This is just a quick post filled with details about a biography I am currently reading. You cannot buy it online in book or even kindle or ebook form. Hopefully, in future. However, read the details below to find out how to read this fantastic biography online for yourself! I am reading every chapter as slowly as possible because I don't want it to end...
I WILL PROVIDE THE LINK BELOW TO MARION DELL'S WEBSITE, so you can read the biography at will.
Image taken from website, The Elusive Julia Prinsep Stephen
care of Marion Dell
So, who was Julia Prinsep Stephen besides being called, 'The mother of Virginia Woolf' (and also Vanessa Bell)? Dr. Marion Dell, Vice-Chairman of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain has written a brand new biography where you can learn as much about her life as you would like. Dr. Dell's stunning and impeccable research has brought Julia Stephen refreshingly to life; so much so, you would swear she is standing in front of you narrating her life story herself.
Of course, there was more to Julia Prinsep Stephen then her famous children (or child). Her lineage dates back to not only the Prinseps but also the Pattles of Calcutta. Her aunt was photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron and she lived during a time of great poets i.e. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and authors as Henry James and Charles Dickens.William Makepeace Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair bears a very important connection and mention but you'll have to read Dr. Dell's biography to find out more...
Book cover created by Dr. Marion Dell.
Image taken from her website, The Elusive Julia Prinsep Stephen
There are several sections and tabs on the website filled with all kinds of background information to the author, Dr. Marion Dell as well as her previous books which are Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf related. Marion has been uploading several chapters at a time under the Biography tab on her website. So far, the first four chapters are available to read. Take a poke around and I really hope you like what you find.
What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking through them.
Christina Rossetti by Lewis Carroll
albumen print, 7 October 1863
National Portrait Gallery
1918
Monday, August 4th
Christina (Rossetti) has the great distinction of being a born poet, as she seems to have known very well herself. But if I were bringing a case against God she is one of the first witnesses I should call. It is melancholy reading. First she starved herself of love, which meant also life; then of poetry in deference to what she thought her religion demanded. There were two good suitors. The first indeed had his peculiarities. He had a conscience.She could only marry a particular shade of Christian. He could only stay that shade for a few months at a time. Finally he developed Roman Catholicism and was lost. Worse still was the case of Mr. Collins a really delightful scholar an unworldly recluse a single-minded worshiper of Christina, who could never be brought into the fold at all. On this account she could only visit him affectionately in his lodgings, which she did to the end of her life. Poetry was castrated too. she would set herself to do the psalms into verse; and to make all her poetry subservient to the Christian doctrines. Consequently, as I think, she starved into austere emaciation a very fine original gift, which only wanted licence to take to itself a far finer form than, shall we say Mrs. Browning's. She wrote very easily; in a spontaneous childlike kind of way one imagines, as is the case generally with a true gift; still underdeveloped. She has the natural singing power. She thinks too. She has fancy. One could say she is profane enough to guess, have been ribald and witty. And, as a reward for all her sacrifices, she died in terror, uncertain of salvation. I confess though that I have only turned her poetry over, making way inevitably to the ones I knew already.
