Chapter One In her childhood Virginia Woolf was a keen hunter of butterflies and moths. With her brothers and sister she would smear tree trunks with treacle to attract and capture the insects, and then pin their lifelike corpses to cork boards, their wings outspread. It was an interest that persisted into her adult life, and when she discovered that I too was a bug hunter, she insisted that we go hunting together in the fields around Long Barn, our house in Kent, two miles from Knole, my mother's birthplace. I was nine years old. One summer's afternoon when we were sweeping the tall grass with our nets and catching nothing, she suddenly paused, leaning on her bamboo cane as a savage might lean on his assegai, and said to me: "What's it like to be a child?" I, taken aback, replied, "Well, Virginia, you know what it's like. You've been a child yourself. I don't know what it's like to be you, because I've never been grownup." It was the only occasion when I got the better of her, dialectically. I believe that her motive was to gather copy for her portrait of James in To the Lighthouse , which she was writing at the time, and James was about my own age. She told me that it was not much use thinking back into her own childhood, because little girls are different from little boys. "But were you happy as a child?" I asked. I forget what she replied, but now I think I know the answer, since her childhood and youth have been more amply recorded than almost any other. It was not so much unhappy as troubled. Her mother died when she was thirteen, and her half sister when she was fifteen. At twenty-two she lost her father, and two years later her brother Thoby. Another half sister was mentally deranged. Virginia herself, while still quite young, suffered from periods of acute depression and even insanity. She was sexually abused by her half brothers when she was too young to understand what was happening. It was a string of calamities that could have resulted in a youth that was deeply disturbed. But she was courageous, resilient and enterprising. As her early letters and diaries reveal more convincingly than her later recollections, she developed normally enough, and although she was indifferent to social success, she had a gift for friendship, and very early in her life, an impulse to turn every experience into words. It was on the same occasion as our butterfly hunt that she said to me, "Nothing has really happened until it has been described. So you must write many letters to your family and friends, and keep a diary." Pain was relieved, and pleasure doubled, by recording it. Virginia was born in London on January 25, 1882, the third child of Leslie and Julia Stephen. For both her parents it was a second marriage, and each partner inherited, from the other, children born of the first. It is simpler to describe their complex genealogy by a diagram, to which I have added in brackets their ages in 1895, the year when Julia died: [DIAGRAM OMITTED] Laura was the mentally unbalanced child, who was treated by her father with scant affection, and after Julia's death was placed by him in a mental home where she lived until she died at the age of seventy-five. Leslie's first wife, a daughter of William Thackeray, the novelist, and Julia's first husband, Herbert Duckworth, a handsome barrister, can have meant little to Virginia apart from the tragedy of their early deaths and the progeny of cousins, chiefly Fishers and Vaughans, which they generated. It was a large family group, from which different members entered Virginia's life with varying degrees of intimacy and persistence. Emma and Madge Vaughan (the original of Sally in Mrs. Dalloway ) were among her earliest friends, but they were not to last long in her affections. The people who mattered most in her childhood were her parents, her sister Vanessa and her elder brother Thoby. Julia was the daughter of John Jackson, who spent much of his career as a doctor in Calcutta, and Maria Pattle. Like her mother, Julia was one of the most beautiful women of her age. In her youth she posed for Watts, Burne-Jones, and her aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, the photographer, who has left an image of her that is distinctly pre-Raphaelite, often tragic in countenance, and like Virginia, always beautiful but never pretty. What strikes one most about these portraits is the serenity of her gaze, as if life was a constant test of character which she would survive triumphantly, but this impression may be due to the immobility needed for early photography: one cannot hold a smile longer than an instant without it appearing false. In To the Lighthouse , where Mrs. Ramsay is a close portrait of Julia, Virginia shows us another side of her mother's character--swift, decisive, impatient of stupidity, quick-tempered but incapable of unkindness. In a memoir dated 1907 she wrote of her parents, "Beautiful often, even to our eyes, were their gestures, their glances of pure and unutterable delight in each other." Leslie revered Julia, and she controlled him by her submissiveness. In a sense she was the stronger character of the two, quietly dominating. But Leslie was no weakling. Born the son of Sir James Stephen, a senior civil servant and then a professor of history, he developed from a shy boy into a man who could be formidable, and as a mountaineer, tough. He was ordained a clergyman in his youth but lost his faith and left Cambridge for London, where he earned his living as a literary and political journalist, and became a leading intellectual, the originator and first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography , a friend of Meredith, Henry James, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold and George Eliot. Virginia's childhood was therefore comfortably upper middle class and intellectually stimulating. They lived in a respectable Kensington cul-de-sac, 22 Hyde Park Gate, where seven servants ran the house under Julia's direction. The weekly journal Hyde Park Gate News that Virginia and Vanessa began in 1891 and sustained for four years portrays a lively, talented, funny family, in which tensions were cushioned by mutual affection. The older members supported the younger, and the younger amused their elders. Virginia's talent for