorothy Nevill for Cassandra
(1987). See also Boyd (1976: 90–3).
182
Notes
183
3. If, as Briggs argues, Woolf began Night and Day while on honeymoon, she
and Leonard would have been writing their romans a clèf together. The degree
of collaborative writing, the correspondences, and Woolf’s response to her
husband’s fictionalisation are the subject of much speculation. See Briggs
(2005: 31–5); Hussey (1992: 127–46); Rosenbaum (2003: 185–210) and
Gordon’s Preface to The Wise Virgins (L. Woolf 2003: vii–xix).
4. For early critical reception see Briggs (2005: 52–7).
5. Katherine Mansfield, ‘A Ship Comes into Harbour’ The Athenaeum, 21
November 1919.
6. Clive Bell, The Dial (December 1924, vol. 77: 456–7).
7. See Jane Marcus, ‘Enchanted Organs, Magic Bells: Night and Day as
Comic Opera’, in R. Freedman (ed.). Virginia Woolf: Revaluation and
Continuity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1980: 97–122).
8. Woolf’s state of mind depends on when she was writing Night and Day.
Many critics accept Quentin Bell’s date of 1915 or 1916 after her breakdown (1996: II: 32). Briggs argues convincingly that she began earlier,
possibly 1913 (2005: 34).
9. Ellis (2007) and de Gay (2007) explore Woolf’s nineteenth-century
intertexts and literary legacies in detail. Alison Booth’s (1992) assessment
of lines of inheritance from George Eliot and Woolf is discussed by Blair
(2007: 121–2).
10. See Vanessa Curtis, ‘James Russell Lowell’s Poem to Virginia Stephen’
VWB (no. 33, 2010: 50–2).
11. Mary Berenson to Isabella Stewart Gardner, 11 October 1914, in Rollin
Van H. Hadley (ed.). The Letters of Bernard Berenson and Isabella Stewart
Gardner 1887–1924, with Correspondence by Mary Berenson (Boston:
Northeast University Press, 1987).
12. Galton’s theories on eugenics did not have the negative connotations
which they now have. See David Bradshaw (2003a). Many Bloomsberries
and friends, including Maynard Keynes, Goldsworthy Dickinson,
Ottoline Morrel, D.H. Lawrence and T.S. Eliot, were advocates. Raitt
explores Vita Sackville-West’s reliance on eugenic theory in early novels
(1993: 41–61).
13. The most recent lurid theories are in Deborah McDonald, The Prince,
his Tutor and the Ripper: The Evidence Linking James Kenneth Stephen to the
Whitechapel Murders ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007). For a reasoned
assessment of the life and work of James K. Stephen see Newman (2008).
14. Charlotte Brontë dedicated her novel to William Thackeray. Readers
speculated that she thus linked him Rochester. See Taylor (1999: 271).
15. Royal Earlswood Asylum. Form of Medical Certificate, 12 July 1893. Ref.
392/11/4/4. Surrey History Centre.
16. Royal Earlswood Asylum. Register number 2877 page 457. Ref. 392/11/1/1.
Surrey History Centre.
17. There are also possible resonances of Thackeray’s alleged indiscretions
and Richmond Ritchie’s affair with Eleanor Tennyson. See Garnett (2004:
14) and Gérin (1981: 214–17).
184
Notes
18. Newman (2006) reveals the extent of Woolf’s suppression.
19. Spalding (1999: 264 n. 14) suggests that Woolf obscured Helen Fry’s
illness, which was schizophrenia and possibly inherited syphilis. Woolf
also suppressed Fry’s many affairs. See Briggs (2005: 347–8, 497 n. 34).
20. See Richardson (2002: xxxvi–liv).
21. See Marcus (2000: 211–13, 215–16).
22. See Raitt in relation to Woolf and Sackville-West (1993: 17–40, 62–86).
23. MacKay (1990) and Aplin (2010) discuss Ritchie’s response to her father
and her Introductions.
24. Unpublished letter, L. Woolf to Boyd, 22 June 1961. Special Collections.
Sussex University.
3 ‘The Transparent Medium’: Anny Thackeray Ritchie
1. For instance, travelling ‘To Caen for my book, to see a Normandy farm’
(H. Ritchie 1924a: 129).
2. Madge Vaughan’s publications included Days Spent on a Doge’s Farm
(1893) based on her childhood (L1: 27, 373), and a highly censored
biography of her father, John Addington Symonds, obscuring his sexual
orientation.
3. Madge Vaughan, Giggleswick School, Settle, Yorkshire, 30 November
1904, to Virginia Stephen. Unpublished. Sussex University Special
Collections (SxMs-18/1/D/181/2).
4. For Dickinson’s nurturing of Woolf’s early work and her introduction to
Kathleen Lyttleton, editor of the Women’s Supplement of The Guardian,
see Rudikoff (1999: 89–102).
5. Leslie Stephen, Saturday Review, 24 April 1869, cited in MacKay (1987: 90
n. 33). Leslie Stephen married Minny Thackeray in 1867 and moved into
the home jointly owned by the sisters, asserting his patriarchal control
over them both.
6. In this she agrees with Julia Stephen’s attitude to domestic service, as I
discuss in Chapter 5.
7. Copies of most of Ritchie’s work have survived in the Woolfs’ Library,
now housed at Washington State University. These include bound
copies of two volumes of Atalanta, which include essays by Ritchie. For a
discussion on the holdings at WSU, the contents of the magazine and of
Woolf’s possible use of both, see Daugherty (2010a: 24, 30–3).
8. The link is recognised too by Boyd, who comments that Ritchie’s
experiments with the ‘fanciful life of the mind [...] might almost be taken
to foreshadow Virginia Woolf’s type of stream of consciousness’ (1976: 88).
She gives examples from Old Kensington, ‘Jane Austen’ and Mrs Dymond.
