PENGUIN BOOKS
VIRGINIA WOOLF: AN INNER LIFE
‘The effect of this Life is cumulative, various… respectful of her readers’ initiative in shaping a Woolf of our own’ Lyndall Gordon, Independent on Sunday
‘Immensely readable… Briggs allows her subject the space to breathe, creating a deliciously furtive sense of peering over Virginia’s shoulder… I found myself referring back to the novels with renewed enthusiasm and increased knowledge. What better display of the success of a literary biography?’ Zöe Strachan, Herald
‘For any intelligent person wishing to get to grips with Woolf’s work – what it is all about, how it evolved in the writing, why it is as it is – it would be a fine place to begin’ Victoria Glendinning, Guardian
‘It captures the intense pleasures of her art, the necessary focus of intellectual energy and commitment to the sheer daily grind. It should be pressed into the hands of every aspiring young novelist as an exemplar of the writing life’ Jane Dunn, Sunday Times
‘Rich… engaging… introduces quiet surprises and insights’ Jim Stewart, The Times Literary Supplement
‘Briggs, at times writing in prose as beautiful as Woolf’s, has created an original, uplifting work… an excellent book… Scholarly but never arrogant, poignant but unsentimental, it goes a long way towards restoring Woolf’s rightful reputation as a major novelist above all else’ Vanessa Curtis, Scotland on Sunday
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Julia Briggs was the general editor of the highly successful Penguin Virginia Woolf series, for which she herself edited Night and Day. She is the author of Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story, A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit, 1858–1924 and This Stage-play World: Texts and Contexts, 1580–1625. She is currently Professor of English and Women’s Studies at De Montford University. Julia Briggs was made an OBE in 2006.
An Inner Life
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published by Allen Lane 2005
Published in Penguin Books 2006
1
Copyright © Julia Briggs, 2005
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
EISBN: 978–0–141–90549–5
For Anthea
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
1 Beginning: The Voyage Out (1915)
2 Into the Night: Night and Day (1919)
3 ‘Our Press Arrived on Tuesday’ Monday or Tuesday (1921)
4 In Search of Jacob: Jacob’s Room (1922)
5 A Woman Connects: The Common Reader (1925)
6 ‘What a Lark! What a Plunge!’: Mrs Dalloway (1925)
7 Writing Itself: To the Lighthouse (1927)
8 ‘The Secret of Life is…’: Orlando (1928)
9 To the Women of the Future: A Room of One’s Own (1929)
10 ‘Into Deep Waters’: The Waves (1931)
11 The Years of The Years: The Second Common Reader (1932), Flush (1933), The Years (1937)
12 Attacking Hitler in England: Three Guineas (1938)
13 Life Writing: Roger Fry (1940), ‘A Sketch of the Past’
14 The Last of England: Between the Acts (1941)
Epilogue
Notes
Index
1 Page from The Voyage Out manuscript
2 The Voyage Out dust-jacket
3 Page from Night and Day manuscript
4 Night and Day dust-jacket
5 Announcement from the Hogarth Press
6 Monday or Tuesday dust-jacket
7 Page from Jacob’s Room manuscript
8 Jacob’s Room dust-jacket
9 Woolf’s letter to the New Statesman
10 The Common Reader dust-jacket
11 Page from Mrs Dalloway manuscript
12 Mrs Dalloway dust-jacket
13 Woolf’s plan for To the Lighthouse
14 To the Lighthouse dust-jacket
15 Last page of Orlando manuscript
16 Orlando dust-jacket
17 Page from A Room of One’s Own manuscript
18 A Room of One’s Own dust-jacket
19 Woolf’s list of interludes for The Waves
20 The Waves dust-jacket
21 Page from The Pargiters manuscript (retitled The Years)
22 The Years dust-jacket
23 Index to Woolf’s scrapbook
24 Three Guineas dust-jacket
25 Page from ‘A Sketch of the Past’ manuscript
26 Roger Fry dust-jacket
27 Woolf’s notes for Between the Acts
28 Between the Acts dust-jacket
29 Woolf’s suicide note to her husband Leonard Woolf
‘[E]very secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works, yet we require critics to explain the one and biographers to expound the other’.1
In Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, the narrator/biographer is driven to frenzies of impatience when her subject abandons herself to ‘this mere wool-gathering; this thinking; this sitting in a chair day in, day out, with a cigarette and a sheet of paper and a pen and an inkpot. If only subjects, we might complain (for our patience is wearing thin), had more consideration for their biographers!’2 Though silent, and apparently doing practically nothing, the writer is paradoxically doing exactly what makes her life matter to us, even though her activity, her surrender to ‘thought and imagination’, may be invisible to an observer.
Woolf’s fiction is centrally concerned with the inner life, and finding ways of re-creating that life in narrative. Her first two novels, though more traditional than her later fiction, are preoccupied with dreams – both night dreams and day dreams; she even considered calling the novel that became Night and Day, ‘Dreams and Realities’.3 Her first short story written for the Hogarth Press takes place inside the head of a woman sitting by a fire and looking at ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (as the story is called), while she meditates on the elusive and fragmented nature of experience. Her train of thought is interrupted by a man with a newspaper who identifies the mark, thus extinguishing the rich imaginative potential of uncertainty.4 Other early stories show how events that occur in the mind – events based on mistaken assumptions, for example5 – can have the same impact as actual events. From this point on, Woolf’s fiction weaves its way in and out of the minds of her characters. Her last novel, Between the Acts, creates a series of collisions between mind-acts and actual events.
