Virginia Woolf: Life Before Bloomsbury

"For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself."

Sep 22, 2023

Virginia Stephen, George Charles Beresford, 1902

Virginia Woolf, one of history's greatest literary minds, was an author, diarist, essayist, and biographer but is probably most remembered for two of her novels, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, which showcased her stream-of-consciousness writing style. With her sister Vanessa and brothers Thoby and Adrian, she was also at the centre of the legendary Bloomsbury Group, an association of free-thinking intellectuals, artists, and writers from the early twentieth century. Here, I will look at Virginia’s early life, from a Victorian childhood in Kensington to new beginnings in Bloomsbury.

Adeline Virginia Stephen was born into an upper-middle-class Victorian family on 25th January 1882 - the second daughter of respected biographer and historian Leslie Stephen and philanthropist and Pre-Raphaelite model Julia Prinsep Jackson.

Sir Leslie Stephen, Photographer Unknown, c. 1860

Julia Stephen, Photographer Unknown, c. 1880s

Leslie and Julia were widows when they married and already had four children between them: Laura Stephen, George, Stella, and Gerald Duckworth. Vanessa was born the year after their marriage, followed by Thoby the year after that, and, despite their intention to round off their extended family at six children, Virginia and Adrian were born soon after.

The large Stephen Duckworth family lived at 22 Hyde Park Gate, a tall townhouse in South Kensington across the street from Kensington Gardens. Virginia, a pretty round-faced child, lived with Vanessa, Thoby, and Adrian in the day and night nurseries at the top of the house. The Duckworth siblings, George, Stella, and Gerald, inhabited the second floor, while Laura, Leslie's disabled daughter from his first marriage, was cared for by a nurse. From a very early age, Virginia was the family's storyteller. Once the lights had been extinguished in the Stephens' nursery, she would regale her siblings with stories of fantasy and adventure.

Julia with Virginia on her lap, Henry H.H. Cameron, 1884

During their formative years, Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, and Adrian were educated primarily at home by their parents and half-sister Stella. Before Virginia was even seven, she had lessons in Latin, History, French, and Mathematics.

When their brothers had left 22 Hyde Park Gate to continue their education at boarding school, Virginia and Vanessa would educate themselves, retreating to a downstairs room with high windows overlooking the gardens where Vanessa would study art practice from Ruskin’s The Elements of Drawing, and Virginia, aged just nine, writing a family newspaper The Hyde Park Gate News and reading the books in her father’s library. She is said to have loved the literature of the Elizabethan period and also read Hakluyt’s Voyages from an early age. As Leslie and Julie were culturally connected, she and Vanessa would also come into contact with some of the leading artists and writers of the day, including Henry James, Thomas Hardy, John Ruskin, George Meredith, and Edmund Gosse.

Thoby, Vanessa, Virginia and Adrian with their mother at Talland House, Photographer Unknown, c. 1894

Some of the happiest times in Virginia’s childhood were spent at Talland House - a pretty Cornish villa just outside St Ives. Leslie discovered the house during a walking holiday in 1881, and for thirteen years the family would spend a few weeks there each summer, the children playing tennis and cricket, bathing in the sea, and exploring the nearby beach and rock pools.

On Saturday morning Master Hilary Hunt and Master Basil Smith came up to Talland House and asked Master Thoby and Miss Virginia Stephen to accompany them to the light-house as Freeman the boatman said that there was a perfect tide and wind for going there. Master Adrian Stephen was much disappointed at not being allowed to go.
Hyde Park Gate News, 12th September 1892

Talland House, Photographer Unknown, c. 1882-1894

Vanessa, Julia, Virginia and Thoby outside Talland House, Photographer Unknown, 1894

Virginia and Vanessa playing cricket at Talland House, Photographer Unknown, 1894

Tragically, 1894 would be the family's last summer at Talland House. Just a few months later, on 5th May 1895, Julia Stephen passed away unexpectedly from heart failure, aged just forty-nine. Their father's grief was overwhelming, and according to Virginia:

There was something in the darkened rooms, the groans, the passionate lamentations that passed the normal limits of sorrow… now that against all his expectations, his wife had died before him, he was like one who, by the failure of some stay, reels staggering blindly about the world, and fills it with his woe.1

George, Stella, and Gerald were travelling abroad at the time of Julia's death. Still, Stella returned home immediately, taking over the responsibilities of caring for her stepfather and younger siblings - until her own untimely death from peritonitis just two years after their mother, and only twenty-eight years of age.

Vanessa, Stella and Virginia in 1896, Photographer Unknown

After Julia's death, George Duckworth, by then twenty-seven, also took on some familial responsibilities - buying presents and arranging fun activities for his half-siblings. But affection transformed into something sinister when he and his younger brother Gerald began to abuse Virginia and Vanessa sexually. The abuse lasted several years, and Virginia would write about the memories of her childhood molestation in A Sketch of the Past.