9. Elaine Showalter has written extensively on this, for instance in ‘Piecing
and Writing’, in Nancy K. Miller (ed.). The Poetics of Gender (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986: 222–47).
10. See also Daugherty (2010a: 22–3).
11. The Reflector, 1 January 1888. British Library.
Notes
185
12. See volumes one and two of The Correspondence and Journals of the
Thackeray Family, ed. John Aplin (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010).
13. MacKay (1990) explores Ritchie’s complex relationship with her father
and his work and the ploys she uses to circumvent his proscription on
any official biography.
14. I develop this point in Chapter 5, in relation to her use of stories about
her mother, which she could only have known through her father and
the Mausoleum Book.
15. De Gay has discussed Woolf’s extensive use, and parody, of Austen’s work
in Night and Day (2007: 46).
16. In ‘The Art of Fiction’, Longman’s Magazine, September 1884, James
describes, but does not name, this English novelist, but from the context
and references and his first-hand knowledge of her personality and
writing it is clearly Ritchie.
4
‘Take my lens. I bequeath it to my descendents’:
Julia Margaret Cameron
1. Woolf was reading George Frederick Watts: The Annals of an Artist’s Life
(1912), by his wife Mary.
2. For Cameron’s reputation see Wolf (1998: 33–41).
3. I refer to the typewritten drafts, with holograph revisions, of ‘The
Searchlight’ (SxMs-18/2/B/) lodged in the Special Collections at
Sussex University. Where I quote from these I have corrected obvious
typographical errors. I refer only to those drafts relevant to my argument
about Cameron and Woolf. For a full discussion see John Graham, ‘The
Drafts of Virginia Woolf’s “The Searchlight”’ Twentieth Century Literature,
December 1976: 379–93. See also Judith Raiskin, Virginia Woolf Miscellany
49, 1997: 5, Clarke (1999) and notes 6 and 7 below.
4. The reference is to Tennyson’s home, Farringford, next to that of Cameron
in Freshwater, and to his poem Maud. Woolf plays with this connection
again in Freshwater.
5. Ritchie is probably referring to a photograph taken by Rejlander in 1863
(Page 1992: 122).
6. De Gay (2000) challenges Graham’s dating of the scripts and argues
that Woolf did not dispense with the Freshwater version but, under its
revised title of ‘A Scene from the Past’, was developing it as a separate
story when she died. Marcus (2008) discusses both Graham’s and de Gay’s
chronologies and readings of the drafts.
7. Marcus (2008: 6–7) details Woolf’s use of cinematic techniques in this story.
8. For further discussion of the photographs see Dickey (2010: 384–90) and
Aleksiuk (2000).
9. Gillespie speculates that the costumes for the Dreadnought Hoax owe
much to Cameron’s photographs (1993: 118). Ritchie describes Cameron’s
employment of friends in her plays in From Friend to Friend (1919: 21–2), as
does Woolf (E4: 381). Olsen discusses Cameron and the theatre (2003: 161–4).
186
Notes
10. Terry’s role is discussed by Olsen (2003: 264–5) and Marcus (2008: 6, 8).
11. For accounts of the different versions and the production of this play see
Lee (1997: 661–2) and Olsen (2003: 263–4).
12. Olsen notes many responses to Cameron’s generosity (2003: 81, 259).
13. See MacKay (2001: 37–48) for a detailed discussion of ‘Annals’. Gernsheim
(1948: 67) explores Cameron’s own errors and emendations. Reid notes
the discrepancy in age (1996: 516 n. 23), attributing it to Julia Stephen’s
DNB article ( JDS: 214).
14. This argument is supported by recent research. See Watson (1994: 15).
15. I discuss Woolf’s use of the Angel in the House in Chapter 5 in relation
to Julia Stephen.
16. See Dell and Whybrow (2003: 32, 33, 46, 47).
17. Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett kept up the tradition, collaborating
on Vanessa Bell’s Family Album to provide ‘a photographic record of
Bloomsbury at home’ (1981: 8–9).
18. I discuss Leslie Stephen’s problematic portrayals in his Mausoleum Book,
of Anny Ritchie in Chapter 3 and of Julia Stephen in Chapter 5.
19. Ritchie wrote an Introduction, ‘Reminiscences’, for the volume on which
she collaborated with Cameron’s son, H.H. Cameron, Alfred Lord Tennyson
and his Friends: A Series of 25 Portraits and Frontispiece in Photogravure from the
Negatives of Julia Margaret Cameron, published in 1893.
20. Gillespie (1991) has demonstrated how much creative boundary crossing
exists in the work of the two sisters.
21. I discuss Cameron’s photos of Julia Stephen in detail in Chapter 5.
22. ‘On A Portrait’ was published in Macmillan’s Magazine, February 1876. See
Gernsheim (1948: 73).
23. Aleksiuk explores this captioning (2000: 128–9).
24. Wolf gives a detailed technical description of this process and of
Cameron’s use of it (1998: 33–5).
25. The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860–1900 at the V&A, 2
April–17 July 2011. Three of Cameron’s photographs were included in the
‘Cult of Indistinctness: Art Photography of the 1890s’ section.
26. Dick suggests (HH: 300) that ‘Portraits’ is possibly part of a collaborative
project, ‘Faces and Voices’, planned by Woolf and Bell as lithographs
to be printed by themselves, but never completed (D5: 57 n. 8, 58, 61).
Humm draws on the work of Walter Benjamin to offer a feminist reading
of the stories (2002: 25–9, 31–8).
27. Leslie Hankins gives a comprehensive assessment of Woolf and film (2010).
28. Some critics dispute that this is Woolf’s modernist manifesto. Goldman
terms it a ‘virtuoso manifesto of modernism’ but also notes its ‘disputed
interventions’ (2010: 35). Linden Peach (2010) debates it in terms of
Woolf’s realist aesthetics.
29. Gillian Beer (2000) explores Woolf’s use of science including the theories
of Jeans and Eddington. See also Henry (2000: 142–4).