In his magisterial survey of representation in European fiction, Mimesis, the German critic Erich Auerbach argued that Woolf’s method of depicting the interior life of a range of characters gestured towards ‘a common life of mankind on earth’, and he considered this a new and significant development in narrative method.6 Certainly Woolf’s fiction is concerned to acknowledge the interiority, the subjectivity of other human beings. In 1918, she had noted in her diary, ‘The reason why it is easy to kill another person must be that one’s imagination is too sluggish to conceive what his life means to him – the infinite possibilities of a succession of days which are furled in him, & have already been spent’.7 In daily life, she was as capable as the next person of ignoring the selfhood of others, but within her fiction, she encourages her readers to extend their sympathies through the use of the imagination, deliberately writing in the tradition of George Eliot, who believed that ‘Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot’.8 Both writers share a tradition of women’s writing in which moral awareness carries the reader across the boundaries of gender, class and race in the interests of wider sympathy and understanding. In re-creating the interiority of others, Woolf drew, as she had to, on what she knew of her own. She remained a fascinated observer of her own thoughts and also of her own creative process, recording both in her diaries and letters; her late, unfinished autobiographical ‘Sketch of the Past’ takes a closer look within.
My account is inspired by Woolf’s own interest in the process of writing, as well as by a corresponding unease with accounts that (like Orlando’s biographer) concentrate too narrowly on her social life, and so underestimate the centrality of her art – the main source of her interest for us. Woolf was evidently a highly sociable person, with a fascinating and gifted circle of family and friends, an engaging companion and an entrancing aunt, yet it was what she did when she was alone, walking or sitting at her desk, for which we now remember her. While the story of her inner life cannot be told (except as another fiction), it is possible to track down a number of the factors that brought her books into being, by following the genesis and process of their writing as reflected in the surviving drafts, and supplementing these with the accounts she gave to friends, or confided to her diary as aids to reconstruction. My aim, ultimately, is to lead readers back to her work with a fresh sense of what they might find there. Although the book has an overall direction, individual chapters are structured in different ways, as seemed most appropriate, though each concludes with an ‘aftermath’, a history of the book’s production and reception after publication. These can, of course, be skipped, as can the endnotes, which list sources and suggest lines of thought that seemed too specialized or speculative to appeal to ‘the common reader’, for whom my book is primarily intended.
This book inevitably stands upon the achievements of other Woolf scholars, editors, critics and readers – most of these are, I hope, acknowledged in the endnotes. It has taken me several years to write, and I have incurred many debts along the way: the first is to the Arts and Humanities Research Board who, in conjunction with my university, De Montfort, Leicester, enabled me to take a year’s research leave from January 1999 to January 2000. I am warmly grateful to the colleagues who made this possible – to Deborah Cartmell, Jane Dowson, Imelda Whelehan and Nigel Wood. I have learned a great deal about Woolf in conversation with friends and colleagues, both here and abroad, and fear that, in the process, I have both borrowed and distorted their ideas without necessarily noticing that I was doing so. I particularly want to thank Michèle Barrett, James Beechey, Kate Benzel, Ted Bishop, Rachel Bowlby, David Bradshaw, Beth Rigel Daugherty, Marion Dell, Diane Gillespie, Kathy Laing, Phyllis Lassner, Jane Liddell-King, Alison Light, Nicola Luckhurst, Vara Neverow, Sybil Oldfield, Merry Pawlowski, Jem Poster, Sue Roe, Anna Snaith, Alice Staveley and Pierre-Eric Villeneuve. I am well aware of how much the kindness of librarians has contributed, and particularly want to thank the incomparable Bet Inglis, formerly of Sussex University Library, who always knew what one needed before one knew oneself; and also Michael Bott of Reading University Library, Dr Isaac Gewirtz, Curator of the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library, and Karen Kukil, Curator of the Rare Book Room at Smith College, Northampton, Mass.
Special thanks are due to the several close friends who have listened, read and encouraged at every stage: to Jane Marcus, the fairy godmother of Woolf studies; to Nigel Hamilton, who prevented me from writing ‘lit. crit.’, and invented the ‘headstones’, to David Stocker, who insisted upon the importance of Roger Fry, and more recently, to Hans Gabler, who with characteristic warmth and generosity, has contributed in so many different ways. I would also like to thank my agent Gill Coleridge, my copy-editor Charlotte Ridings, my publisher Simon Winder and my excellent readers, Stuart Clarke and Mark Hussey, for their full, helpful and constructive comments – the remaining errors are my own. Further, different and loving thanks belong to my nearest and dearest – to Jon and Christina, to Simon and Belle, and to Jeremy, and especially to my sister Anthea, to whom this book is dedicated.