Anne Thackeray Ritchie
Daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray
Albumen print taken by Julia Margaret Cameron
Freshwater Bay, Isle of Wight, 1867
1919
Wednesday, March 5th
But oh, dear, what a lot I've got to read! The entire works of Mr. James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, so as to compare them to the entire works of Dickens and Mrs. Gaskell; besides that George Eliot; and finally Hardy. And I've just done Aunt Anny on a really liberal scale. Yes, since I wrote last she has died, a week ago today to be precise, at Freshwater, and was buried up at Hampstead yesterday, where six or seven years ago we saw Richmond buried in a yellow fog. I suppose my feeling for her is half moonshine, or rather half reflected from other feelings. Father cared for her, she goes down the last, almost of that old nineteenth century Hyde Park Gate world. Unlike most old ladies she showed very little anxiety to see one; felt, I sometimes think, a little painfully at the sight of us, as if we'd gone far off and recalled unhappiness, which she never liked to dwell on. Also, unlike most old Aunts she had the wits to feel how sharply we differed on current questions; and this, perhaps, gave her a sense, hardly existing with her usual circle, of age, obsoleteness, extinction. For myself though she need have had no anxieties on this head, since I admired her sincerely; but still the generations certainly look very different ways. Two or perhaps three years ago L. and I went to see her, found her much diminished in size,wearing a feather boa round her neck and seated alone in a drawing room almost the copy, on a smaller scale, of the old drawing room; the same subdued pleasant air of the eighteenth century and old portraits and old china. She had our tea waiting for us. Her manner was a little distant, and more than a little melancholy. I asked her about father, and she said how those young men laughed in a "loud melancholy way" and how their generation was a very happy one, but selfish; and how ours seemed to her fine but very terrible; but we hadn't any writers such as they had, "Some of them have just a touch of that quality; Bernard Shaw has; but only a touch. The pleasant thing was to know them all us ordinary people, not great men" And then a story of Carlyle and father; Carlyle saying he'd as soon wash his face in a dirty puddle as write journalism. She put her hand down, I remember, into a bag or box standing beside the fire, and said she had a novel, three quarters written, but couldn't finish it. Nor do I suppose it ever was finished; but I've said all I can say, dressing it up a trifle rosily, in The Times tomorrow. I have written to Hester, but how I doubt the sincerity of my own emotion!
I have been very blessed to have a few of my articles featured and published online in various magazines and journal blogs lately. As a passionate lover of all things Victorian era and nineteenth century, who through my independent research, it feels as if the beginning of my dreams are coming true.
I have been reading my way through the novels of Virginia Woolf. Now with Halloween upon us tomorrow, I thought about a ghost story of a different kind...
What if you lived in an old house that you loved and knew was haunted? Not sure who the ghost was or why it stayed in your house? Perhaps, your life triggered a memory for that ghost. What do you mean ghosts don't exist? Oh, yes they do! They watch us; they see and hear us all the time. They appear to us via sound, imagery and smell but you must remain aware and open minded to experience their visitations.
“Here we left it,” she said. And he added, “Oh, but here tool” “It’s upstairs,” she murmured. “And in the garden,” he whispered. “Quietly,” they said, “or we shall wake them.”
As I said, A Haunted House by Virginia Woolf is not a novel or a novella even it is one of her short stories published in a collection called Monday and Tuesday in 1921. It is only a few pages in length. I am deeply touched by this short story. At the heart of it, is love. Love experienced between a man and woman, a married couple, who lived in the house before the author's current occupant; the female married protagonist. The ghostly couple had the best-married years of life here together and have left their hearts here together along with their unforgotten treasured memories. The love between the current couple spurs their ghostly visitations and Virginia Woolf's conversations between the ghostly couple are just beautiful.
“Here we slept,” she says. And he adds, “Kisses without number.” “Waking in the morning—” “Silver between the trees—” “Upstairs—” “In the garden—” “When summer came—” “In winter snowtime—” The doors go shutting far in the distance, gently knocking like the pulse of a heart.
In this very short tale, any reader would be touched by the deep sentimentality and heartbreaking honestly of the true connection between man and woman (in this case) and the blessing of a happy life together. One which abides through the ages.
Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf with their dog Pinka
This book reprints Virginia Woolf's witty and moving biographical essay of her great-aunt, and Roger Fry's pioneering study of the photographs published together in 1926 under the title Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women. To these are added Julia Margaret Cameron's own auto-biographical fragment, Annals of the Glass House, and her only surviving poem, On a Portrait. They are introduced by Tristram Powell. Tristram Powell is a film-maker and historian of photography.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), a central figure of the Bloomsbury Group, is best known for the nonlinear narrative of her novels, and for her feminism. Roger Fry (1866-1934), painter and critic, was another member of the Bloomsbury Group. He was a leading champion of Post-Impressionism.