30. Dell and Whybrow (2003: 30, 37, 38, 39, 41, 47, 70).
31. Bradshaw suggests other associations for the name ‘Cam’ (TtL: 177 n. 21).
Notes
187
5 ‘Closer than any of the living’: Julia Prinsep Stephen
1. This use of the deictic to emphasise the presence of someone who is
absent, or recover someone who was lost, is used also in her fiction. For
instance of Jacob, ‘yet there he was’ ( JR: 132), and the final line of Mrs
Dalloway ‘For there she was’ (MD: 165).
2. Oldfield (2006) discusses the distinction between the terms ‘atheist’ and
‘agnostic’ in relation to Leslie and Julia Stephen. I agree with her that
‘atheist’ more closely describes their beliefs, although agnostic is a term
often used especially of Julia Stephen, possibly because of her article
‘Agnostic Women’.
3. The Mausoleum Book and enclosed papers, British Library, Additional
Manuscript 57920. Alan Bell discusses the writing and compilation of the
Mausoleum Book (MB: xi–xiv, 97–8). See also Broughton (1999: 3–59).
4. The death certificate gives the cause of Herbert Duckworth’s death as pelvic peritonitis. Contemporary local accounts state it was caused when he
carried one of his children upstairs. The fig story is repeated for instance
by Gillespie ( JDS: xix) and Rosenman (1986: 5).
5. Woolf either misremembers what Stella said, or conflates it with her
father’s accounts. Woolf never visited Orchardleigh but Stella went
frequently and knew that her father was not buried there, but in the
Duckworth family mausoleum at Lullington church, not an easy edifice
for anyone to lie on. Typical of the recycling and heightening is the assertion that ‘pregnant with Gerald [Julia] lay for hours on Herbert’s grave’
(HPGN: 228). Unpublished letters (see note 15 below) confirm that Julia
Stephen was only at Lullington for the funeral and spent the weeks before
Gerald’s birth in their London home.
6. See for instance Light (2008: 206) and Rosenman (1986: 69).
7. Vanessa Curtis, ‘Correspondence between Julia Stephen and George
Smith, 1885–94’ VWB (no. 33: 19–32).
8. Jane Garrity suggests that Cameron did represent Stephen as an Angel in
the House (2000: 202, 218 n. 31).
9. I discuss Woolf’s collaboration with Roger Fry on Victorian Photographs of
Famous Men and Fair Women, in Chapter 3.
10. The Reverend William Arthur Duckworth’s diary, 20 and 21 February
1867. Somerset Heritage Centre, Taunton (DD/DU/186).
11. This is very like V. Bell’s famous 1910 portrait of Woolf in an armchair
with an eyeless face (Shone 1999: 85).
12. Woolf presumably means herself, Vanessa and Adrian. Thoby and her three
Duckworth half-siblings were already dead when she was writing A Sketch of
the Past. Her other half-sibling, Laura, who outlived Woolf, is again written
out. Though not biologically Julia Stephen’s child she is included fictionally as one of the eight children of Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse.
13. Afterword by Rita Charon, p. 109, in On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf,
introduced by Hermione Lee, with Notes from Sick Rooms by Julia Stephen,
introduced by Mark Hussey (Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 2012).
188
Notes
14. Nursing at home would have been the norm at this time. The middle
and upper classes would only very rarely go to hospital. See Flanders ‘The
Sickroom’ (2004: 302–48).
15. Mia Jackson to Julia Stephen, 5 October [1889]. Mia Jackson’s letters,
with some related papers, are held in the Special Collections, Sussex
University, ref. SxMs89.
16. See note 13 above.
17. One exception is in a letter to Winifred Holtby, 10 September 1931, in
which she confirms Stephen’s authorship of what she titles Notes from a
Sick Room, but still asserts that ‘this was the only thing she ever wrote’.
She is glad that Holtby found ‘traces of me in my mothers [sic] little
book’. VWB (no. 32: 14–15).
18. Unpublished letter from Dr Nicholls to George Duckworth, 14 May 1895.
In private ownership.
19. Letter from Julia Stephen [Duckworth] at The Porch, to Mrs Leslie
Stephen [Minny Thackeray], 22 September 1874. See note 15 above.
20. Andrea Adolph, ‘The Maria Jackson Letters: Woolf and Familial Discourses
of Embodiment’, paper read at the International Virginia Woolf Society
MLA, 2003. Edited version published Virginia Woolf Miscellany (no. 65:
12–14).
21. It is not clear why they were never published. Stephen’s stories appear to
have been prepared for publication ( JDS: 258 n. 4).
22. James Fitzjames Stephen published ‘Women and Scepticism’ in 1863;
Leslie Stephen ‘Housekeeping’ in 1874 and ‘An Agnostic’s Apology’, first
as an article and then as a book, in 1876 and 1893; Caroline Stephen
published ‘Mistresses and Servants’ in 1879.
23. Two letters were published in the Pall Mall Gazette of 3 October and 16
October 1879. They were signed Julia Prinsep Stephen, 13, Hyde Park-gate
South.
24. Light (2008: 22–41) discusses Julia Stephen and her servants.
25. See Richardson (2002: xxxviii–xxxix).
26. See for instance Haller (1998).
27. Mia Jackson to Julia Stephen, 21 October [1889?]. See note 15 above.
28. For more examples see Dell and Whybrow (2003: 76–8).
29. Both stories have complicated publishing histories (HH: 296). Gillespie
and Steele have inserted some of Leslie Stephen’s and Bell’s drawings in
their edition ( JDS: 55, 164).
30. Mia Jackson to Julia Stephen, 11 November [?]. I have lengthened written
abbreviations but have not corrected the punctuation. See note 15 above.