Julia Briggs
De Montfort University, Leicester
2004
I have followed the spelling and punctuation of quotations from Woolf’s Diaries as transcribed and published by Anne Olivier Bell, with Andrew McNeillie, from her Letters as transcribed and published by Nigel Nicolson, with Joanne Trautmann Banks, and from the various other published transcriptions of her drafts cited, unless otherwise stated in the notes. I have transcribed Clive Bell’s eccentric spelling as best I could.
The author and publishers would like to thank the Society of Authors as the literary representative of the Estate of Clive Bell for permission to quote from his letters and unpublished diary; as the literary representative of the Estate of Katherine Mansfield for permission to quote from Mansfield’s review of Night and Day and from her letters; as agent of the Strachey Trust for permission to quote from Lytton Strachey’s letters; as the literary representative of the Estate of Leonard Woolf for permission to quote from his letters; as the literary representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf for permission to quote from Woolf’s manuscript drafts and their transcriptions, and from her Collected Essays, edited by Leonard Woolf.
Extracts from Sketches in Pen and Ink: A Bloomsbury Notebook by Vanessa Bell, edited by Lia Giachero and published by the Hogarth Press, are used by permission of the Random House Group Limited, as are extracts from An Autobiography by Leonard Woolf, published by the Hogarth Press, and from The Wise Virgins by Leonard Woolf, published by Chatto & Windus.
Extracts from A Passionate Apprentice by Virginia Woolf, edited by Mitchell Leaska; The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, edited by Susan Dick; The Essays of Virginia Woolf, edited by Andrew McNeillie; from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf and from Moments of Being, all published by the Hogarth Press, are used by permission of the executors of the Estate of Virginia Woolf and the Random House Group Limited.
Thanks to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin for permission to quote from Clive Bell’s letters to Mary Hutchinson, and to the Henry W. and Albert Berg Collection, the British Library and the University of Sussex Library for permission to quote from material in their collections.
The author and publishers would like to thank the following for illustrations: Henrietta Garnett, and the Victoria University Library at the University of Toronto, for reproductions of book jackets on pp. 27, 56, 82, 107, 128, 159, 185, 215, 237, 267, 303, 336, 368 and 393; the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, the New York Public Library, the Astor, Lennox, and Tilden Foundations, and the Society of Authors, for illustrations on pp. 2, 30 and 161; the University of Sussex, and the Society of Authors, for illustrations on pp. 59, 85, 217, 239, 270, 306, 339 and 371; the British Library, and the Society of Authors, for illustrations on pp. 131 and 400–401; and the British Library (Colindale), and the Society of Authors, for the illustration on p. 110.
How does a writer begin? Virginia Woolf published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915, when she was thirty-three, but her life in fiction began with the novel’s conception, eight years before, the moment when she embarked on a quest for her own powers – for its title says as much about her own creative journey as it does about the novel’s action.
Later Woolf would keep a diary in which she recorded key moments in the genesis of her fictions, providing an outline history of how they came into being, but no such records survive for her first novel. The exact moment of its birth is irrecoverable, yet she plunged herself into it at the very moment when she launched herself as an independent person, obliged to make choices as to how and where she would lead her life. Once begun, the narrative provided a focus for her imagination, a secret centre, a private path that, with occasional gaps and lapses, would guide her for the rest of her life. The Voyage Out was a desperate struggle to write, draft succeeding draft, racking her confidence, yet when completed, it proved, as its first reader had promised, ‘a work that counts’.1
If the precise ‘when’ is unknown, the ‘where’ is partly written into the novel itself: all the surviving drafts begin in the heart of London, in ‘the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment’ [p.3],2 though the exact street is not named. The traffic flows, like a tributary stream, towards the Thames, which in its turn flows into the great oceans beyond (as in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness), eventually finding the mouths of other rivers – the Tagus, and later the Amazon. Jostled by busy clerks and typists, a married couple are walking down the street arm-in-arm, an image of one of the possible futures that the – the Tagus, and later the Amazon. Jostled by busy clerks and typists, a married couple are walking down the street arm-in-arm, an image of one of the possible futures that the
twenty-five-year-old Virginia Stephen might have imagined for herself. But before the novel was finished, the nature and meaning of marriage would be thoroughly explored, and its promise of ‘calm sea and fair voyage’ dismantled.