fiction developed early. When she was only six or seven, she wrote to her mother (the letter first surfaced in Joanne Trautmann Banks's Congenial Spirits ): Mrs Prinsep says that she will only go in a slow train cos she says all the fast trains have accidents and she told us about an old man of 70 who got his legs caute in the weels of the train and the train began to go on and the old gentleman was draged along till the train caute fire and he called out for somebody to cut off his legs but nobody came he was burnt up. Goodbye. Your loving Virginia. The legend that Leslie was cantankerous and indifferent to his children is not confirmed by the many references to them in his letters to Julia, now in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library. He called them his ragamice, and Virginia was Ginia: "Kiss my ragamice and Ginia. There will be no more of that breed." "Little Ginia is already an accomplished flirt. I said today that I must go down to my work. She nestled herself down on the sofa by me, squeezed her little self tightly up against me, and then gazed up with her bright eyes through her shock of hair and said, `Don't go, papa.' She looked full of mischief all the time. I never saw such a little rogue." "My sweet little Ginia. I shall be glad to have her back." "My love to all my pets, specially my Ginia. I have been thinking of her all day." "Ginia tells me a story every night." And then this, when Virginia was eleven: "Yesterday I discussed George III with her. She takes in a great deal, and will really be an author in time." Their holidays were spent in Cornwall, at St. Ives, where Leslie rented Talland House for thirteen summers until Julia died. It was a curious choice for a man who was not naturally a beachcomber, and was careful with his money. Cornwall was distant from London, and the expense of transporting his large family and several servants was considerable. When they had recovered from the long journey, the children were very happy there, and Leslie showed his kindest side, relaxed and paternal. Two years before her death Virginia wrote, "St. Ives gave me all the pure delight which is before my eyes, even at this moment." Every day brought an experience that, if not novel, was treated as a novelty--walking on the moors, swimming, boating, shopping, and playing games, indoor and out. A photograph taken in Cornwall when she was about six shows Virginia sturdy, tomboyish, concentrating on her role as wicket keeper while Adrian batted. Then an incident occurred that was to surface years later in one of her best-loved novels. She recorded it in Hyde Park Gate News: "Master Adrian Stephen was much disappointed at not being allowed to go." It was the expedition to Godrevy lighthouse in St. Ives Bay. When Julia died, life changed for all of them. They found no consolation in religion. Both Virginia's parents were agnostic. Though their children had "sponsors," none of them was baptized. Leslie was exhausted by his grief, and by the tide of relations who washed up at Hyde Park Gate to gratify their benevolence and overwhelm him with excessive sympathy. He would groan aloud at meals, and complain every week when Stella, who had taken on her mother's role as housekeeper, presented the weekly bills for payment. "He went through an extraordinary dramatisation of self-pity," Virginia wrote in recollection. "He sank into his chair and sat with his head on his breast. At last, after glancing at a book, he would look up and say half-plaintively, `And what are you doing this afternoon, Ginny?' Never have I felt such rage and frustration." He was in danger of losing his children's affection. They felt imprisoned by him. The boys would escape to school, but the girls were housebound. When Stella fell in love with Jack Hills, Leslie's attitude was like that of Mr. Woodhouse in Emma , thinking only that he would be deprived of her company and help, and when she married, his only consolation was that they took a house across the street. When Stella died, probably of peritonitis, only three months after her wedding, he seemed not particularly to mind. His capacity for grief had been exhausted by Julia's death, and Vanessa could take over the management of the house, which she did, dutifully and reluctantly. In later life Virginia would sometimes complain that she was denied the education that was given automatically to boys, but her protests were not consistent nor wholly justified. Once, in middle age, she wrote to Vita Sackville-West, who had reproached her for her lack of "jolly vulgarity," that she had had no chance to acquire it. "Think how I was brought up! No school; mooning about alone among my father's books; never any chance to pick up all that goes on in schools--throwing balls; ragging; slang; vulgarities; scenes; jealousies!" But would she have become a different, more rounded person if she had experienced all this in company with schoolgirls instead of with her siblings? As for universities, she found academics limp and dull. Visiting Oxford in 1907, when she was twenty-five, she described its atmosphere as "quite the chilliest and least human known to me. You see brains floating like so many sea-anemones, nor have they shape or colour," and two years later, after another visit, "There were Regius Professors at dinner, and undergraduates who had won prizes without number and were consequently unable to talk." In the Oxford chapter of The Years she lampooned university life brilliantly. She would have been sucked dry by it. Nor was she denied tuition in her youth. Leslie gave her the run of his extensive library, talked to her about what she read, and encouraged her to write, and on those occasions she felt soothed, stimulated, full of love for this unworldly, distinguished, adorable man. He paid for her to take Greek lessons from Janet Case and Latin from Dr. George Warr ("my beloved Warr"). While Vanessa left daily for art college, Virginia remained alone at the top of the house, puzzling over Homer and Sophocles, line by line with a lexicon, naturally studious, and determined to be a writer. She discovered for herself the pleasure of dipping deep into the treasury of the language to express her exact meaning, partly by writing essays and a diary, but mainly in the form