Daguerreotype portrait of Julia Margaret Cameron and her daughter, Julia Hay Cameron by Unknown, 1845, National Media Museum
The photographer is unknown but it is possible that the image was made
in Calcutta as both mother and daughter were there until January 1845,
after which 'Little Julia' returned to England for three years. The case
is inscribed by the daughter 'Feb 10th 1845. This for me to keep', and
probably at a later date by her mother 'Given to my Julia by her request
- her own choice.' Julia Hay Cameron died in childbirth in her early
30s, at which point the portrait appears to have been returned to her
mother. (This portrait is now housed at Dimbola Lodge, Freshwater Bay, Isle of Wight, home of Julia Margaret Cameron. This image is not included in the book. I added it because its beautiful)
At the age of forty-eight, Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) was given a camera by her daughter when she moved to the Isle of Wight: 'It might amuse you, Mother, to try to photograph during your solitude at Freshwater.' The gift was to begin Mrs.Cameron's short but prolific career as one of photography's first great artists.
Cameron's long exposures and softfocus portraits were criticised by photographers of the time as lacking skill, but these evocative manipulations were in fact early realisations of photography's true poetic potential. Such expressiveness was something more readily understood by the Pre-Raphaelite painters with whom Cameron became associated, and who gave her encouragement.
Her portraits capture some of the most famous intellectuals and artists of the Victorian era, all made to follow Mrs. Cameron's famously exacting direction.
PRODUCT DETAILS
Julia Margaret Cameron By Herself,Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY
128 Pages, 4.5 x 5.75
Formats: Trade Paper
Trade Paper, $16.95 (US $16.95) (CA $22.95)
Publication Date: October 2016 ISBN 9781843681212
Rights: US & CA
Pallas Athene (Oct 2016)
In a letter to Sir Edward Ryan she says, 'Lastly as to spots, they must, I think remain. I could have them touched out, but I am the only photographer who always issues untouched photographs and artists for this reason, amongst others, value my photographs. So Mr. Watts and Mr. Rossetti and Mr. du Maurier write me above all others'. (Julia Margaret Cameron's letter, pg. 18).
Dear Reader, if you are in search of first-hand accounts from Mrs. Cameron herself, her family members, closest friends, scholars, and the like then look no further. For this small booklet is quite intimate and charming. There are myriads of biographies on photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron's life and work. However, I am so in love with this beautiful yet introspective look beyond the lens into Mrs. Cameron's world in Ceylon and Freshwater Bay, Isle of Wight.
It is as if her closest friends have gathered together all of Mrs. Cameron's surviving writings (Annals of the Glass House), excerpts from her letters to colleagues, family, and friends, as well as critiques of the day written by family members and scholars of photography and history. There is no better research than personal artifacts from the subject. Yes, we have her photographs but there was so much more to the woman behind the standing box camera lens.
Julia Margaret Cameron with sons Henry Herschel Hay and Charles Hay, 1857-8
by an unknown photographer, Harry Ransom Center
I was shocked when I read the story of Julia's father in his coffin returning home with his widow and young children (including a very young child named Julia Margaret) when his coffin exploded with him in it! Apparently, James Pattle was something of a liar and a scoundrel with a temper! There are several fascinating stories about young Julia Margaret Pattle's childhood and family; yes, she was born a Pattle before marrying Charles Hay Cameron later in life and having her family. So many wonderful mentions of Mr. Cameron, his viewpoint on living on their coffee plantation in Ceylon, his thoughts on his wife, Julia Margaret, their life together, etc. It is worth the money for learning about that rare aspect of her personal life alone!
If you want to learn more about the poets and scholars of Freshwater Bay on the magical Isle of Wight, all her friends are gathered within these pages. Focus is put on the famous laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson but deeper exploration into Julia Margaret's earlier friendship with great men such as poet and essayist, Sir Henry Taylor and astronomer, chemist, polymath Sir John Herschel just to name a few! Wonderful descriptive stories of dinners and parties at her sister Sarah Prinsep's Little Holland House. I could have stayed there forever.
There are fifty of Julia Margaret Cameron's photographs numbered and labeled as plates. Next to each photograph is a story and anecdote of that particular friend and sitter. However, some wonderful stories of the famous visitors who met Mrs. Cameron and didn't exactly like or get on with her! Very funny tidbits indeed.