31. Jackson’s letters, see note 15, are full of references to her grandchildren’s
letters and stories. There were other family newspapers such as the
Corkscrew Gazette and the Talland Gazette (Brosnan 1999: 19; HPGN:
75). Thoby Stephen’s unpublished stories are in the British Library Special
Manuscripts, deposit 10225.
32. Mia Jackson to Julia Stephen, 31 May [1891]. See note 15 above.
33. Mia Jackson to Julia Stephen, 3 July [1891?]. See note 15 above.
Notes
189
34. The poem is reproduced in Anstruther (1992: 104–22). It is a sentimental
romance, dedicated to Patmore’s wife Emily, arguing that ‘a happy marriage is an earthly foretaste of the love of God to be known in Heaven’
(6). An ‘Angel’ cult had begun by the 1870s (61–73, 96–101).
35. Blair gives an illuminating account of the drafts and genesis of Woolf’s
attack on the Angel (2007: 53–60).
36. See de Gay (1999).
37. Garrity (2000: 202); Flint (2010: 19); Reed (2004: 24–5).
38. Vogue Magazine, May 1924, p. 49.
39. Klein was a friend of Adrian and Karin Stephen. Woolf attended her
lectures in Bloomsbury in July 1925. See MacGibbon (1997: 132–3,
150–1).
40. Several additional transcripts were found after Leonard Woolf’s death and
added to the second edition, but it is still an incomplete document. At
the time of her death Julia Briggs was working on a further revision of
these papers. Hans Walter Gabler is continuing this research by digitising
the original holographs and typescripts. See www.woolfonline.org.
6
‘Let us be our great grandmothers’: Heredity and
Legacy in The Years
1. Her fictional First Essay, dated 11 October 1932 (TP: 5–10), is heavily
indebted to the talk she actually gave on 21 January 1931 to The London
and National Society for Women’s Service (E5: 635–48). The genesis of
The Years, and its complex genetic relationship to The Pargiters, A Room
of One’s Own, ‘Professions for Women’ and Three Guineas is dealt with in
particular detail by Briggs (2005: 269–304), Leaska (TP), Bradshaw and
Blyth (2012: xii–xxxii) and Snaith (2012: xxxix–xcix).
2. For alternative dating see Snaith (2012: 505).
3. J.K. Stephen’s poems, Quo Musa Tendis?, were published in 1891. See
Newman (2008).
4. Ellen Terry’s beetle-wing dress is displayed at her home, Smallhythe.
5. See Bradshaw and Blyth (2012: xxiii–xxvi) on images of moral pollution.
6. Brenda Silver attributes these titles to Woolf’s 1929 recollection of knocking at her father’s study door as a child to borrow books from his library
(1983: 7), but Woolf was inventing a recollection for Vita Sackville-West
(L4: 27), and had already employed it in Night and Day.
7. Eleanor’s philanthropy, her Grove Days, is based on that of Julia Stephen,
Stella Duckworth, who was in charge of visiting six houses in Lissom
Grove, and Caroline Stephen, who built a block of artisans’ houses in
Chelsea. All three women had worked with Octavia Hill on housing
projects for the poor. See Darley (1990).
8. Woolf’s possible anti-Semitism has attracted critical attention, including
Lee (1997: 678–81) and Briggs (2005: 305–10). Conversely, Bradshaw
(1999) argues that in The Years Woolf is philo-Semitic.
190
Notes
9. In this sense there are similarities with the work of May Sinclair, based on
her studies in psychoanalysis, for instance in The Life and Death of Harriett
Frean (1922).
10. Clarke has tracked down Woolf’s sources for some of these facts. See ‘The
Picture of Cologne Cathedral’ VWB (no. 47: 42–8).
11. Snaith’s paper ‘The Years, Street Music and Acoustic Space’ was given as
the Plenary Address to the Nineteenth Annual Conference on Virginia
Woolf, 2009. Abstract in Woolf & the City Selected Papers, ed. Elizabeth
Evans and Sarah Cornish (Clemson University Digital Press. 2010: 17).
12. For regulation of musicians see Snaith (2012: 396–7).
13. See note 11.
14. Elicia Clements (2002) emphasises new ways of ‘hearing’ the text in her
discussion of ‘the vocal reverberations and echoes’ in Night and Day.
15. Clarke queries the location of Kitty Lasswade’s estates in ‘Kitty Leaves for
the North’ (VWB, no. 47, 15 September 2014: 38–41).
16. Bradshaw explores Woolf’s Yorkshire references in Jacob’s Room, in
connection with themes of war (2003b). I have explored them in relation to Vaughan, Ritchie and Lowell and in connection with St Ives
(Dell 2005).
17. See Watson (2008: 106–27).
18. Ritchie wrote ‘A Discourse on Modern Sibyls’ (FtP: 3–30) as a Presidential
Address, which was read on her behalf at the AGM of the English
Association, on 10 January 1913, thus post-dating Woolf’s essay. So this
particular borrowing is speculative on my part. However, the internal
resonances with Woolf’s essay suggest that Ritchie’s 1913 talk is probably
based on an earlier work, unpublished or not extant.
19. Snaith discusses Woolf, Smyth and women’s suffrage (2012: xlvii) and
suggests that Smyth is the model for Rose (2012: 458–9).
20. ‘“... we have so much to make up”: The Letters of Ethel Smyth to Virginia
Woolf’. A lecture given to the VWSGB, in Settle, 7 September 2004.
Unpublished.
21. See also Henry (2000: 141–2) for more on Woolf’s use of the telescope and
its connections with Vita Sackville-West and with Garsington.
22. See Bradshaw and Blyth (2012: 318 n. 56).
23. This would be like the Indian muslins the Pattle sisters wore, as in the
Watts’ painting of Sophia Dalrymple (Bryant 2004: 82).
