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CHAPTER 1
Expectations
It's a rare writer who has not been on the receiving end of at least some expectations, whether from family, friends, or at least one teacher. Often we need just one person to believe in us, to expect us to succeed. Virginia Stephen grew up in a highly literate family; her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, began editing the National Dictionary of Biography in the year she was born (1882), and his library was open to her from the moment she could read. He told visitors that "Ginia" would be a writer; but how this would happen, he did not specify. He wanted her to write to support his own work, and her first published piece of writing, in 1905, was in fact a memoir about him. It was written after his death, an anonymous contribution "by one of his daughters" to Frederic Maitland's Life and Letters of Sir Leslie Stephen. The work depressed her as much as it absorbed her, and it was dutiful and, inevitably, self-censored.
A letter to Thoby in 1896, when she was fourteen, has a postscript dictated by her father: "I want to see how quick this wretched girl can typewrite; I think she does it rather better than I had expected." In 1897 "this wretched girl" (possibly an affectionate appellation in disguise) wrote to Thoby, "The beauty of my language is sick, that I am driven to confess the reason o't — Mr. Payn sent father a book which is a great help to him (Mr. Payn) in his writings — called the Thesaurus of English Words — Perhaps you can explain Thesaurus — but the object of the work is to provide poor scant language authors with three or four different words for the same idea, so that their sentences may not jar — This father took as an insult, and accordingly handed it over to me — and I have been trying to make use of it."
In her next letter in the same year she told him, "My Dear Dr. Seton says I must not do any lessons this term." It was only two years after her mother's death, in 1895, and her own first mental breakdown. Struggling with the thesaurus, trying to impress her older brother, and "not doing any lessons," Virginia Stephen in her adolescence moved between very demanding expectations — studying Greek and Latin the same year at Kings College in London, attending history lectures there, and studying entomology at home with her father — and very low expectations.
In a letter to Vita Sackville-West in 1926, Virginia lampooned her upbringing. "Think how I was brought up! No school; mooning about alone among my father's books; never any chance to pick up what goes on in schools — throwing balls; ragging; slang; vulgarity; scenes; jealousies — only rages with my half-brothers, and being walked off my legs round the Serpentine by my father."
Janet Case, "regular as a Clock but a nice woman, really," as her student described her, was probably the most determined person in Virginia's surroundings to help her educate herself. Case, a Cambridge classicist, lived in Hampstead and gave Virginia lessons in Greek starting in 1902. She had a profound influence on Virginia, both intellectually and as a friend, and evidently put some structure into her life. When Leslie Stephen was dying in 1904, Virginia wrote to her, "Your talk is as good as a lesson." She was always slightly mocking of Case, as in this statement in a letter to Vanessa in 1908: "I had a letter from poor old Case. She is full of tender humanities and a kind of cultured Christianity, though she is too well educated to be a Christian." It was Case, a Cambridge graduate and scholar, who initiated Virginia into campaigning for women's suffrage and organized labor. She put the brakes on her student's excesses, it seems, and connected her with a wider, feminist worldview. In 1911 Virginia reported to Vanessa, "Janet C. said suddenly in the train, 'What are you thinking of, Virginia?' Imprudently I answered, 'Supposing next time we meet[,] a baby leaps within me?' She said that was not the way to talk."
When Leslie Stephen announced that his younger daughter would be a writer, he probably didn't mean a fiction writer, even though he was friends with novelists such as Thomas Hardy and Henry James, who both came to the house. The Victorian ideal of womanhood, as exemplified by his wife before her death, included much visiting of the poor, housekeeping, and attention to male well-being, especially his own. Virginia pinned this down forever in her description of Mr. Ramsay and his bids for his wife's attention in To the Lighthouse, written well after her father's death. Mr. Ramsey has just told his wife, rather brutally, that she won't finish the stocking she is knitting that night in time for him to take it to the lighthouse keeper's little boy the next day. "He wanted something — wanted the thing she always found it so difficult to give him; wanted her to tell him that she loved him. And that, no, she could not do."
What Virginia's demanding, emotionally dependent father wanted, at Hyde Park Gate in those days, was usually what came about. Virginia wrote to her friend Emma Vaughan in 1900, with some apprehension, "Thoby is here today but he goes tomorrow and then I shall be left alone with my Parent." In a letter the same year to George Duckworth she wrote, "Father is stretched at full length snoring on the sofa and this annoys me so much I can't write sense." Her father was not an easy companion, especially in his bereavement.