One of my favorite quotes from the book is one I often remember and know to be true even to this day. I should know because I am blessed to have visited Freshwater Bay, Isle of Wight and most of my very dear 'friends' remain there...
Everybody is either a genius, or a poet, or a painter or peculiar in some way.
Is there nobody commonplace?
I am forever grateful to Trafalgar Square Publishing, Independent Publishers Group as well as Pallas Athene for mailing me a beautiful hardcover edition of, Julia Margaret Cameron By Herself, Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry for review. I will cherish it always.
Now published in the United States and available for purchase, Amazon US
Already published in the United Kingdom and available for purchase, Amazon UK
I am so thrilled and deeply honored to bring you an interview I conducted with Marion Dell. Thanks to Pan Macmillan UK, I was able to reach out to her, introduce myself, tell her how much I enjoyed, 'Influential Forebears'. She could not have been more gracious and kind. Later on, to my delight, she also agreed to an interview. I sent her my questions concerning her focus on the novels of Virginia Woolf, and those related to and closely engaged in her circle. For instance, Julia Margaret Cameron, Anny Thackeray Ritchie, and Virginia Woolf's mother, Julia Prinsep Stephen.
<----Julia Margaret Cameron in 1860s
===> Anny Thackeray Ritchie in 1867 a photograph taken by Julia Margaret Cameron.
Center below is the most recognizable face of the beautiful woman, Julia Prinsep Stephen. A photograph taken by Julia Margaret Cameron in 1867.
1) I love how your focus is on the family and the
family connection. Can you explain why those three women: Julia Margaret
Cameron, Anny Thackeray Ritchie, and Julia Prinsep Stephen? What makes them
Influential Forebears?
They
were all influential in helping to form Woolf as a woman and as a writer. Of
course they were not the only influences. I chose them because they were strong
influences right from her birth and because they were linked to her
genealogically. They were part of her matrilineage.
2) You write about Virginia Woolf as creative spirit,
as writer and author focusing on aspects of her two novels Night and Day and The Years.
I was fascinated about your chapter on her worry of ‘the black Stephen
madness’.What surprised you most about
this aspect of her life?
I
think that she experienced periods of ‘blackness’ throughout her life. I think
she was what would now be diagnosed as bi-polar. But of course the term did not
exist then. In her opinion, and in her youth, any mental illness or disorder
was considered something to be ashamed of and hidden. We no longer regard it
this way. I think that for her, although it caused her heartache and sadness,
it was predominantly a positive condition. In the manic phases she was at her
most productive and creative. She would not have been the great writer she was
without this energy and ambivalence in her personality.
3) We both share a love of researching family
connections within nineteenth-century poets and artists. Again, in this book,
your research is incredible. Please describe a bit of your research process
when writing a book. How do you go about it? Also, when is research enough before you say,
‘now I can write the book’? Or do you write and research at the same time as
you go along in the process?
I do
most of the research first. Then as I write I might find gaps which need to be
plugged. It takes a long time. I have been researching the life of Julia
Stephen, Woolf’s mother, for about ten years already, while also researching
and writing other things. It is difficult because she left so little of herself
in her own voice; no diary, no photograph album, few extant letters. But it is
the part I most enjoy – especially going to relevant places and meeting people
who are involved and interested. I also need time to try to make connections
between things and to collect archive material such as photographs, magazine
articles, or letters and diaries. Often the most interesting insights, and
amazing pieces of information, come from serendipity; from chance meetings,
from unexpected sources, or when I am looking for something else entirely.
4) Was there any aspect of these Influential
Forebears: Julia Margaret Cameron, Anny Thackeray Ritchie and Julia Prinsep
Stephen that surprised you when conducting your research? Have you learned new
things about them that you didn’t perhaps know before? Any stories about them
you could share? Funny anecdotes perhaps?
What I
discovered, which I didn’t really know before I started this, was how
inter-connected these three women were. I began with their individual
connections with Woolf, but then found that the three of them formed a strong,
mutually supportive, collaborative sisterhood of professional women. I like all
the stories of how Cameron browbeat her subjects in order to make them sit for
her. Virginia Woolf took lots of the funny anecdotes for her play Freshwater, which is hilarious, as well
as somewhat unkind.
