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 publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-58019-4 ISBN 978-1-137-49728-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137497284 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 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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). 58 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. 66 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) 68 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 [...] 70 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 74 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. 76 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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 78 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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 80 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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 82 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. 84 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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 86 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 88 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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 90 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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, 92 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 94 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). 96 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 98 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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 100 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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 102 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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. 104 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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 105 106 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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 108 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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 110 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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. 112 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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). 114 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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 116 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. 118 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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 120 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears (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 122 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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, 124 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears ‘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. 126 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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). 128 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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 130 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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 132 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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, 134 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 136 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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 Heredity and Legacy in The Years 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 138 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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 140 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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 142 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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 144 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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 Heredity and Legacy in The Years 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. 146 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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). Heredity and Legacy in The Years 147 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 148 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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 Heredity and Legacy in The Years 149 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 150 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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 Heredity and Legacy in The Years 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 152 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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 Heredity and Legacy in The Years 153 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) 154 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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 Heredity and Legacy in The Years 155 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 156 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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 Heredity and Legacy in The Years 157 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 158 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 160 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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 162 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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 164 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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 166 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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 168 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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 170 Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears 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 172 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 176 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. 178 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, 180 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. Select Bibliography Aleksiuk, Natasha. 2000. ‘“A Thousand Angles”: Photographic Irony in the Work of Julia Margaret Cameron and Virginia Woolf’ Mosaic (University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada, vol. 33, no. 2: 125–42) Annan, Noel. 1984. Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian (New York: Random House) Anstruther, Ian. 1992. 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Thackeray’s Daughter: Some Recollections of Anne Thackeray Ritchie (Dublin: Euphorion Books) Galton, Francis. 1978. Hereditary Genius (1869. London: Macmillan; repr. London: Julian Friedmann Publishers) Garnett, Henrietta. 2004. Anny: A Life of Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie (London: Chatto & Windus) Select Bibliography 195 ——— 2008. A Nineteenth Century Childhood (London: VWSGB) Garrity, Jane. 2000. ‘Virginia Woolf, Intellectual Harlotry, and 1920s British Vogue’, in Pamela Caughie (ed.). Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (York and London: Garland Publishing: 185–218) Gérin, Winifred. 1981. Anne Thackeray Ritchie: A Biography (Oxford University Press) Gernsheim, Helmut. 1948. Julia Margaret Cameron: Her Life and Photographic Work (London: Fountain Press) Giachero, Lia (ed.). 1997. Vanessa Bell: Sketches in Pen and Ink (London: Hogarth Press) Gillespie, Diane. 1991. The Sisters’ Arts (1988. 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Women in the Milieu of Leonard and Virginia Woolf: Peace, Politics and Education (New York: Pace University Press: 212–42) Hankins, Leslie Kathleen. 2010. ‘Virginia Woolf and Film’, in Maggie Humm (ed.). The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts (Edinburgh University Press: 351–74) Harris, Alexandra. 2010. Romantic Moderns (London: Thames & Hudson) Harrison, Jane. 1925. Reminiscences of a Student’s Life (London: Hogarth Press) Henry, Holly. 2000. ‘From Edwin Hubble’s Telescope to Virginia Woolf’s “Searchlight”’, in Pamela Caughie (ed.). Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (London and New York: Garland Publishing: 135–58) Hill, Brian. 1973. Julia Margaret Cameron: A Victorian Family Portrait (London: Peter Owen) Hinton, Brian (ed.). 2003. Illustrations by Julia Margaret Cameron of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Other Poems (Freshwater: Julia Margaret Cameron Trust) 196 Select Bibliography Holtby, Winifred. 1932. 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Women’s Fiction Between the Wars: Mothers, Daughters and Writing (Edinburgh University Press) James, Henry. 2001. ‘The Art of Fiction’, in Stephen Regan (ed.). The Nineteenth Century Novel: A Critical Reader (London and New York: Routledge) Janis, Eugenia. 1994. Introduction to For my Best Beloved Sister Mia: An Album of Photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Art Museum: 9–13) Jay, Elisabeth (ed.). 1990. The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant (Oxford University Press) Kaplan, Sydney Janet. 1991. Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press) Laurence, Patricia. 2003. Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism and China (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press) Leach, Karoline. 2003. ‘“Lewis Carroll” as Romantic Hero: Anne Thackeray’s From an Island’ The Carrollian, The Lewis Carroll Journal (no. 12: 3–21) Leaska, Mitchell. 1998. Granite and Rainbow: The Hidden Life of Virginia Woolf (London: Picador) Lee, Hermione. 1997. Virginia Woolf (1996. London: Chatto & Windus; repr. London: Vintage) Lessens, R. 2009. ‘Virginia Woolf’s French Ancestors: Legends and Facts’ VWB (no. 32: 49–58) ——— 2010. ‘Virginia Woolf’s French Ancestor: New Facts’ VWB (no. 33: 33–5) Light, Alison. 2008. Mrs Woolf and the Servants (2007. London: Fig Tree, repr. London: Penguin Books) Lounsberry, Barbara. 2014. Becoming Virginia Woolf (Gainesville: University Press of Florida) Lukitsh, Joanne. 1996. ‘The Thackeray Album: Looking at Julia Margaret Cameron’s Gift to Her Friend Annie Thackeray’, in Dave Oliphant (ed.). Select Bibliography 197 Gendered Territory: Photographs of Women by Julia Margaret Cameron (Austin: University of Texas Press: 33–61) MacCarthy, Mary. 1929. A Nineteenth-Century Childhood (1924. London: Martin Secker) MacGibbon, Jean. 1997. There’s the Lighthouse: A Biography of Adrian Stephen (London: James & James Publishers) MacKay, Carol Hanbery. 1987. ‘The Thackeray Connection: Virginia Woolf’s Aunt Anny’, in Jane Marcus (ed.). Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: A Centenary Celebration (Bloomington: Indiana University Press) ——— 1990. ‘Biography as Reflected Autobiography: The Self-Creation of Anne Thackeray Ritchie’, in Susan Groag Bell and Marilyn Yalom (eds). Revealing Lives: Autobiography, Biography and Gender (State University of New York Press: 65–79) ——— 1996. ‘“Soaring between home and heaven –”: Julia Margaret Cameron’s Visual Meditations on the Self’, in Dave Oliphant (ed.). Gendered Territory: Photographs of Women by Julia Margaret Cameron (Austin: University of Texas Press: 63–87) ——— 2001. Creative Negativity: Four Victorian Exemplars of the Female Quest (Stanford University Press) Marcus, Jane. 1983. ‘The Niece of a Nun: Virginia Woolf, Caroline Stephen and the Cloistered Imagination’, in Jane Marcus (ed.). Virginia Woolf: A Feminist Slant (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press: 7–36) Marcus, Laura. 2000. ‘Woolf’s Feminism and Feminism’s Woolf’, in Sue Roe and Susan Sellers (eds). The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge University Press: 209–44) ——— 2008. ‘“In the Circle of the Lens”: Woolf’s “Telescope” Story, Scene-Making and Memory’ Journal of the Short Story in English [Online] (no. 50: Spring) Martin, Ann. 2005. ‘Modernist Transformations: Virginia Woolf, Cinderella, and the Legacy of Lady Ritchie’ Woolf Studies Annual (vol. 11: 33–52) McCail, Ronald. 1987. ‘A Family Matter: “Night and Day” and “Old Kensington”’ Review of English Studies (n.s.: 38:149: 23–39) Miller, Jane Eldridge. 1994. Rebel Women: Feminism, Modernism and the Edwardian Novel (London: Virago Press) Mills, Jean. 2006. ‘The Unbounded Whole: Harrisonian Ritual Structures in Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day’ Virginia Woolf Miscellany (no. 69: 6–7) Moore, Grace. 2003. ‘Virginia Woolf and the Remaking of Victorian Britain’ VWB (no. 13: 8–17) Mulligan, Therese. 1994. Foreword to For my Best Beloved Sister Mia: An Album of Photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Art Museum: 5–7) Newman, Hilary. 2006. Laura Stephen: A Memoir (London: Cecil Woolf) ——— 2008. James Kenneth Stephen: Virginia Woolf’s Tragic Cousin (London: Cecil Woolf) Nicholson, Virginia. 2002. Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900–1939 (London: Viking) 198 Select Bibliography Noble, Joan Russell (ed.). 1972. Recollections of Virginia Woolf (1972. New York: W. Morrow; repr. Athens: Ohio University Press) Oldfield, Sybil. 