This married couple make their way to Wapping in London’s sordid East End, to the docks and the ship that will carry them to South America. In later drafts of this opening scene, the woman dissolves into tears as she reaches the Embankment, while her embarrassed husband recites poetry to himself, and attempts to calm her. But in the earliest surviving version, Geranium Ambrose and his wife discuss the city’s corrosive effect upon the soil beneath. He tells her that the earth between the paving cracks was once fertile enough to grow vines. Now it is poisoned, and no living thing could find its way out. For a moment, she imagines Regent Street festooned with vines, but they agree that such grapes would never ripen, or else would be black and bitter. London is a barren and deadening weight of stone, crushing out the impulses of life beneath it.3
Such a vision of the city, as a vast environmental disaster, is all too familiar at the beginning of the twenty-first century, yet the Victorians too saw London as a city in decay, physically polluted by its sewers and cemeteries, morally contaminated by social and sexual degradation. The young Virginia Stephen had read Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885),4 a post-apocalyptic fantasy, in which a depopulated England has been reclaimed by the wild; society has reverted to small communes in which a feudal aristocracy protects its peasants and slaves from bandit raids, while London itself has been abandoned, as a lethal swamp of poisonous fumes, burning with methane gas and fatal to all forms of life. Virginia later abandoned the fantasy of her original opening (as dialogue, it was stiff and implausible), but her original vision of London as a place of darkness, ‘a circumscribed mound, eternally burnt, eternally scarred’ [p.11], underpins the opening of The Voyage Out, though in later drafts its decay is pictured in terms of visible destitution and social injustice: ‘When one gave up seeing the beauty that clothed things, this was the skeleton beneath.’ [p.5]5
At every stage of composition, Woolf ’s first novel was haunted by a sense of an underworld, of horrors lying beneath the surface: the human suffering that furnishes middle-class comfort; the white hairless monsters, and the ribs of wrecked ships that lurk in the ocean’s unplumbed depths,6 dank tunnels under the Thames, inhabited by deformed and gibbering creatures with long nails – and whatever lies beneath the conscious mind. Social occasions only momentarily distract us ‘from seeing to the bottom of things’ [p.116]. In the end, the unplumbed depths, the dark and sticky pool of what we fear but cannot understand or deal with, rises and overwhelms the novel’s heroine.
The Voyage Out was begun during the summer of 1907 and submitted for publication in March 1913. No one knows exactly how many times it was rewritten. Virginia’s husband, Leonard Woolf, recalled that ‘she once opened a cupboard and found in it (and burnt) a whole mountain of MSS; it was The Voyage Out which she had rewritten (I think) five times from beginning to end’.7 But why did it take so long to write? For its author, everything seemed to hang on it. Virginia had always known that she would become a writer, perhaps even an important writer. In February 1904, soon after her father’s death, she had walked along the down at the edge of the sea at Manorbier, in Pembrokeshire, wanting to write ‘a book – a book – But what book?’8 Once she had embarked upon it, her first novel had to justify her commitment, not just to others, but to herself. She was a perfectionist, and each new draft disappointed her high hopes and increased her fear of failing.
The task she had set herself was, by any standards, a daunting one. For several years before she began, she had been reviewing popular novels, but found herself dissatisfied with their predictable treatments of plot and character – she would continue to experiment with these elements for the rest of her career. She felt particularly impatient with the highly structured, coincidental plotting still current in fiction, and would have no truck with it. Her early readers were troubled by what they took to be gaps or flaws in the novel’s design, later recognizable as the signatures of modernism. To cast conventional methods aside required courage and conviction: ‘My boldness terrifies me’, she admitted.9
Another delaying factor was her sheer creativity, a scrolloping fecundity of invention that tempted her to rework her fictions endlessly, making it hard for her to let them go. She was artist enough to judge when the story-telling had to stop, yet the tale-spinning continued inside her head: early characters, like Mr and Mrs Dalloway in The Voyage Out, turned up again in later fictions, both published and unpublished.10
At each stage of writing, she was reluctant to confine herself to a single approach to the exclusion of others: ‘What I wanted to do was to give the feeling of a vast tumult of life, as various & disorderly as possible… the whole was to have a sort of pattern and be somehow controlled. The difficulty was to keep any sort of “coherence” ’, she later explained to Lytton Strachey.11 The completion of individual drafts further compounded her problems. While it was always possible to rework events from a different point of view, the several approaches did not necessarily sit comfortably with one another. The surviving versions show a process of accretion, accompanied, inevitably, by some loss of focus, direction and consistency. The struggle between her impulse to fantasize and a commitment to social reality continued, and the fantasy element tended to get suppressed, to the lasting regret of her earliest reader, Clive Bell. Then and always, she shared her heroine’s commitment to ‘the world of things that aren’t there [which] was splendidly vigorous and far more real than the other. She felt that one never spoke of the things that mattered, but carried them about, until a note of music, or a sentence or a sight, joined hands with them.’12
These lines do not appear in The Voyage Out but in an earlier version, which has since been published by Louise DeSalvo under the novel’s working title, Melymbrosia – an invented compound word, combining the Greek and Latin names for honey and ambrosia (the food of the gods, which conferred immortality) and playing on the name of the Ambroses. Drafts in manuscript or typescript survive from at least four distinct versions, and there are fragments of others: all of them describe a voyage from London to South America undertaken by the couple of the opening scene, eventually named Helen and Ridley Ambrose, with Helen’s niece Rachel Vinrace, daughter of the ship’s captain. On the voyage they are joined by a reactionary politician, Richard Dalloway and his wife Clarissa. When Clive Bell read ‘volume 1’, early in 1909 he congratulated Virginia on its brilliance, adding, ‘Now, how are you going to finish it? Surely the Dalloways must appear again, & the Mary Jane [the name of the ship, at that stage]? Unless, indeed, you have invented some new, undream’t of form?’13 She had. In chapter VI of the published text, the Dalloways walk out of the novel for good (though they were to make a comeback in Mrs Dalloway).