5) Has your opinion of Virginia Woolf changed in any
way since writing a few books about her and her family now? In what way?
The
more I read of Woolf’s work, both fiction and non-fiction, the more I am
confirmed in my opinion that she is a great writer. Since doing my research I
have become more aware of the sheer range of her work. Also of her strong sense
of humour and of close observation.
6) Julia Prinsep Stephen is a fascinating woman with
not much known about her life. Anything you could share that you love most
about her or something that fascinated you perhaps?
This
is still a work in progress, but I am finding a fun loving, vivacious, gossipy,
lively woman, very much at odds with the image usually presented of her,
dressed in black, in the gloomy photographs towards the end of her life.
Julia Stephen with Virginia on her lap, 1884
by Henry H.H. Cameron, Smith College.
About the Author
Marion Dell is an Independent writer and lecturer based in the U.K. and has previously taught at the Open University. She is the co-author with (Marion Whybrow) of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell: Remembering St. Ives (2003), and she is currently writing a biography of Julia Stephen.
In Virginia Woolf's
Influential Forebears, Marion Dell reveals nineteenth-century legacies
which inform Woolf's work and shape her as a writing woman, pre-eminent
in twentieth-century literary modernism. She identifies specific lines
of descent from three of Woolf's forebears: her great-aunt, the
photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, the writer she called aunt, Anny
Thackeray Ritchie, and her mother Julia Prinsep Stephen. Dell shows how
the work and influence of these three women is textually, artistically,
biographically and genealogically embedded in Woolf's own. Woolf's
response to them was ambivalent, revealing her conflicted relationship
with her past. But ambivalence was also one of their legacies to her and
a positive aesthetic in her work. Though she frequently obscures their
influence she recognises them as invisible presences. Close reading of
the novels which frame this book, Night and Day and The Years, shows
Woolf's lifelong engagement with the lives and works of Cameron,
Ritchie, and Stephen.
Hardcover, 222 pages
Published
October 13th 2015
by Palgrave Macmillan
Thank you to Palgrave Macmillan for my review copy.
I happen to adore Virginia Woolf's novels. Her writing is beautiful. For me, the words come alive on the page; her characters seem real, the events feel as if they have occurred regardless of whether it be a war, a death or a love affair. However, I am no expert on her I just hope to understand where her insecurities and fears come from. To do that one must inevitably research the family line. One must find out all there is to know from recorded documentation.
In Virginia Woolf's case, I urge every person who loves her novels as I do to make a space on your bookshelf for this very special critical analysis of Virginia Woolf's Influential Forebears. For at the heart of it Dell traces the influence of the lives of Julia Margaret Cameron, Anny Thackeray Ritchie and her mother, Julia Prinsep Stephen. In a chapter by chapter overview two of Woolf's novels are focused upon, e.g. Night and Day and The Years. Characters are culled out from novel chapters and they seem to re-emerge almost in a reincarnated state, thus rexamined by Dell herself as she juxtaposes each forbearing woman.
What stands out most to me is the expert and thorough research Marion Dell has done. Having researched the personal lives of these 'Influential Forebears' a bit myself, I was fascinated to read of the fear of 'the black Stephen madness' that worried Virginia Woolf as genetically linked between The Stephen Family and The Ritchie Family. This was a light bulb moment for me, I must say! Dell's research is magnificent. Immediately, I was turning page after page, smiling in recognition of especially Julia Margaret Cameron's descriptions in mention of stories by Virginia Woolf's The Searchlight and photographic descriptions of some of Cameron's sitters as well. Understandably, some of the most heartwarming and heartbreaking chapters focused on Woolf's memories of her mother, the acclaimed beauty, Julia Prinsep Stephen. The maternal bond between mother and daughter does not end or perish as a result of paternal death. Instead, Julia Prinsep Stephen's is resurrected, lovingly lifted out of her aunt Cameron's albumen prints and placed back into the loving childhood arms of her troubled and talented daughter, Adeline Stephen better known as Virginia Woolf.