2006. The Child of Two Atheists: Virginia Woolf’s Humanism (Southport: VWSGB) ——— 2008. Jeanie, an ‘Army of One’: Mrs. Nassau Senior 1828–1877, the First Woman in Whitehall (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press) Olsen, Victoria. 2003. From Life: Julia Margaret Cameron and Victorian Photography (London: Aurum Press) Orel, Harold (ed.). 1967. Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings (London: Macmillan) Page, N. 1992. Tennyson: An Illustrated Life (London: Allison & Busby) Park, Sowon. 2005. ‘Suffrage and Virginia Woolf: “The Mass Behind the Single Voice”’ The Review of English Studies (n.s., vol. 56, no. 223: 119–34) Paul, Janis. 1987. The Victorian Heritage of Virginia Woolf: The External World in her Novels (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books) Pawlowski, Merry. 2010. ‘Virginia Woolf and Scrapbooking’, in Maggie Humm (ed.). The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts (Edinburgh University Press: 298–313) Peach, Linden. 2010. ‘Virginia Woolf and Realist Aesthetics’, in Maggie Humm (ed.). The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts (Edinburgh University Press: 104–17) Powell, Tristram (ed.). 1973. Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women (1926. London: Hogarth Press; repr. London: Chatto & Windus) Radin, Grace. 1981. Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Years’: The Evolution of a Novel (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press) Raine, Kathleen. 1978. ‘The Land Unknown’ Virginia Woolf Miscellany (no. 10) Raitt, Suzanne. 1993. Vita and Virginia: The Work and Friendship of V. SackvilleWest and Virginia Woolf (1993. Oxford University Press; repr. Oxford: Clarendon Press) Reed, Christopher. 2004. Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture and Domesticity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press) Reid, Panthea. 1996. Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf (Oxford University Press) Reynier, Christine. 2009. Virginia Woolf’s Ethics of the Short Story (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan) Richardson, Angelique (ed.). 2002. Women Who Did: Stories by Men and Women, 1890–1914 (London: Penguin Books) ——— 2003. Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman (Oxford University Press) Ritchie, Anny Thackeray [Miss Thackeray]. 1895. Miss Angel. The Works of Miss Thackeray volume VIII (London: Smith, Elder) ——— [Lady Ritchie]. 1919. From Friend to Friend (London: John Murray) ——— [Anne Isabella Thackeray]. 1995. The Story of Elizabeth (1876. London: Smith, Elder; repr. Bristol: Thoemmes Press) ——— [Miss Thackeray]. 1996. From an Island (1877. Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz; repr. Newport, Isle of Wight: Hunnyhill Publications) Select Bibliography 199 Ritchie, Hester (ed.). 1924a. Letters of Anne Thackeray Ritchie (London: John Murray) ——— 1924b. 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Men and Memories, Vol. II: Recollections of William Rothenstein 1900–1922 (London: Faber and Faber) Rudikoff, Sonya. 1987. ‘A Possible Source for Night and Day’s Cassandra Otway’ Virginia Woolf Miscellany (no. 28) ——— 1998. ‘The Known and the Unknown in a Late-Victorian Friendship: Virginia Woolf and the Vaughans’ Woolf Studies Annual (vol. 4: 101–22) ——— 1999. Ancestral Houses: Virginia Woolf and the Aristocracy (Palo Alto, CA: The Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship) Seiberling, Grace. 1986. Amateurs, Photography, and the Mid-Victorian Imagination (University of Chicago Press) Shankman, Lilian. 1994. Anne Thackeray Ritchie: Journals and Letters (Columbus: Ohio State University Press) Shone, Richard. 1999. The Art of Bloomsbury (London: Tate Gallery Publishing) Silver, Brenda. 1983. Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks (Princeton University Press) Smith, Lindsay. 1996. ‘Further Thoughts on “The Politics of Focus”’, in Dave Oliphant (ed.). Gendered Territory: Photographs of Women by Julia Margaret Cameron (Austin: University of Texas Press: 13–31) ——— 1998. The Politics of Focus: Women, Children and Nineteenth-century Photography (Manchester University Press) Snaith, Anna. 2000. ‘Negotiating Genre: Re-visioning History in The Pargiters’, in Anna Snaith (ed.). Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations (London: Macmillan) ——— (ed.) 2012. Virginia Woolf The Years (Cambridge University Press) Snaith, Anna and Michael Whitworth (eds). 2007. Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan) Spalding, Frances. 1996. Vanessa Bell (1983. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson; repr. London: Orion Books) ——— 1999. Roger Fry: Art and Life (1980. London: Granada Publishing in Paul Elek; repr. Norwich: Black Dog Books) 200 Select Bibliography Stansky, Peter. 1997. On or About December 1910: Early Bloomsbury and Its Intimate World (1996. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) Strachey, Lytton. 1986. Eminent Victorians (1918. London: Chatto & Windus; repr. London: Penguin Books) Sweet, Matthew. 2001. Inventing the Victorians (London: Faber and Faber) Taylor, D.J. 1999. Thackeray (London: Chatto & Windus) Troubridge, L. 1925. Memoirs and Reflections (London: William Heinemann) Watson, April. 1994. ‘A History from the Heart’, in For my Best Beloved Sister Mia: An Album of Photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Art Museum: 14–25) Watson, Nicola J. 2008. The Literary Tourist (2006. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan) Whitworth, Michael. 2000. ‘Virginia Woolf and Modernism’, in Sue Roe and Susan Sellers (eds). The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge University Press) Wolf, Sylvia. 1998. Julia Margaret Cameron’s Women (New Haven and London: Yale University Press) Woolf, Leonard. 1964. Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911 to 1918 (London: Hogarth Press) ——— 1975a. Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880 to 1904 (1960. London: Hogarth Press; repr. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) ——— 1975b. Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919 to 1939 (1967. London: Hogarth Press; repr. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) ——— 2003. The Wise Virgins (1914. London: Edward Arnold; repr. London: Persephone Books) Woolf, Virginia. 1952. Flush: A Biography (1933. London: Hogarth Press) ——— 2012. On Being Ill with Notes from Sick Rooms by Julia Stephen (Ashfield, MA: Paris Press) Zuckerman, Joanne. 1973. ‘Anne Thackeray Ritchie as the Model for Mrs. Hilbery in Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day’, The Virginia Woolf Quarterly (vol. 1, no. 3: 32–46) Zwerdling, Alex. 1986. Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press) 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