24. See Clarke (2003).
Conclusion: ‘Invisible Presences’ and ‘Transparent
Mediums’: Virginia Woolf’s Nineteenth-Century Legacies
1. In the Preface to the second edition, Bloom argues that his work has been
misread and that he did not propose ‘a Freudian Oedipal rivalry, despite a
rhetorical flourish or two in this book’ (1997: xxii). Rosenman identifies
the problems Bloom’s work poses for women writers (1986: 136–7). See
also de Gay (2007: 7).
Notes
191
2. A Writer’s Diary, edited by Leonard Woolf, was published by the Hogarth
Press in 1953. The journals were finally published, as A Passionate
Apprentice, by Leaska in 1990.
3. Newman (2006: 39–42) gives a detailed account of Laura Stephen’s
finances and the loans Woolf and her siblings took from her trust fund set
up with Thackeray family money.
4. The Bloomsbury Group and its membership is notoriously difficult to
define. See Rosenbaum (1987: 3–7).
5. For a history of the area, see the Bloomsbury Project www.ucl.ac.uk/
bloomsbury-project.
6. Peter Stansky gives a detailed context for Woolf’s remark (1997: 239–43) as
does Briggs (2005: 124–6) and Ellis (2007: 57–63).
7. Bradshaw, ‘The Turn of The Years’. A talk given to the Virginia Woolf
Society of Great Britain, Worcester College, Oxford, 12 September 2010.
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Index
Adolph, Andrea, 115
Aleksiuk, Natasha, 81
Anstruther, Ian, 125
Aplin, John, 27, 33, 39, 55, 67, 83
Atalanta, 46–7, 184n.7
Austen, Jane, 27, 50, 52, 64, 121,
144, 162
Cameron, Charles Hay, 13
Cameron, Julia Margaret, 72–104
Dimbola, 13, 14, 17, 84
family connections, 1–6, 8, 12–14
photograph albums as visual
auto/biography and family
history, 91–5
proto-modernism, 97–9
public and private spheres, 89–91
and Ritchie and Stephen
interconnections, 14–18,
39–40, 43, 60, 105–6,
118, 151
and Stephen: Cameron’s
photographs of, 109–11
and Stephen and Woolf: arresting
beauty, 102–4
and Woolf:
blurring boundaries influence
in Woolf’s work, 5–6, 87–9,
171–5
legacy to Woolf, 72–4
as role model for Woolf, 29, 42
Victorian Photographs of Famous
Men and Fair Women, see
Woolf, Virginia
Woolf’s ambivalent
representations of Cameron,
9–10, 22, 37, 83–5, 178–81
Woolf’s recontextualisation,
imaginative retelling and
fictionalised auto/biography,
18–19, 80–2, 134; in ‘The
Searchlight’, 74–80
Woolf’s suppression of
Cameron’s achievements,
85–7, 163
Woolf’s use of Cameron’s
photographs in Vogue,
129–31, 176
Beer, Gillian, 160, 161, 173
Bell, Clive, 23, 86
Bell, Julian, 28, 108
Bell, Quentin, 2, 49, 107, 173
Bell, Vanessa, 13, 17, 22, 29, 35, 53,
73, 74, 81, 82, 83, 92, 94, 95,
106, 119, 121, 122, 125, 128,
129, 130, 140, 170
Blair, Emily, 43, 68, 126, 127, 168,
169, 179
Blin de Grincourt, Thérèse-Josephe,
see de L’Étang, Thérèse
Bloom, Howard
The Anxiety of Influence, 161,
190n.1
Bloomsbury Group, 16, 17, 40, 55,
82, 171, 173
Booth, Alison, 162
Booth, Charles (General), 15, 118
Booth family, 172
Bradshaw, David, 140, 177
Briary, The, 17
Briggs, Julia, 2, 24, 28, 31, 95, 102,
125, 132, 178
genetic theory, 1–2, 182 Intro n.1
Brontë, Charlotte, 28, 39, 52, 162
Brontë, Emily, 50, 52, 162
Brosnan, Leila, 47, 122
Broughton, Trev Lynn, 50, 55, 56,
57, 59
Burne-Jones, (Sir) Edward, 16, 35,
106, 170
201
202
Index
Cameron – continued
Woolf’s visual inheritance
from Cameron, 2, 60, 95–7,
99–102, 127–8, 133, 152–3,
154–6, 175–7
works
Annals of My Glasshouse, 82, 85,
88, 89, 102–3
‘On a Portrait’, 97, 102
Carroll, Lewis, 17, 83, 91
Carubia, Josephine, 178
Case, Janet, 22, 31, 33
Charon, Rita, 113
Clapham sect, 15
Cornhill, 39, 40, 44, 58, 115
Daugherty, Beth, 42, 44, 171
Atalanta, 47
Davies, Margaret Llewelyn, 33, 171
de Gay, Jane, 29, 77, 102, 117, 166
de L’Étang, Adéline, 12
de L’Étang, Ambroise-Pierre Antoine
(Chevalier), 2, 11, 12, 13,
182n.1.1
de L’Étang, Thérèse, 11, 13, 160
de Sévigné, Madame, 48, 49, 163
Dever, Carolyn, 124
Dickens, Charles, 40
Dickey, Colin, 74, 93
Dickinson, Violet, 19, 43, 161,
165, 167
The Dictionary of National Biography
(DNB), 55
on Ritchie, 41
Ritchie on Browning, Elizabeth,
59, 60, 62, 69
in ‘The Searchlight’, 76–7