Sleep had almost come to me. The room was dark, the house silent. Then, creeping stealthily, the door opened, treading gingerly someone entered. “Who?” I cried. “Don’t be frightened,” George whispered. “And don’t turn on the light, oh beloved.” And he flung himself on my bed and took me in his arms.
There was a slab outside the dining room door for standing the dishes upon. Once, when I was very small, Gerald Duckworth lifted me onto this and as I sat there he began to explore my body.

Although the extent of George and Gerald's abuse is unknown, there was abuse, and not long after her mother's death, Virginia suffered her first nervous breakdown. Lessons ceased, she lost her desire to write, and the Hyde Park Gate News ended.

Members of the Stephen Duckworth family, Photographer Unknown (possibly Stella Duckworth), 1892

In 1897, Virginia showed signs of recovery, and learning resumed. She had also started a diary in the New Year and, on 25th January, her fifteenth birthday, recorded the following:

My birthday. No presents at breakfast and none til Mr Gibbs came, bearing a great parcel under his arms, which turned out to be a gorgeous Queen Elizabeth — by Dr Creighton. I went out for a walk round the pond after breakfast with father, it being Nessas drawing day. Went out with Stella to Hatchards about some book for Jack, and then to Regent St. for flowers and fruit for him; then to Wimpole St. to see how he had slept, and then to Miss Hill in Marylebone Rd. Jo [Fisher] was there discussing the plans for Stellas new cottages with Miss Hill. All three learnedly argued over them for half an hour, I sitting on a stool by the fire and surveying Miss Hills legs — Nessa went back to her drawing after lunch, and Stella and I went to Story’s to buy me an arm chair, which is to be Ss present to me — We got a very nice one, and I came straight home, while Stella went on to Wimpole St. Gerald gave me £1, and Adrian a holder for my stylograph —Father is going to give me Lockharts Life of Scott — Cousin Mia gave me a diary and another pocket book. Thoby writes to say that he has ordered films for me. Got Carlyles Reminiscences, which I have read before. Reading four books at once — The Newcomes, Caryle, Old Curiosity Shop, and Queen Elizabeth.

In this diary, she also recorded the beginnings and endings of the books she had read. Between 1st January and 30th June 1897, Virginia added the following:

Three Generations of English Women (volumes 2 and 3); Froude’s Carlyle; Creighton’s Queen Elizabeth; Lockhart’s Life of Sir Walter Scott; The Newcomes; Carlyle’s Reminiscences; The Old Curiosity Shop; Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography by Sir James Stephen; Felix Holt; John Halifax, Gentleman; Among My Books and My Study Windows by J. R. Lowell; A Tale of Two Cities; Silas Marner; The Life of Coleridge by James Dykes Campbell; The Heart of Princess Osra by Anthony Hope; three volumes of Pepys; Macauley’s History; Barchester Towers; a novel by Henry James; Carlyle’s French Revolution, his Cromwell and his Life of Sterling; a work by Lady Barlow; Shirley; Thomas Arnold’s History of Rome; A Deplorable Affair by W. E. Norris.

Through their shared love of literature, a special bond had formed between Virginia and her father, and when he died on 22nd February 1904, of all his children, she is said to have felt his loss the most.

After his funeral, she, Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, Adrian, George, and Gerald travelled to Manorbier, Pembrokeshire, for a month. Virginia wrote about this time in her diary eighteen years later.

[At sixteen]… I was for knowing all that was to be known, & for writing a book-a book- but what book? That vision came to me more clearly at Manorbier aged 21, walking the down on the edge of the sea.2

From Manorbier, they travelled to Paris and Venice, but on their return to London, Virginia suffered her second breakdown and was advised to take another break. She went to stay with her friend Violet Dickinson in Burnham Wood, where she made her first attempt at suicide by jumping out of a window. Thankfully, she was not seriously harmed and wrote to Violet later:

Oh, my Violet, if there were a God I should bless him for having delivered me safe and sound from the miseries of the last six months! You can’t think what an exquisite joy every minute of my life is to me now, and my only prayer is that I may live to be 70. I do think I may emerge less selfish and cocksure than I went in and with greater understanding of the troubles of others. Sorrow, such as I feel now for father, is soothing and natural and makes life more worth having, if sadder. I can never tell you what you have been to me all this time—for one thing you wouldn’t believe it—but if affection is worth anything you have, and always will have mine.3

Meanwhile, while writing to her sister every day, Vanessa began preparations for their life away from 22 Hyde Park Gate. Despite warnings from older relatives to stay in a safe neighbourhood, she chose the less respectable but cheaper Bloomsbury and, within six months, had found a new home at 46 Gordon Square.

Early in the new year, aged twenty-two, Virginia joined Vanessa, Thoby, and Adrian in their new home. Bloomsbury marked the beginning of her life as an independent woman, free from the shackles of her Victorian childhood and as a professional writer.

For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of – to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others… and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.
To the Lighthouse

Victoria Walker writes:

Inner Life

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