This lecture makes Quentin Bell’s 1972 biography of Virginia Woolf a starting point for a brief discussion of personal and social forces at play in her life.
Born in 1882, Virginia Woolf came to adulthood at the turn of the twentieth century. She stands therefore near the beginning of the Modernist movement and modern women’s writing in English. Her novel-length essay, A Room of One’s Own was based on lectures that she gave at Cambridge University in October 1928. These coincided with the writing and publication of To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), when Woolf’s creative powers were at their height. Her biographer, her nephew Quentin Bell, perceptively described the book’s style, as follows:
[A Room of One’s Own] is that rare thing—a lively but good-tempered polemic, and a book that, like Orlando, is of particular interest to the student of her life. For in A Room of One’s Own one hears Virginia speaking. In her novels she is thinking. In her critical works one can sometimes hear her voice, but it is always a little formal, a little editorial. In A Room of One’s Own she gets very close to her conversational style. (Virginia Woolf: A Biography Vol. 2: 144)
A Room of One’s Own provides insights into the historical disadvantaging of women as creators of literature and the other arts. It suggests some simple ways of countering disadvantage, and encourages modern women to strive for excellence in these fields. Partly on the basis of this book, the revitalised feminist movement of the 1970s (Second-Wave Feminism) adopted Woolf as an intellectual mentor and prototype for change. Claiming that earlier interpretations of Woolf’s life and writings had suffered from a masculinist bias, feminists proceeded to reconceptualise them in as a struggle with patriarchy.
Well-written, frank and detailed, Virginia Woolf: A Biography invites reading as an accomplished example of the biographer’s craft. Its publication in 1972 coincided with the rise of Second Wave Feminism, but most of the research, thinking and writing was carried out before women’s liberation and equality had resurfaced into political prominence. Bell makes little of Woolf’s feminism, and, unlike Woolf, does not connect the difficulties and crises of her life with patriarchy. His premises are clear in his summary of the content of Woolf’s argument in A Room of One’s Own (Vol.2:144):
… the key to emancipation is to be found in the door of a room which a woman may call her own and which she can inhabit with the same freedom and independence as her brothers. The lack of this economic freedom breeds resentment, the noisy assertive resentment of the male, who insists on claiming his superiority, and the shrill nagging resentment of the female who clamours for her rights. Both produce bad literature, for literature – fiction, that is – demands a comprehensive sympathy which transcends and comprehends the feelings of both sexes. The great artist is Androgynous. [my italics]
Bell’s closing sentences summarising Woolf’s argument about androgyny and the artist are penetrating if brief, but some of his other claims are problematic. A Room of One’s Own doesn’t equate women’s “emancipation” with owning a room of her own. Instead Woolf claims modestly and simply that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (p. 4). Far from discussing male economic deprivation–“lack of economic freedom breeds resentment,” A Room of One’s Own discusses patriarchal wealth–seen for example in the dinner that the Woolf persona attends at the Oxbridge men’s college–and points to the part played by this wealth in furthering men’s literary creativity and academic success. Far from measuring up to the androgyny ideal, Bell’s way of thinking is binary and oppositional, and his vocabulary is heavily gendered: ‘noisy’, ‘assertive’, ‘superiority’ associated with the male; ‘shrill nagging’ associated with the female. Nowhere in A Room of One’s Own does Woolf suggest that the woman artist’s protests are “shrill nagging”: her own argument is coolly logical and measured in tone. Its purpose is to prove the justice of the woman writer’s cause. She argues that undigested passion produces bad literature, and praises especially the cool clarity of Jane Austen’s novels. Woolf strove for and attained the same clarity in her own novels. Readers’ continuing appreciation of her many writings, especially her novels, testifies to her outstanding talent and to her determination in overcoming the disadvantages of growing up and living in a patriarchy. Woolf ends by encouraging her present listeners and future readers to “work for,” and in fact to be midwives assisting at the rebirth of “the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister” (p. 149).