Parental expectations aside — and Leslie Stephen's for his younger daughter were a mixed bag — Virginia was expected to be literate, even learned, by the standards of her time. By the time she was eighteen she was reading in four languages. She was (vaguely) expected to marry and, in due course, have children. Vanessa, who married soon after their father's death and quickly got pregnant, was always an example and an inspiration to her, but one she felt unable to live up to. Her expectations of herself as an artist as well as a woman were colored by Vanessa's example, and she always felt inferior, or at least somehow unfinished by comparison. Being childless compounded this feeling. In 1907, when her sister was pregnant for the first time, she wrote to Violet Dickinson, "Nessa is like a great child, more happy and serene than ever, sketching ... draped in a long robe of crimson, or raspberry, coloured silk." She added wistfully, "Shall I ever bear a child, I wonder?"
Thoby, at Cambridge, wrote to his younger sister as an intellectual equal and added suggestions to her reading list. His expectations of her were evidently high. In 1901 she wrote to him, "Father has begun to say 'We must talk about what you are to read at Fritham.' I have told him that you have promised to help me with a Greek play or two — Sophocles I think. ... I have read the Antigone, Oedipus Coloneus — and am in the middle of the Trachiniae. I should rather like to read the Antigone again — and any others you advise. I find to my immense pride that I really enjoy not only admire Sophocles." Thus Thoby, whose education at public school and the university was considered worth paying for, passed on some of it — saving his father money, incidentally — to his younger sister.
It was usual then for girls to be educated at home. My own grandmother and two of my great-aunts, daughters of the master of an Oxford college, were allowed to go to Girton College at Cambridge at the same time that Virginia Stephen's education was being overseen by her father. But this was unusual, and they were still not allowed to earn degrees, as the men did, nor did they live on campus; instead they were segregated three miles out of town and brought to lectures in a covered horse-drawn carriage. My grandmother once asked permission to invite her father to tea in her rooms with a friend of hers and was told that she must have a chaperone. "But he's my father!" she protested, and got the reply, "But he's not the other girl's father." Some of the same prudishness and caution ruled in the Stephen household — but it was blown out the window by the Stephen children when they were orphaned by their father's death and left free to do as they liked in their house in Gordon Square.
Virginia was expected to be educated, dutiful, marriageable, and childbearing, as were all young women of her class and time. But her father's focus on her intellectual development and her devotion to him, to the point of neglecting all other aspects of her life, is more interesting. She had been given her marching orders, and march she did.
Unlike most contemporary young writers, she never thought of rushing straight into writing a novel. She knew what she had to learn first. Even though the idea of a play with "oceans of talk and emotions without end" excited her, as noted in the introduction, when she wrote to Violet Dickinson about it in 1902 she knew that she had to work toward it. She taught herself, writing reviews, pieces she called descriptions, and, above all, letters. She also taught herself by reading. During the years up to 1912, when she met and married Leonard Woolf and sent her first novel to Duckworth Press (owned by her half brothers) for publication, she was digging information from every book she read as well as honing her own descriptions of nature, people, conversations, and states of mind, working through flights of imagination and fantasy to find the exact word, excise the excesses, and arrive where she needed to be.
She questioned herself, challenged herself, and allowed others to challenge her. The letters she wrote to Clive Bell after his marriage to her sister show how she was calming herself down, organizing her mind so that she could write, preparing herself for the long haul of the novel. Her own expectations changed, as she moved from her despairing exclamation in 1909, "Oh how I wish I could write" (see introduction), to the assured "He has written a novel and so have I" after her marriage to Leonard in 1912. But was her novel any good? Would Leonard's be more favorably received? What would Morgan (E. M.) Forster, Tom (T. S.) Eliot, and her sister, Vanessa, think of it? Her own doubts and fears never quite left her. The legacy of Leslie Stephen, his fierceness and his expectations, remained with her long after his death; only decades later, with the publication of To the Lighthouse, did she finally lay him out in fiction and cast him metaphorically afloat.
What we expect of ourselves very often has its origins in the expectations of others: the voice in the ear, parental or otherwise, telling us what we should be doing or that we are not doing enough. Virginia Stephen grew up doing battle with her father's ghostly voice, and she admitted later that if he had lived to be ninety-six (rather than seventy-one), she would not have written her novels.
"I dont [sic] think I will come for dinner," she wrote to Violet Dickinson in 1902, "but to tea, as all 4 males are at home and I cant [sic] very well be out for dinner." Not only was she needed to preside over dinners and tea tables after her mother's death; there was also the unspoken command of what was suitable for a woman to write. Biography and essays were all right. In 1902 she wrote to Thoby, "My mind is dazed with Sidney Lee. He has come to consult about the Dictionary (How I wish it at the bottom of the sea!) and his squeak sounds like a tormented Rat." If Leslie Stephen had lived longer, would his daughter have been made to be just one more of the Dictionary of National Biography's acolytes?