Staying with the Ambroses in their villa at Santa Marina, Rachel meets a group of English visitors at the hotel, including St John Hirst and Terence Hewet, two young men recently down from Cambridge. After a picnic, a dance, a lunch, Rachel, Helen and the two young men make a further voyage inland, up the Amazon, where the jungle’s strangeness threatens to engulf them. As Terence and Rachel recognize that they are falling in love, the travellers feel threatened by the unknown and uncontrollable world that surrounds them. Now the structures that human beings construct for themselves, both real and imaginary, begin to look temporary and vulnerable. ‘These trees get on one’s nerves’, Hirst exclaims; ‘it’s all so crazy. God’s undoubtedly mad.’ [p.260] Helen is filled with ‘presentiments of disaster’, and in the earlier draft she remembers a river party where a boat had suddenly capsized:
In the same way then they had been mocked at; now again they had ventured too far.
‘At any moment the awful thing may happen’, she breathed.
What did their pretence of competence and wisdom amount to?… All the disasters in her experience seemed to have come from civilised people forgetting how easily they may die.14
Death and love lie beneath the surface of life like monsters on the sea-bed, mysterious forces that at any moment may rise and explode.15 The inexplicable and inexplicably painful nature of love is examined, and the promise that it may be happily house-trained in marriage (the traditional plot of romance) is rejected. Yet ironically, one meaning of ‘the voyage out’ for Virginia derived from the kind of stories that her mother may have handed on to her daughters, stories in which romance led to the long voyage of marriage, symbolized by the journey undertaken by the Ambroses in the opening chapter:
We were in a little boat going out to a ship at night… The sun had set and the moon was rising over our heads. There were lovely silver lights upon the waves – It was life, it was death. The great sea was round us. It was the voyage for ever and ever.16
For the young Virginia Stephen, marriage no longer held out the promise it had for her mother’s generation; the old ideal was undermined by the merest observation. Within The Voyage Out, the Ambroses’ marriage, for all its strengths, seems to Terence Hewet morally compromising: ‘She gave way to him; she spoilt him; she arranged things for him; she who was all truth to others was not true to her husband, was not true to her friends if they came in conflict with her husband.’ [p.229] His insight occurs in the course of a meditation on the several marriages of the hotel guests. He remembers Rachel telling him that men and women bring out the worst in one another and should live separately. Desiring her, and confused by his thoughts, he wonders whether to tell her he loathes marriage – its smugness, its safety, its concessions.
The desire for marriage and its impossibility provide the central theme of The Voyage Out. It begins in a style of comedy and social satire inherited from a range of English examples, from Jane Austen to E. M. Forster (Virginia had reviewed The Longest Journey and A Room with a View while writing her own novel). It tells the familiar story of a young woman launching herself into society, yet marriage, as the expected climax, becomes first a source of doubt and anxiety, and then a disaster, with Rachel’s death. The case against marriage is first made with the appearance of the Dalloways, whose gender politics are as suspect as their imperialism – indeed the two are closely connected. While Clarissa assures Rachel that she can see her husband’s faults ‘more clearly than I see anyone else’s’ [p.52], she wonders privately ‘whether it is really good for a woman to live with a man who is morally her superior, as Richard is mine… I suppose I feel for him what my mother and women of her generation felt for Christ’ [p.44].
Women and men have been brought up so differently, are constructed so differently, have such different expectations of life, that the very words they use have different meanings. Richard Dalloway, in a moment of intimacy with Rachel, confides to her the importance he has found in ‘love’, ‘a word that seemed to unveil the skies for Rachel.’ He tries to explain that he isn’t using it in the conventional sense: ‘I use it as young men use it. Girls are kept very ignorant, aren’t they?’ [p.59]
Just what he does mean by ‘love’ becomes apparent at their next encounter:
The ship lurched. Rachel fell slightly forward. Richard took her in his arms and kissed her. Holding her tight, he kissed her passionately, so that she felt the hardness of his body and the roughness of his cheek printed upon hers. She fell back in her chair, with tremendous beats of the heart, each of which sent black waves across her eyes. He clasped his forehead in his hands.
‘You tempt me,’ he said. The tone of his voice was terrifying. He seemed choked in fight. They were both trembling. [p.67]
Dalloway’s attitudes to sexual as well as public politics (‘may I be in my grave before a woman has the right to vote in England!’ [p.35]) are here inextricably linked: he takes advantage of Rachel’s inexperience and then justifies himself by blaming her for tempting him, in a familiar masculine manoeuvre. Rachel is overcome with conflicting emotions – excitement (‘something wonderful had happened’ [p.67]); embarrassment at his presence (he refuses to meet her eye at dinner); and panic – his action releases images of sexual and social anxiety lurking beneath the surface of her consciousness, which rise up in the form of nightmares later that night. She dreams that she is walking down a long tunnel leading to a vault, whose walls ‘oozed with damp, which collected into drops and slid down’. This quasi-vaginal passage is occupied by ‘a little deformed man’ [p.68], at once a goblin and an outcast of the city. As when she falls ill, Rachel suffers from bad dreams in which she is simultaneously trapped in the depths of her own body and the lowest places of the city – both sites of the alien, the unknown.