Virginia Woolf's Influential Forebears by Marion Dell is dense, complicated reading but the familial bonds of love and pride transcend time and Dell has captured it.
It can break your heart to have a sister like Virginia Woolf.
London,
1905: The city is alight with change, and the Stephen siblings are at
the forefront. Vanessa, Virginia, Thoby, and Adrian are leaving behind
their childhood home and taking a house in the leafy heart of
avant-garde Bloomsbury. There, they bring together a glittering circle
of bright, outrageous artistic friends who will come to be known as the
Bloomsbury Group. And at the center of this charmed circle are the
devoted, gifted sisters: Vanessa, the painter, and Virginia, the writer.
Each
member of the group will go on to earn fame and success, but so far
Vanessa Bell has never sold a painting. Virginia Woolf’s book review has
just been turned down by TheTimes. Lytton Strachey
has not published anything. E. M. Forster has finished his first novel
but does not like the title. Leonard Woolf is still a civil servant in
Ceylon, and John Maynard Keynes is looking for a job. Together, this
sparkling coterie of artists and intellectuals throw away convention and
embrace the wild freedom of being young, single bohemians in London.
But
the landscape shifts when Vanessa unexpectedly falls in love and her
sister feels dangerously abandoned. Eerily possessive, charismatic,
manipulative, and brilliant, Virginia has always lived in the shelter of
Vanessa’s constant attention and encouragement. Without it, she careens
toward self-destruction and madness. As tragedy and betrayal threaten
to destroy the family, Vanessa must decide if it is finally time to
protect her own happiness above all else.
The work of exciting young newcomer Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister exquisitely
captures the champagne-heady days of prewar London and the
extraordinary lives of sisters Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf.
Hardcover: 368 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books (December 30, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 080417637X
ISBN-13: 978-0804176378
VANESSA BELL AND VIRGINIA WOOLF BOTH PHOTOGRAPHED BY GEORGE CHARLES BERESFORD in July 1902
Author, Priya Parmar bravely fictionalizes the happenings of The Bloomsbury Group members: Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell (Vanessa's husband), E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes with familial issues between siblings Adrian and Thoby, with a compliicated and competitive sibling relationship between older sister Vanessa Stephen and Virginia Stephen. Vanessa and her sister opens in 1905 with a party involving brothers Thoby and Adrian and covers the years through until Virginia's marriage to Leonard Woolf in 1912. The novel is easily presented in an invented diary format from Vanessa Bell's perspective. We have Virginia's diary or notebooks with her thoughts and her letters but Vanessa's real diary has never been discovered yet! The author has researched The Stephen sisters and their friends and siblings through reading their letters and used them in chapter formats throughout this novel. There are minor discrepancies such as months are written a bit later than the actual months but that does not take away from how much I enjoyed Vanessa and her Sister. I am no expert on Virginia Woolf who is the much more well known sibling and I did not purposefully look for changes the author made factually throughout their lives but they are there in minor format if you look for them.
Priya Parmar brings Vanessa Bell center stage standing in the spotlight as painter and flesh and blood woman who paints as a creative outlet in dealing with her psychologically and emotionally scarred childhood wounds. Her sister Virginia is very co-dependent on her. Together they forge a sibling bond that will be torn apart by cheating and one sister's decision. Vanessa and her Sister could've been very heady reading but the author intelligently uses each member's passion for creating as a plot base for this novel making it a page turner for anyone curious about the entire Bloomsbury Group. It is all here in gorgeous prose. The diary format is a wonderful tool choice to use making the reader want to keep reading because they feel as if they are sitting across from Vanessa Bell who is retelling some of the hardest years of her life (1905-1912).
I learned a lot about Vanessa Bell and will do my own research as always. However, how refreshing to read a novel from a sister's perspective removing the focus solely off of VIRGINIA WOOLF. Vanessa must have felt in her younger sister's shadow her whole life juxtaposed against their very famous and loved beautiful mother, Julia Stephen. Here, Vanessa shines and I hope readers will enjoy Vanessa and her Sister as much as I have. It truly is beautifully written and for me is a family story novel that needed to be written.