Stephen, Julia, on Cameron, 6, 16,
86, 111, 160
Stephen, Leslie, 58, 76–7, 81,
108
Dilke family, 119
Dimbola, see Cameron, Julia
Margaret
Duckworth, Arthur, 110
Duckworth family, 168
Duckworth, George, 13, 16, 63, 94,
114, 170
Duckworth, Gerald, 13, 23, 170
Duckworth, Herbert, 13, 18, 63, 107,
110, 114, 117, 131
Duckworth, Stella, 13, 16, 107, 108,
118, 121, 136, 140, 170
Dusinberre, Juliet, 122
Eliot, George, 17, 39, 40, 52, 86, 144
Ellis, Steve, 24, 26, 34, 36, 166,
173, 175
Farringford, 17, 76, 78
Fisher, Herbert, 17, 77, 81, 111,
136, 176
Fisher, Hervey, 138
Fisher, Lettice, 171
Fisher, Mary (Jackson), 13
Flanders, Judith, 90
Flint, Kate, 173
Ford, Colin, 89, 90
Forster, E.M., 23, 31
Freshwater, 13, 14, 39, 76, 77, 78, 83
Freshwater, see Woolf, Virginia
Freshwater Circle, 3, 5, 9, 16, 17, 75,
175, 182n6
Freud, Sigmund, 131, 132, 160
Fry, Roger, 174, 175
’Mrs. Cameron’s Photographs’,
86–8
Roger Fry, see Woolf, Virginia
Victorian Photographs of Famous
Men and Fair Women, see
Woolf, Virginia
Galton, Francis, 27, 28
Garnett, Angelica, 22, 30, 81
Garnett, Henrietta, 2
Gaskell, Mrs, 51, 68, 162
Gauguin, Paul, 35
genetic theory, see Briggs, Julia
Gernsheim, Helmut, 86, 88, 89, 102
Gillespie, Diane, 84, 96, 100–1, 112
Gillespie and Steele (JDS), see
Stephen, Julia
Index
Grant, Duncan, 81, 106, 171
Greenfield, Susan, 124
Hampsthwaite, 150–1
Hardy, Thomas, 25, 174
‘The Poor Man and the Lady’, 24
’The Science of Fiction’, 23–4
Hargreaves, Tracy, 151
Harris, Alexandra, 176, 177, 179
Harrison, Jane, 36, 40, 41, 96, 128,
161, 162
Haworth
‘Haworth’, see Woolf, Virginia
Ritchie’s visit, 150–1
Woolf’s visit, 43
Herschel, Sir John, 73, 75, 91, 96
Hill, Octavia, 15
Hogarth Press, 44, 89, 95, 129, 130,
131, 175
Holman Hunt, William, 16
Holtby, Winifred, 113, 166
Holton, Amanda, 22, 30, 39, 58, 165
Humm, Maggie, 72, 87, 94, 95, 96,
98, 101, 114, 137, 161, 180
Hunting, Constance, 113, 114
22 Hyde Park Gate, 13, 17, 71, 73,
116, 121, 122, 137–8, 163,
167, 168, 171, 172, 173, 177
Ingman, Heather, 127, 128, 161
Jackson, John, Dr, 12, 13
Jackson, Maria (Mia), 12, 13, 18, 91,
92, 95, 114, 115, 118, 121,
122, 123, 125, 165, 180
James, Henry, 170
‘The Art of Fiction’, 24, 174
on Ritchie, 41, 65
Woolf’s review, 17, 26
Kauffman, Angelica, 16
Keats, John, 25, 178, 179
Klein, Melanie, 131
Lathbury, Bertha
’Agnosticism and Women’, 112, 113
203
Laurence, Patricia, 128
Leach, Karoline, 83
Leaska, Mitchell, 136
Lee, Hermione, 24, 48, 55, 86, 95,
120, 122, 139, 143, 154, 155,
167, 172
Light, Alison, 54, 116, 117, 135,
139, 155, 160, 165, 169
Little Holland House Circle, 2, 5,
16, 17, 106
Lounsberry, Barbara, 165
Lukitsh, Joanne, 91, 92
MacCarthy, Desmond, 40, 41,
164, 171
MacKay, Carol Hanbery, 42, 45, 50,
52, 55, 56, 59, 66, 80, 96, 97,
100, 109, 110, 111, 118, 126,
179
Maitland, Frederic, 33
Mansfield, Katherine, 23, 166
Marcus, Laura, 21, 32, 33, 73, 74, 101
Martin, Ann, 48
Mills, Jean, 36
Moore, G.E., 116, 117
Moore, Grace, 173
Mulligan, Therese, 91, 95, 180
Nicholson, Virginia, 173
Nicolson, Harold, 178
Some People, 59
Nicolson, Nigel, 180
Nineteenth Century, 112, 115, 117
Oliphant, Margaret, 43, 52, 69,
168, 169
Olsen, Victoria, 17, 18, 85
The Pargiters (TP), see The Years
Patmore, Coventry
‘The Angel in the House’, 6, 125,
189n.34
Pattle, Adeline, 91
Pattle, Adéline (de L’Étang), 12
Pattle family, 12, 14, 85, 91, 92, 94,
108, 110, 170
204
Index
Pattle, James, 8, 12, 151
Pattle, Virginia, 91
Pattledom, 12, 182n1.1
‘Pattledom’, see Woolf, Virginia
Paul, Janis, 177
Prinsep family, 14, 17, 172
Prinsep, Henry Thoby, 13, 16
Prinsep, May, 97, 110
Prinsep, Sara (Sarah), Mrs, 13, 63,
82, 120
Raine, Kathleen, 170
Rejlander, Oscar, 91, 92, 110
Richardson, Dorothy, 49
Ritchie, Anny (Anne Isabella)
Thackeray, 38–71, 88, 89, 90,
91, 95, 98, 103, 110, 111, 113,
118, 132
achievements, 40–3
and Cameron and Stephen
interconnections, 14–18,
39–40, 43, 60, 105–6, 118, 151
Leonard Woolf on, 35, 39, 58, 66
and Leslie Stephen: differing
attitudes to biography, 57–9,
61–2
transgressive writing, 49–53, 65–6
as transparent medium between
Woolf and Cameron, 5, 68,
82–3
and Virginia Woolf:
connections with Woolf and
Woolf’s work, 1–4, 8–11,
13–14, 29–31; street music,
145–9
covert acknowledgement by
Woolf, 70–1
crafting memories, 66–7
legacies in Woolf’s work
158–81
lines of influence from Ritchie’s
essays, 44–9
lines of influence from Ritchie’s
novels, 62–5
obscuration by Woolf, 67–70
Woolf’s apprenticeship, 42–4
Woolf’s literary transformation
of Ritchie, 2–24, 29–31, 33,
38–71; in Night and Day,
3–4, 18–19, 20–3, 33–7,
134; in The Years, 134, 135,
140–51
Yorkshire roots, 149–51
works
‘Adventures of Three Little
Sisters’, 53
Atalanta, 46–7
Blackstick Papers (BP), 47, 49,
51, 52
A Book of Sybils (ABoS), 49, 52,
53, 162
Chapters from Some Memoirs
(CfSOM), 56, 58, 67
‘Concerning Tourguénieff’, 69
‘A Discourse on Modern Sibyls’,
53, 162, 168
‘From an Island’, 5, 17, 65, 83,
104
‘From Friend to Friend’, 4, 41,
77, 82
‘Jane Austen’, 49
‘Little Scholars’, 4, 39
Miss Angel, 16, 58, 62
Mrs Dymond, 44, 65
Old Kensington (OK), 5, 8, 16,
17, 18, 40, 62–5, 66, 144,
145, 146, 147, 148, 150,
151, 152
Records of Tennyson, Ruskin,
Browning (RTRB), 5, 60–2,
69, 78
The Story of Elizabeth, 16, 39, 40,
43, 53, 65, 83
‘Toilers and Spinsters’ (T&S), 5,
15, 44, 45, 46, 47, 98, 166
Ritchie, Hester, 33
Ritchie, Richmond, 14, 42
Rosenbaum, S.P., 116
Rosenman, Ellen, 30, 128, 163, 178
Rothenstein, William, 35
Rudikoff, Sonya, 32, 170, 171, 172
Ruotolo, Lucio, 81
Index
Sackville-West, Vita, 63, 80, 81,
93, 180
St Ives, 17, 94, 112, 114, 119, 121,
132, 136, 148, 152
Schulkind, Jeanne, 132, 135, 165
Senior, Jeanie, 15
Shankman, Lilian, 41, 50
Sinclair, May, 131, 166
Smith, George Murray, 40, 50, 52,
108, 168
Smith, Lindsay, 90, 97
Smyth, Ethel, 8, 13, 81, 85, 94, 145,
151, 177
Snaith, Anna, 2, 32, 146, 148, 171
Sowon Park, 166
Stephen, Adeline Virginia, see Woolf,
Virginia
Stephen, Adrian, 13, 28, 73
Stephen, Caroline, 168
Stephen, Fitzjames, 28, 40
Stephen, James Kenneth (Jem), 28,
53, 136
Stephen, Julia Prinsep (Jackson)
(Duckworth), 1–3, 6–7, 13–16,
18, 63, 73, 82, 92, 93, 94, 97,
102–3, 105–33, 137–8, 139,
151, 155
achievements: the ‘real’ woman,
111–16
atheism and philanthropy,
116–18
and Cameron
arresting beauty, 102–4
photographs of Stephen, 109–11
and Cameron and Ritchie
interconnections, 14–18,
39–40, 43, 60, 105–6, 118, 151
constructs of Stephen, 106–111
and Woolf, 105–33
absent mother, 124–5
legacies of laughter and gossip,
122–4, 164
mentorship of the apprentice
Woolf, 118–22
nurturing of Woolf’s early
writing, 105
205
reimagining Stephen in A Sketch
of the Past, 131–3
resurrecting Stephen in The
Years, 138–40
retrieving the lost mother:
invisible presences, 128–31
Woolf’s ambivalence to
Stephen, 105
writing influence on Woolf, 112
works
‘Agnostic Women’, 6, 111, 112,
114
DNB entry for Julia Margaret
Cameron, 6, 16, 111
‘Domestic Arrangements of the
Ordinary English Home’, 111,
115
Notes from Sick Rooms, 6, 111,
112–15
Pall Mall Gazette, 16, 116
‘The Servant Question’, 6, 111
stories for children (JDS),
7, 106, 111, 114, 116–17,
119–20
Stephen, Karin (Costelloe), 28, 171
Stephen, Laura, 13, 14, 18, 28, 29,
53, 83, 122, 168
Stephen, Leslie (Sir), 1, 13, 14, 16,
28, 33, 39, 41, 76, 77, 81, 83,
94, 95, 102, 103, 106, 107,
108, 109, 110, 112, 114, 117,
120, 122, 130, 138, 169, 171
and Anny Ritchie: attitudes to
biography, see Ritchie, Anny
Thackeray
works
Mausoleum Book, 6, 39, 58, 95,
102, 106, 108, 117, 124,
129, 155
‘The Redundancy of Women’,
45
Stephen, Minny (Harriet Marian
Thackeray), 13, 14, 53, 58, 83,
108, 109, 114, 115, 124
Stephen, Thoby, 13, 123
Stephen, Vanessa, see Bell, Vanessa
206
Index
Strachey, Lady, 12, 55
Strachey, Lytton, 34, 93, 171
Eminent Victorians, 34, 56, 173
Symonds, Madge, see Vaughan,
Madge
Talland House, 17, 61, 62, 67,
92, 102, 119, 136, 148, 163,
167, 176
Taylor, Henry (Sir), 75, 77, 78, 81,
92, 93, 100
Tennyson, Alfred (Lord), 9, 16, 40,
43, 77, 78, 80, 83, 84, 90, 93,
94, 95, 96
Tennyson, Emily, 81
Terry, Ellen, 16, 82, 92, 93, 97, 101,
110, 136
Thackeray, Anne Isabella, see
Ritchie, Anny Thackeray
Thackeray, Harriet Marian, see
Stephen, Minny
Thackeray, William Makepeace, 14,
16, 28