Talking it over with Helen next day, Rachel confronts her own confusion: ‘I was a good deal excited… But I didn’t mind till afterwards; when –… I became terrified’ [p.71]. Helen silently blames Rachel’s father for leaving her in such a state of ignorance, and tries to put Dalloway’s kiss into a wider perspective: male sexual desire is common but better ignored, like ‘the noises people make when they eat, or men spitting’. Rachel, pursuing her own train of thought, admits to herself and Helen ‘I liked him, and I liked being kissed’, yet she is appalled at the wave of panic and self-loss induced by sexual desire. She later experiences a similar reaction during a picnic that Terence has organized, when she and he accidentally stumble upon Arthur and Susan (guests at the hotel) ‘courting’:
They saw a man and woman lying on the ground beneath them, rolling slightly this way and that as the embrace tightened and slackened… Nor could you tell from [the woman’s] expression whether she was happy or had suffered something…
‘I don’t like that,’ said Rachel after a moment. [pp. 127–8]
Dalloway’s remark, that girls were kept very ignorant, was a constant and constantly reiterated complaint of women at the turn of the century. Rachel suffers ‘terrors and agonies… Women one sees in the streets,… Men kissing one… Things one guesses at…’ [p.202] Talking to Helen, Rachel links the threat of Dalloway’s sexuality with the dark world of the city, the prostitutes in Piccadilly, symbolically circling the statue of Eros, and their effect on the lives of young women like herself, forbidden to walk down Bond Street alone because of the risk of being mistaken for one of them – a restraint upon her liberty that she bitterly resents: ‘So that’s why I can’t walk alone!… Because men are brutes! I hate men!’ [p.72]17
Prostitution is one visible outcome of male desire, and through its dark consequences for women and its silent exposure of unanswered needs, it troubles Rachel and the novel as a whole, as it had troubled the Victorian social conscience. Evelyn Murgatroyd, the novel’s comically gushing ‘New Woman’, believes that, with a few like-minded friends, she could put a stop to prostitution in six months, if she went to Piccadilly and talked, woman to woman, to its victims, telling them frankly how ‘beastly’ they were being. For Rachel, prostitution is linked with death through a cheap novel she has picked up, ‘whose purpose was to distribute the guilt of a woman’s downfall upon the right shoulders’ [p.113]. Though the actual novel is not identified, it belongs to a popular format of the day, designed to raise social consciousness and scare young women off the streets through horrific warnings. An earlier draft sets out its stereotypical plot in greater detail: after being raped by her landlord, the working-class heroine is forced into prostitution, until, battered and abandoned, she dies in a cheap lodging house, having lost her baby, and even her identity. At the inquest, she is referred to only as ‘Sloper’s Sal’ and dismissed as ‘a loose woman’. The book upsets Rachel, yet she keeps it by her, ‘as a reminder of the frailty of the body’. The novel is scarcely mentioned in the published version, yet a sudden recollection of ‘Sal’s’ death prompts Rachel to ask Terence, ‘Is it true… that women die with bugs crawling across their faces?’18 [p.284]
Radical critics of patriarchy represented marriage itself as a form of prostitution, which made sexual and domestic slavery appear acceptable by exploiting women’s desire for romance and love, while motherhood ensured their continued subjection. Yet as Woolf’s novel shows, unmarried women were often just as subject to domestic slavery, being tied to parents or elderly relatives, and required to act as hostesses or housekeepers, to run errands or act as unpaid companions. Marriage might reasonably be preferred because it offered middle-class women greater choice, as well as higher social status (a view reflected in Susan Warrington’s delight in her engagement).
If the relationship between Rachel and Terence is to work, they must confront and, if possible, overcome the evident inequalities in love and marriage. In the Melymbrosia draft, it is Rachel who despairs of any communication between the sexes, seeing only her own terror and the empty myths of masculinity:
After all… what’s the use of men talking to women? We’re so different. We hate and fear each other. If you could strip off my skin now you would see all my nerves gone white with fear of you…
Besides women see the worst of men. How cruel they are at home, how they believe in ranks and ceremonies, how they want praise and management. Even Uncle Ridley who is far better than most wants praise all day long and things made easy by Helen. As for men talking to women as though they were men, no; it’s the worst relationship there is; we bring out all that’s bad in each other; we should live separate.19
But in the published novel, it is no longer Rachel but Terence who describes the way relations between men and women have been undermined by women’s exaggerated respect for men, men’s bullying, and the neglect and ignorance in which most young women were brought up: ‘Doesn’t it make your blood boil? If I were a woman I’d blow someone’s brains out,’ says Terence [p.201].