of letters to her family and friends. Often she would write to her brother Thoby at school and later at Cambridge, and he, remarkably for a schoolboy, kept her letters, unlike those which she wrote to me when I was his age. She acquired a gift for self-mockery and the mocking of others, akin to the juvenile burlesques of Jane Austen, for she found disapproval more amusing than approval, but without malice. London, apart from Leslie's tantrums, was fun; so was the country. On holiday in Huntingdonshire in 1899, she wrote to Emma Vaughan: "I shall think it a test of friends for the future whether they can appreciate the Fen country. I want to read books about it, and to write sonnets about it all day long. It is the only place for rest of mind and body, and for contentment and creamy potatoes and all the joys of life." She was honing her gift for observation and was interested not so much in the weird as in the mysteries of the normal. She scarcely needed formal education. She was her own guide through history and literature. She was learning all through her life. Another side of her childhood was darker. Her two half brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth, regarded Vanessa and Virginia as sexual objects, first of wonder, then of desire. Virginia recalled how once at St. Ives Gerald lifted her onto a table, and out of curiosity, put his hand under her skirt and examined her private parts. To Virginia, who was always exceptionally modest about her body, this was repulsive. She never forgot it. She did not accuse Gerald of any other indiscretions. George became the monster. After Julia's death, he would enter Virginia's bedroom, fling himself onto her bed, and take her in his arms. She wrote later of his "violent gusts of passion," and of his behavior as "little better than a brute's." The suggestion was that he had committed, or at least attempted, incest with the girls, and this was Quentin Bell's belief when he first wrote of these incidents. The term "incestuous relationship" is how he summarized them in the index to the first volume of his life of his aunt. Other biographers took up the theme. George's behavior was said to have been responsible for Virginia's sexual timidity and even contributive to her periodic fits of insanity. Louise de Salvo, the American Woolf scholar, has claimed that "sexual abuse was probably the central and most formative feature of her early life," and she alleges that "virtually every male member of the Stephen household was engaged in this behaviour." She uses the term incest without qualification. The allegation is far-fetched. Soon after Quentin Bell's book was published, I visited George Duckworth's son Henry in his Sussex house to inquire whether his father had kept any letters from Virginia that might throw more light on the matter. Appalled by Bell's innuendoes, he gave me five letters with permission to publish them, because he believed that they would prove beyond doubt that the relationship between George and his half sisters stopped short of any reasonable reproach. He argued that it was almost inconceivable that a girl who had been subjected to such brutal treatment could address her seducer as "My dear old Bar" and "My dearest George," or that Vanessa, the other victim of his endearments, would have gone happily to Paris with him in 1900 and two years later to Rome. Quentin Bell, in his last book, Elders and Betters , modified his censure of the Duckworth brothers. He concluded that whatever George's lust may have been, he never carried it to the extent of rape. Nasty erotic fumblings are the most we need suppose. George's instinct was no doubt incestuous, but his practice was not. So conventional a man would never have run the risk of an incestuous and illegitimate child. In recollection, Virginia made more of a drama of the affair than the facts justify. George's attempt to introduce the sisters to polite London society ended in failure. He himself was handsome and socially ambitious, and no doubt sought to magnify his popularity by association with two exceptionally attractive girls. He assumed the role of their dead mother. To him every party was a challenge to Virginia's and Vanessa's marriageability. He could not understand why they were so ungrateful. He was proud of their beauty: should they not be proud of his? But they refused to act the part he planned for them. "We are failures really," Virginia wrote to Emma Vaughan. "We can't shine in society. I don't know how it's done. We ain't popular. We sit in corners and look like mutes who are longing for a funeral." When they were taken as guests to country houses, it was no better. At Corby Castle, which belonged to Jack Hills's father, "it was very dismal and strange. Everything is very stately and uncomfortable. I wish to goodness I could find myself a home." This was written to Thoby. Then Leslie fell ill with abdominal cancer and took two years to die. The course of his decline was described by Virginia in almost daily bulletins to her new confidante, Violet Dickinson, who had been Stella's friend, and although she was seventeen years older, Virginia conceived for her an almost passionate affection, writing to her letters that startle us by their frankness: "It is astonishing what depths--hot volcanic depths--your finger has stirred in Sparrow [her name for herself when writing to Violet], hitherto entirely quiescent." Their flirtation was carried on step by step with Leslie's decline. Virginia was not heartless, but she could not help revealing to Violet her impatience for his death. On Christmas Day 1903 she wrote, "If only it could be quicker," but she meant it as much for Leslie's sake as for her own. He died two months later, on February 22, 1904, when Virginia was just twenty-two. She wrote to Janet Case next day, "Father died very peacefully, as we sat by him. I know it was what he wanted most. All these years we have hardly been apart and I want him every moment of the day. But we still have each other--Nessa and Thoby and Adrian and I, and when we are together, he and Mother do not seem far off." There was no room for the Duckworths in their little world. Orphaned, they moved as a group, Vanessa taking the lead. Copyright © 2000 Nigel Nicolson. All rights reserved.