Thank you to Ballantine Books and NetGalley for providing me with an online reader copy.
Happy Birthday to Leonard Woolf who was born on this day in 1880. Not knowing much about Mr. Woolf, beyond his marrying Virginia Woolf; I did a bit of research when I stumbled upon his autobiography! Imagine my surprise!! So, here are some excerpt quotes by the man himself describing some of his legendary friends...
The wedding photograph of Leonard Woolf and Virginia (Stephen) Woolf taken on their wedding day August 10, 1912, NY Times archives
“I emerged from nothingness was the early morning of November 25th,
1880, though in fact I did not personally become aware of my existence until
some two or three years later.I have
lived my life on the assumption that sooner or later I shall pass by annihilation
into the same state of nothingness from which I suddenly emerged that winter
morning in West Cromwell Road, Kensington, so many years ago.” Leonard
Woolf, Sowing: an autobiography of the years 1880-1904
‘Sowing: an autobiography of the years 1880-1904’ is a
wonderful autobiography written by the man known as the ‘husband’ of Virginia
Woolf but who was he really? He gives his opinions and observations about his
birth, childhood experiences that stand out in his memory for specific reasons including
those he met between the years of his life 1880-1904.
The one negative aspect of an autobiography is perhaps the
fact that it is one sided, sometimes grandiose in thought and belief with
definitely jaded moments of life experiences. I recommend it as a look into who
he thought he was.
Leonard Woolf as a schoolboy. Image source from Sowing: an autobiography of the years 1880-1904 by Leonard Woolf, 1960 edition
Leonard Woolf studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. He became
friends with Saxon Sydney-Turner, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, and Thoby
Stephen. They became known as the ‘Apostles’ and the beginnings of the
Bloomsbury Group began.
Leonard Woolf was a member of the Colonial Civil Service in
Ceylon for two reasons: once he became disillusioned with Imperialism he left
and he fell in love with Virginia Stephen. When Leonard married Virginia in
1912 she became Virginia Woolf! After her death in 1941 it was Leonard who took
charge of publishing her uncollected essays and diary selections.
Leonard Woolf joined the Fabian Society writing two reports
for them in 1916 serving the basis of the League of Nations. From 1919-1945 he
also served as secretary to the Labor Party’s advisory committees on
international and imperial questions. He and Virginia established what became
known as the Hogarth Press in 1917. Woolf
suffered a stroke and died on 14 August 1969 at Monk’s House which Virginia
bought in 1919.
On his friendships with Stephen and Strachey
Father of Toby Stephen and Virginia Stephen, Sir Leslie Stephen Leonard Woolf's parents and siblings
“By the time I left Cambridge I had become very intimate with Thoby
Stephen and Lytton Strachey and knew their families, and so the foundations of
what became known as Bloomsbury were laid. Thoby’s family seemed to a young man
like me formidable and even alarming. When his father, Sir Leslie Stephen, came
up to stay a weekend with him, Lytton and I were had in to meet him. He was one
of those bearded and beautiful Victorian old gentlemen of exquisite gentility
and physical and mental distinction on whose face the sorrows of all the world
had traced the indelible lines of suffering nobility. He was immensely
distinguished as a historian of ideas, literary critic, biographer, and the
first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. When I found myself, a nervous undergraduate,
sitting opposite to this very tall and distinguished old gentleman in Thoby’s
rooms in Trinity Great Court and expected to make conversation with him-not
helped in any way by Thoby-it seemed to me, as I said, formidable and alarming.
He was stone deaf and that one had to sit quite near to him and shout
everything one said to him down an ear-trumpet. This awkwardness and terror
were gradually dissipated by him. He had immense charm and he obviously liked
to meet the young and Thoby’s friends. He could see through our awkwardness and
even grubbiness to our intelligence, and was pleased by our respect and
appreciation. In the end we were all talking and laughing naturally (so far as
this is possible down an ear-trumpet) and enjoying one another’s company. This must
have been about three years before Leslie Stephen died.”