Why did Virginia transfer her critique of patriarchy from Rachel to Terence? Possibly it seemed out of character or sounded too much of a feminist rant – Rachel appears less experienced and articulate in The Voyage Out than she had done in the earlier draft, ‘Melymbrosia’. Giving this insight to Terence makes him unusually clear-sighted, but it also suggests that men too might have something to gain from insights which promised a release from the mistakes of the past. His marriage to Rachel will be different, more truthful, more vital, more equal: ‘it does seem possible… though I’ve always thought it the most unlikely thing in the world – I shall be in love with you all my life, and our marriage will be the most exciting thing that’s ever been done!’ [p.281]20 Yet though Terence intends to compensate for the disparities between them, he quickly reverts to stereotypical male behaviour, interrupting her when she is playing the piano, and expecting her to answer their letters of congratulation. His noble resolutions are not translated into practice.21
Unless the old order can be changed, marriage threatens to narrow, rather than enhance Rachel’s opportunities for psychological growth. And, at this crucial juncture in the novel, when all seems set for a happy (or not so happy) ending, Rachel suddenly falls ill and dies. Our narrative expectations are frustrated and disappointed with an abruptness that seems closer to the randomness of life than the tidier outcomes of fiction. Love and death now seem arbitrary. The predominant mode of social comedy makes Rachel’s death even more worrying, more disruptive, its pointlessness confronting and invalidating the plot of romance.
The difficulties of marriage and Rachel’s fears of her own sexuality have encouraged critics to interpret her death as at some level self-inflicted or self-willed, even an acknowledgement of the impossibility of intimacy. Certainly as the book draws to its close there is a sense of impasse, in which the novel’s critique of marriage and the social system seems pitted against Rachel’s own future. Yet against the suggestion that her world has defeated her must be set Rachel’s own view of nature as indifferent or even hostile to human life, erupting uncontrollably and to terrible effect. Dreams, nightmares, hallucinations, illness, death all come from somewhere beyond conscious will or choice, however much our state of mind may lay us open to them. We seek to tame them by finding a meaning for them, but the novel itself remains sceptical. As E. M. Forster noticed, the storm on the final pages makes its own comment on the anxieties of the survivors: ‘ “It can’t only be an accident. For if it was an accident – it need never have happened.” Primaeval thunderstorms answer Mrs Thornbury. There is no reason.’22
Rachel confronts, but fails to answer the question, ‘what do young women want or expect from life?’ For Jane Austen and the Brontës, and a whole tradition of women’s fiction, marriage had provided happy endings. For Virginia Stephen, marriage was all too often a sham and a deception, yet what were the alternatives? And what compensations were there for those who rejected or failed to achieve the pleasures of motherhood and the marriage bed? A profession required training, dedication and self-discipline. One vocation is written into the novel itself – Terence’s ambition is to be a novelist, and when he speaks of his aspirations, he seems to speak for his creator: ‘I sometimes wonder whether there’s anything else in the whole world worth doing… there’s an extraordinary satisfaction in writing, even in the attempt to write.’ [p.204]
The novel charts Rachel’s struggle towards selfhood: ‘I’m going out to t-t-triumph in the wind’, she stutters. ‘I can be m-m-myself.’ Gazing into the depths of the sea, she is intensely alive to the world beyond, and the deep waters beneath. For a moment, just before she falls ill, she pictures herself ‘flung into the sea’, and transformed into a swimming mermaid, but as her temperature rises, the deep waters seem to drag her down, until she lies curled up at the bottom of a deep pool.23 Virginia Stephen survived that dark undertow; writing itself became the raft that would carry her forward.
The novel’s bleak and unconsoling view of death was that of a young woman who had seen too much of it at close hand: within eleven years she had lived through four deaths among her closest family, three of them quite as unexpected as Rachel’s. In 1895, when Virginia was thirteen, her mother had died suddenly of rheumatic fever. Her half-sister Stella had tried to take her mother’s place. Two years later, and newly married, Stella died of peritonitis. ‘[A]t fifteen to have that protection removed, to be tumbled out of the family shelter, to see cracks and gashes in that fabric, to be cut by them, to see beyond them – was that good?’24 Virginia wondered, looking back from middle age.
Early in 1904, her father, Leslie Stephen, had finally died of stomach cancer. His death freed the four Stephen children to start again, to leave their childhood home at Hyde Park Gate for a new life at Gordon Square, in the heart of Bloomsbury. Thoby, the eldest, was reading for the bar after a brilliant career at Cambridge; Vanessa was studying painting; Virginia was reading, writing reviews and giving adult education classes at Morley College for Working Men and Women; her younger brother, Adrian, was still at Cambridge. In 1906, the young Stephens, accompanied by Violet Dickinson, an older friend of Virginia’s, set out on an ambitious trip to Greece and Constantinople, which went disastrously wrong when first Vanessa, and then Violet fell ill, and Virginia found herself struggling with uncomprehending doctors and boiling milk in a hotel room in Athens. They had ‘ventured too far’. Back in London, Thoby, who had gone back early, was also seriously ill, while Vanessa gradually recovered. Only at a late stage did his doctors diagnose Thoby’s high temperature and violent diarrhoea as typhoid, for which there was, in any case, no effective treatment at the time. In the third week of November, he grew suddenly worse and died, after a mistaken attempt to operate on him.