Troubridge, Laura (Lady), 12, 13, 81,
111, 176
Vaughan, Adeline (Jackson), 13
Vaughan, Janet, 94
Vaughan, Madge (Symonds), 8, 43,
149, 165
Vogue, 129–31, 176
Ward, Mrs Humphrey, 168
Watts, George Frederick (Signor), 16,
17, 72, 83, 87, 91, 93, 106
Wolf, Sylvia, 15, 85, 86, 89, 97, 98,
109, 110
Woolf, Leonard, 44, 81, 95, 103,
136, 165
on Ritchie, see Ritchie, Anny
Thackeray
The Wise Virgins, 22
Woolf, Virginia
born into a large connection,
1–10, 35–6
and Cameron, Stephen and
Ritchie, 3, 13–14, 158–81
constructs her ancestry, 11
continuities and porous
boundaries, 24–7
generic ambivalence, 23–4
genetic legacies, 27–9
inherited roles for women, 29–33
life-writing, 33–5
responses to her past
ambivalence, 1, 12–13, 159–61,
161–4, 164–71, 178–81
boundaries and boundary
crossings, 171–3, 173–8
and Ritchie, see Ritchie, Anny
Thackeray
works
‘Am I a Snob?’, 170
‘Anon’, 177
Between the Acts (BtA), 96, 100,
153, 177
‘Blue and Green’, 175
‘Character in Fiction’, 98, 174
‘The Cinema’, 101, 102
‘The Enchanted Organ’, 8, 58,
147, 160, 176
Flush (Flush), 5, 61, 62, 69, 160
Freshwater (F), 5, 17, 63, 65, 72,
77, 81, 82, 83, 84–5, 87, 103,
104, 120, 122, 160, 176
‘Geraldine and Jane’, 44
‘A Giant with Very Small
Thumbs’, 68–9
‘Haworth’, 8, 43, 44, 150
‘How it Strikes a
Contemporary’, 176
Hyde Park Gate News (HPGN), 2,
7, 47, 57, 121, 122–4, 165
‘22 Hyde Park Gate’, 135, 164,
176
Jacob’s Room, 92, 153, 175
‘Julia Margaret Cameron’, 5, 81,
84, 86
‘Kew Gardens’, 23, 95, 170, 175
‘The Lady in the Looking Glass:
A Reflection’, 99
‘The Lives of the Obscure’, 41, 52
Index
‘Madame de Sévigné’, 48, 163
‘The Mark on the Wall’, 23, 70
‘The Modern Essay’, 48
‘Modern Fiction’, 98
‘The Modern Novel’, 175
‘Modern Novels’, 23, 24,
98, 174
Moments of Being, 2, 135, 165
‘Monday or Tuesday’, 175
‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’,
98, 121, 174
Mrs Dalloway, 9, 63, 176, 179
‘The New Biography’, 35, 59
Night and Day (N&D), 2, 3, 4,
5, 7, 8, 9, 16, 17, 18, 20–37,
38–9, 42, 45, 48, 50, 57, 62,
63, 64, 65, 70, 72, 78, 82, 95,
134, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140–
5, 149, 151, 152, 153, 157,
158, 160, 164, 166, 167, 174,
175, 177, 179; ambivalence,
liminality and Woolf’s ‘third
space’, 36–7; Ritchie in, see
Ritchie, Anny Thackeray; and
The Years, see The Years
‘Old Bloomsbury’, 135, 176
‘The Old Order’, 17
‘On Being Ill’, 114
‘On Re-reading Novels’, 174
Orlando (O), 5, 62, 63, 80, 81,
113, 120, 122, 141
The Pargiters, 134, 135, 136,
137, 144, 153, 154, 179
A Passionate Apprentice, 2, 165
‘Pattledom’, 5, 12, 81, 82, 176
‘Portraits’, 5, 99–100
‘Professions for Women’, 46,
141, 153, 160, 179
‘Reminiscences’ (Rem), 53, 54,
108, 138, 160
Roger Fry (Fry), 29, 60–1, 71,
85, 88
A Room of One’s Own (Room), 18,
19, 42, 45, 52, 113, 125, 141,
162, 166
‘The Searchlight’, 5 17, 65, 73,
207
74–82, 87, 134, 152, 160, 179
A Sketch of the Past (Sketch), 1, 7,
9, 17, 54–5, 71, 75, 94, 101,
105, 107, 131–3, 138, 151,
158, 160, 177, 179, 180
‘Street Haunting’, 34, 36, 167
‘Street Music’, 147
‘The Sun and Fish’, 80
Three Guineas (TG), 5, 33, 46,
92, 125, 137, 148, 151, 153,
156, 166, 169, 179
To the Lighthouse (TtL), 7, 17,
18, 66, 73, 75, 102, 103, 105,
117, 119, 122, 124, 125, 128,
129, 131, 134, 138, 141, 160,
167, 176
Victorian Photographs of
Famous Men and Fair
Women, 5, 84, 86, 102, 130,
151, 176
The Voyage Out (VO), 31, 49,
108, 114, 124, 179
The Waves (TW), 80, 92, 101,
144, 145, 157, 163, 179
‘A Woman’s College from the
Outside’, 97
‘Women and Fiction’, 48
The Years (TY), 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 16,
17, 18, 20, 31, 54, 64, 65, 66,
80, 92, 105, 116, 118, 124,
125, 127, 131, 132, 134–57,
158, 160, 163, 164, 166, 167,
169, 170, 174, 176, 177, 179;
cycles, liminality and Woolf’s
‘third space’, 157; endings
and continuities, 151–4; Ethel
Smyth in, 151; and Night and
Day, 140–5; The Pargiters (TP),
134, 135, 137, 179; recovering
family histories in, 151;
Ritchie in, see Ritchie, Anny
Thackeray; Stephen in, see
Stephen, Julia Prinsep
Zuckerman, Joanne, 34
Zwerdling, Alex, 119
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