Toby Stephen and the Shakespeare Society Cambrige,Trinity top.Duncan Grant below. Virginia and Vanessa Stephen in 1902
“I also met Thoby’s two sisters, Vanessa and Virginia Stephen, when they
came up to see him. The young ladies-Vanessa was twenty-one or twenty-two,
Virginia eighteen or nineteen-were just as formidable and alarming as their
father, perhaps even more so. I first saw them one summer afternoon in Thoby’s
rooms; in white dresses and large hats, with parasols in their hands. Their
beauty literally took one’s breath away, for suddenly seeing them one stopped
astonished and everything including one’s breathing for one second also
stopped, as it does when in a picture gallery you suddenly come face to face
with a great Rembrandt or Velazquez or in Sicily rounding a bend in the road
you see across the fields the lovely temple of Segesta. They were at that time,
at least upon the surface, the most Victorian of Victorian young ladies, and
today what that meant it is almost impossible to believe or even remember. Sitting
with them in their brother’s room was their cousin Miss Katherine Stephen,
Principal of Newnham, with whom they were staying. But Miss Stephen was in her
cousin’s room for a tea-party, not in her capacity of cousin, but in her
capacity of chaperone, for in 1901 a respectable female sister was not allowed
to see her male brother in his rooms in a male college except in the presence
of a chaperone. I liked Miss Stephen very much, but it could not be denied that
she was a distinguished, formidable, and rather alarming chaperone. All male
Stephens-and many of the females-whom I have known have had one marked
characteristic which I always think of as Stephenesque, and one can trace it in
stories about or the writings of Stephens of a past generation whom one never
knew. It consisted in a way of thinking and even more in a way of expressing
their thoughts which one associates pre-eminently with Dr. Johnson. There was
something monolithic about them and their opinions, and something marmoreal or
lapidary about their way of expressing those opinions, reminding one of the Ten
Commandments engraved upon the tables of stone, even when they were only
telling you that in their opinion it would rain tomorrow. “
The Strachey Family by Graystone Bird, albumen print on the photographer's printed mount, circa 1893, NPG.
“I stayed with Lytton three years running in the summer in large
country houses which his parents rented, once in Surrey, once in Essex, and
once near Bedford. In this way I got to know his father and mother and all his
brothers and sisters. They stand out in my memory as much the most remarkable
family I have ever known, an extinct social phenomenon which has passed away
and will never be known again.In 1902
the Strachey Family consisted of five sons and five daughters, female and male
alternating down in the family thus: Elinor (Mrs. Rendel) Dick, in the Indian
Army, Dorothy (later Madame Simon Bussy) Ralph, married, in the East Indian
Railway, Pippa, later secretary of the Fawcett Society, Oliver, married, in the
East Indian Railway, Pernel, later Principal of Newnham, Lytton, Marjorie,
James. The level of intelligence in each
son and daughter and in the father and mother was incredibly, fantastically
high. They were all, like their mother, passionately intellectual, most of them
with very quick minds and lively imaginations. “
Leonard Woolf’s time in Ceylon
“I applied for Ceylon which was the senior Crown Colony, and
I was high enough up on the list to get what I asked for. I found myself to my
astonishment and, it must be admitted, dismay in the Ceylon Civil Service.
Looking back I can see that the dismay was natural, but
unnecessary, I am glad that I did not go into the Home Civil and did go into
the Ceylon Civil Service. My seven years in Ceylon were good for me, and,
though they gave me a good deal of pain, they gave me also a good deal of
pleasure-and a great deal of pleasure and memory of things past. But I am glad
too that I lived the kind of life at Trinity which was mainly the reason why I
did not do well in the examinations. It was, I think, a civilized life both intellectually
and emotionally. My intellect was kept at full stretch, which is very good for
the young, by books and the way I read them and by friends and their incessant
and uncompromising conversation. “
I couldn't help but associate Leonard with Virginia Woolf and the entire time would think of her. Sadly, his autobiography did not cover his years with his wife but I kept hearing one song in my head the entire time...Train's Meet Virginia. I think the lyrics actually relate to her!