1. Family
Woolf grew up in a large Victorian family. Her father was Leslie Stephen, the distinguished compiler of the Dictionary of National Biography. Stephen was both dominant and dependent; he considered himself as the ruler of the family, and yet depended on wife and daughters for creature comforts and emotional support. He was unlucky in the women he depended upon, since they tended to die or leave. In succession his first wife, Minny Thackeray and his second wife, Julia Duckworth (Virginia’s mother) died. When his stepdaughter Stella Duckworth moved away after her marriage, Stephen turned for support to Vanessa, Virginia’s elder sister. Bell gives a graphic account of Stephen’s manipulation of his housekeeper-daughter, including the scene he would act out before approving the housekeeping accounts. (The Stephen family was comfortably middle class.):
“The scene would begin with groans and sighs, then expressions of rage, then really terrible outbursts of bellowing fury in which Leslie would quite literally beat his breast, sob, and declare that he, a poor, broken bereaved old man was being callously hounded to ruin…..The row was, almost, a weekly event. It ended when Leslie, with a piteously trembling hand, signed the cheque, all the time acting, and acting superbly, the part of the ruined and injured father.” (Vol.1, p.63).
Other features of Virginia’s childhood explain why she developed insights into the unequal power relationships between men and women.
(a) Her disappointment at being denied the education given as a matter of course to her brothers, Thoby and Adrian. The girls in the Stephen household spent much of their time socialising with relations, a duty from which the boys were free. Virginia was however fortunate in that Stephen encouraged her to read widely in the books in his library. She thus achieved an excellent informal education, but always felt her lack of formal instruction as a disadvantage. This attitude can be detected in the opening chapter of A Room of One’s Own, which contrasts the long history and wealth of the men’s college with the recent founding of the much poorer women’s college.
(b) As a child, Virginia was sexually molested at different times by her half-brothers Gerald and George Duckworth, who were Julia’s sons by an earlier marriage.
2. Friendships with Women
The sisters Virginia and Vanessa had a close and loving relationship. In addition, Virginia cultivated close relationships with women, some openly erotic. Bell states that Virginia was unconsciously in love with Violet Dickinson, a much older woman who supported her in her second breakdown in 1904. Aged forty-three, she had an affair with the openly gay Vita Sackville-West, and four years later began a loving but stormy and non-physical relationship with Ethel Smyth. For Second Wave feminists in the 1970s, Woolf’s adventurous emotional life provided an example of sisterhood and of Platonic and erotic love between women. The overriding purpose of A Room of One’s Own is to explain women’s economic and social disempowerment and to encourage women to take steps to overcome these disadvantages.
3. Instability
Virginia Woolf’s breakdowns and suicide have been interpreted as the response of a sensitive woman to damage inflicted by patriarchy. Sexual molestation by her half-brothers was no doubt one of the causes. The death of Virginia’s mother created further family instability. Virginia’s first breakdown at the age of thirteen closely followed her mother’s death. Leslie Stephen’s temperament likewise contributed to his family’s unhappiness.
Insanity, the expression of deep internal divisions in the psyche, is a common theme in writing by women. Woolf writes of it herself in Mrs Dalloway, where she projects her experience of madness on to a male character, who prophetically commits suicide.
Leonard was by no means a second Leslie Stephen ― he wore himself out in the feminine role of nurse and comforter in Virginia’s illnesses, and encouraged and aided her writing. Furthermore, Virginia had many friends, to whom she related with charm and humour. When she was well, most of her energy was focused on her writing—a great achievement, partly because it fulfils her ideal enunciated in A Room of Ones Own: it does not promote a cause or divert into resentment. If her novels are feminist, this element must be looked for in the way they express a woman’s mind, in their reliance on suggestiveness rather than statement, on their lightness of touch and their subtlety, and on their deep and perceptive interest in people and in human relationships.
Bibliography
Quentin Bell. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. 2 vols. 1972. Frogmore, St Albans: Triad/Paladin, 1976.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Three Guineas. Ed. and Intro. Morag Shiach. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.