Meanwhile, after his wife's death, Sir Leslie roamed the house groaning aloud, chanting poetry, as Mr. Ramsay does in To the Lighthouse, and when he too became sick, he needed both his daughters' permanent presence as well as a nurse. On the day after his death in February 1904, Virginia wrote to Janet Case, "All these years we have hardly been apart, and I want him every moment of the day." His influence was powerful, as that of strong-minded fathers tends to be for their daughters: the model and the oppressor, one to respect and the other to resist. The push and pull of tyranny is felt by Cam in the last pages of To the Lighthouse. It was not surprising that Virginia Stephen's expectations of herself were so high that she thought she never lived up to them, and that even at the height of her fame and success she could never let herself off the hook of self-criticism.
Thus the ideal of apprenticeship — to learn from a master or mistress of one's art, to work alongside a practicing artist — was for Virginia Stephen not straightforward. She had many mentors, and much was expected of her, but in a rather vague way. Women's careers were not, at the beginning of the twentieth century, considered important. So it was hard for women themselves to take a career seriously and to carve out the time and space in which to pursue it. Nevertheless, Vanessa was allowed to study painting with the notoriously ferocious Henry Tonks at the Slade School of Fine Art. Among her fellow students were young men who became ardent advocates of postimpressionism. She went to lectures by Roger Fry, who was on the opposite side from Tonks in the postimpressionist debate.
Vanessa therefore at least had a structure within which to learn. For Virginia, apprenticeship was largely to herself and to the writers of the past. The writer had to find her own way, whereas the painter had some formal instruction and, perhaps even more important, fellow students. This remained true for writers throughout most of the century, at least in England. The American master of fine arts is now duplicated in many British universities, but the first British "writing school" was started only in the 1960s under the aegis of Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. Most British writers of the postwar generation were still in a position similar to Virginia Stephen's, finding inspiration, mentorship, and time to write where they could.
CHAPTER 2
Reading
In a house full of books, reading was, of course, the one approved occupation for the Stephen children. Vanessa remembered Virginia reading aloud to her as she painted and drew; they read most of the Victorian novelists together in this way, and she could still hear much of George Eliot and William Thackeray in her sister's voice.
Julia Stephen had read aloud to her children — just as Mrs. Ramsey, throughout the first section of To the Lighthouse, reads aloud a story about a fisherman to her six-year-old son, James. But Julia preferred to make up her own stories, usually little morality tales of a rather banal cheerfulness. She liked to knit and tell a story as she did so. It was to Sir Leslie's library that Virginia went at a young age to find books.
I think that writers read in a different way from most people. There is really no such thing for a writer as reading for escape or entertainment; writers read to find out what other writers have done and then to discover what they themselves might do. Reading for them is a perpetual investigation; its eternal question is, if so-and-so has done this, then what can I do? Writers learn from other writers. They learn how to be themselves by closely observing others. It's like the way a child learns to talk — or, indeed, do anything.
In her youth Virginia Stephen read ambitiously and under orders. In her teens, she read Thomas Carlyle, "my beloved Macaulay," Charles Lamb's Essays of Elia, Samuel Pepys, and Michel de Montaigne. She loved the Elizabethan adventurer Richard Hakluyt's tales and John Gibson Lockhart's Life of Scott. In one year, 1897, she read George Eliot's Adam Bede and Felix Holt, Charlotte Brontë's Shirley, Anthony Trollope's Bar-chester Towers, Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South and Wives and Daughters, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Many of these were read aloud to Vanessa. Beginning in 1897, her main study was of the classics — first at the Ladies' Department of King's College, in Kensington, then in private lessons with classicist Clara Pater, and in 1898 with Janet Case, her mentor in Hampstead.
Thoby was a strong influence when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge, urging her to read William Shakespeare, whom she had compared unfavorably with the Greeks. She obeyed him, and after reading Cymbeline wrote to him in 1901, "Imogen says —'Think that you are upon a rock, and now throw me again' — and Posthumous answers — 'Hang there like fruit, my soul, till the tree die.' Now, if that doesn't send a shiver down your spine, even if you are in the middle of cold grouse and coffee!" "Hang there like fruit, my soul!" was a favorite phrase of hers, quoted more than once in letters to her friends.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Miss Stephen's Apprenticeship"
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