As The Voyage Out draws to a close, Rachel’s friends search for some kind of explanation: ‘And yet the older one grows… the more certain one becomes that there is a reason. How could one go on if there were no reason?’ ‘There must be some reason why such things happen… Only at first it was not easy to understand what it was’; ‘ “It seems so inexplicable,… Death, I mean” ’; ‘What did matter then? What was the meaning of it all?’25
Before the shock of Thoby’s death could be absorbed, Clive Bell, his closest friend from Cambridge, had proposed to Vanessa for a second time, and had been accepted. For Virginia, it seemed as if she had lost them both. The household of four was now reduced to two, with Virginia responsible for Adrian, although she herself felt in need of mothering; in childhood, she had resented the attention her mother gave to Adrian as the baby of the family. She was afraid that she had lost her intimacy with Vanessa for ever, and blamed herself for feeling resentful when Vanessa was so happy. She tried to feel protective to Adrian as a ‘poor little boy’,26 admitting ‘I cant get reconciled – but we have to go on’,27 and hoping ‘I can make a living out of what is left.’28 At the height of her desolation, friends and relatives tried to cheer her up with assurances that she too would find a husband: ‘The world is full of kindness and stupidity.’29
A few days after Vanessa’s wedding on 7 February 1907, she told Violet Dickinson, ‘I am going to write something serious, needing work’.30 Initially, Clive and Vanessa had planned to find their own home, but then it was agreed that they would take over 46 Gordon Square, so in March, Virginia moved herself and Adrian into 29 Fitzroy Square, accompanied by the family cook, Sophie Farrell, anxious that Virginia wouldn’t look after herself (’she’s such a harum scarum thing… She don’t know what she has on her plate’31).
It is easy to overlook the determination and self-determination that Virginia showed in the months and years after Thoby’s death, partly because she herself was more often aware of her failures than her successes – her loneliness, her impatience with Adrian, and her jealousy of Clive. Letters to her closest friend Violet announced her want of ‘Affection. I don’t get None’,32 and her desire to be babied, to be ‘the most compassionable and soft of Baby Wall[abie]s just climbing on to your bed’.33 Yet six months later, new energies began to stir in her; her letters hum with suppressed excitement about ‘certain manuscripts’, about her future as a writer, which suddenly seems to hang in the balance: ‘I shall be miserable, or happy; a wordy sentimental creature, or a writer of such English as shall one day burn the pages.’34
Her excitement sprang from the writing she was doing each morning, the ‘many small chapters that form in my head’,35 as if claiming a fertility of her own, in the face of Vanessa’s pregnancy. Though she often felt afraid that she was less sexually attractive than Vanessa, and less suited to marriage (‘I see how I shall spend my days a virgin, an Aunt, an authoress’36), she had discovered a secret source of joy for herself, a private theatre in her head, and its actors demanded all the attention she could give. ‘Why should I intrude upon your circle of bliss?’ she asked her preoccupied sister in October. ‘Especially when I can think of nothing but my novel.’37
As she found a new focus for herself, she began to attract the attention of her brother-in-law Clive, who was as fascinated by the art of fiction as that of painting, and was constructing theories on both. In the immediate aftermath of Thoby’s death, she had barely been able to restrain her resentment of him, finding him utterly unworthy of Vanessa (nor was she alone in this): ‘When I think of father and Thoby and then see that funny little creature twitching his pink skin and jerking out his little spasm of laughter I wonder what odd freak there is in Nessa’s eyesight’,38 she confided to Violet, in an unexpectedly sexual image. But as he began to surface from the first absorbing months of marriage, she softened: ‘I think he unfolds.’39 In August, he drew up a list of French literature for her to read. His favourite, Mérimée’s Lettres à une inconnue, she had already read in the sickroom, on their disastrous holiday in Greece, but she took up Flaubert’s letters.40 Marriage had made them both feel shut out, but in different ways – Virginia from her intimacy with Vanessa, and Clive from the approval of the Stephen clan – a mutual friendship seemed to offer each of them a way back.
If Virginia kept a daily diary of these years, it has not survived (though her early journals describe holidays, particular landscapes seen and people met41). Clive Bell, however, began a diary on 1 January 1908, though by the 25th he had already abandoned it. On 2 January he records, ‘Reading Froude’s Carlyle, Dante and Virginia’s Sarah, first part poor, last part excellent, very penetrating and often exquisite’42(‘Sarah’ might have been the name of her heroine at this stage, but was more probably the name of the ship, later the ‘Sarah Jane’,43 and later still, the ‘Euphrosyne’). His diary shows how often they met: on the 3rd, ‘dinner and talk with AVS’; on the 5th, ‘AVS for dinner’; on the 6th, ‘Dinner with Virginia; talked a great deal about myself; for the most part true but gave an altogether wrong impression. Must be corrected.’ She dined with Clive and Vanessa at Gordon Square on the 8th; they met at a play-reading on the 12th, and at home at Fitzroy Square on the 16th. They met again on the morning and evening of the 17th, when she read a paper (‘very beautiful and brilliant, though not thoroughly argued’), and Clive dined at Fitzroy Square on the 24th (the eve of her birthday). He was finally one of the family.
44Civilization45