Even though the short biographical paragraph above presents the facts of Virginia Woolf's life as if they are uncontroversial, there has in fact been keen debate about several different areas of her life and her experience, including her childhood (was it happy?), her marriage (was it oppressive?), her mental illness (was it genetic?), and her sexuality (was she a lesbian?). The paragraph above implicitly suggests that her relations with women were unimportant (it stresses her marriage, and does not mention her feelings for women), and it gives us a very positive picture of her relationship with Leonard, without giving us any hint of the controversy surrounding each of those statements. This exercise will focus on one of the most  unresolved aspects of the biographical debate around Woolf’s life, the sexual molestation by her half-brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth, that she describes or mentions in five different documents:

	a letter to her sister, Vanessa Bell, on 25 (?) July 1911
	a lecture she gave to a group of intimate friends in either 1920 or 1921, called "22 Hyde Park Gate”
	a second lecture to the same group, in late 1921 or 1922, called "Old Bloomsbury"
	another letter to Vanessa Bell, on 20 February 1922
	her autobiography, A Sketch of the Past (1939-40)
	a letter to musician Ethel Smyth on 12 January 1941

She describes only one encounter with Gerald, when she was six years old and he reached under her dress as she was sitting up on a shelf. As for George, she implies that he regularly coerced her into sexual relations sometime during the years between Stella's death in 1897 (when Virginia was fifteen) and George's marriage in 1904.

Biographers have not disputed the facts of the case, at least in relation to her encounter with Gerald, but they have differed widely in their interpretation of the significance of the events she describes. Her relations with her half-brothers are important not just in themselves, but also because our understanding of them in turn affects our picture of Virginia Stephen's childhood. If she was traumatized by repeated episodes of sexual abuse (or even by only one episode), we can assume that by and large she was an unhappy child. If, on the other hand, she responded to her half-brothers' dealings with her with detachment, with amusement, with curiosity, or even with pleasure, then her childhood may not have been such a miserable period in her life. Since many biographers, influenced by psychologists and psychoanalysts, assume that we are to a large extent formed and defined by our responses to childhood events, the answers to the many questions we might ask about Virginia Stephen's childhood are crucial to our interpretation not just of her childhood years, but also of her adulthood and even of her entire personality and her creative process as a writer.

Exercise

I: Evidence

The following extracts comprise the most significant evidence we have of Virginia Woolf’s memories of what happened to her, and of her responses to it. Read through the extracts carefully, paying attention to the precise language she used to describe what happened to her.

I Extract from a letter to Vanessa Bell, [25?] July 1911. This is the earliest surviving document to make reference to Virginia Woolf’s relations with George Duckworth. The letter was first published in 1975. It describes an evening with Janet Case, who was Virginia’s Greek teacher in the early 1900s.

She had brought down a handsome reticule, into which she drops bits of torn lace from time to time; and this she takes away on visits. So she sat stitching …, and listened to a magnificent tirade which I delivered upon life in general.

She has a calm interest in copulation … and this led us to the revelation of all George's malefactions. To my surprise, she has always had an intense dislike of him; and used to say “Whew – you nasty creature”, when he came in and began fondling me over. When I got to the bedroom scenes, she dropped her lace, and gasped like a benevolent gudgeon. By bedtime she said she was feeling quite sick, and did go the W.C., which, needless to say, had no water in it.

I discussed the Bedford Sq. plan with her, the theory of which she thinks noble, but she thought we should get dirty.

If Adrian is with you, would you tell him that 2 or 3 sets of people have been to see the house …⁴

Questions

1. How does the context of this description of what happened affect our interpretation of her account of her "bedroom scenes" with George? What is its tone? What response is she trying to invoke in Vanessa, and, before that, in Janet Case, with her tale?

2. How reliable is this letter as evidence of something that actually happened?

 II. Extract from “22 Hyde Park Gate”, Virginia Woolf’s lecture to the Memoir Club, delivered sometime between March 1920 and 25 May 1921. This lecture was not published in Virginia Woolf’s lifetime, and survives as two typescripts. One typescript is a fair copy, stylistically slightly more polished, of the other: it contains no handwritten corrections and breaks off in mid-sentence. The other typescript, which is several pages longer, has numerous written corrections. The version we now read, edited by Jean Schulkind and published in 1976 in Moments of Being, follows the fair copy until it breaks off, and then continues with the text of the rough draft, incorporating Woolf's handwritten corrections. Woolf apparently never intended to publish it. The Memoir Club was a group of about fifteen very old friends, including the Woolfs and Vanessa Bell, who met periodically in the early 1920s to eat dinner and deliver informal autobiographical talks to one another. Leonard Woolf tells us in his autobiography that the group agreed that their watchword would be “absolute frankness.”⁵ The following extracts come from near the end of the lecture, when Woolf is describing her outings to formal parties and dances, escorted by George. George was about fourteen years older than Virginia, and when this extract begins, George and Vanessa Bell have had a terrible argument on the way home from a party the night before.

But next morning as I was sitting spelling out my Greek George came into my room... His fate was sallow and scored with innumerable wrinkles, for his skin was as loose and flexible as a pug dog’s, and he would express his anguish in the
most poignant manner by puckering lines, folds, and creases from forehead to chin. His manner was stern. His bearing rigid … he stood before the fire in complete silence. Then, as I expected, he began to tell me his version of the preceding night - wrinkling his forehead more than ever, but speaking with a restraint that was at once bitter and manly. Never, never again, he said, would he ask Vanessa to go out with him. He had seen a look in her eyes that had positively frightened him. It should never be said of him that he made her do what she did not wish to do. Here he quivered, but checked himself. Then he went on to say that he had only done what he knew my mother would have wished him to do. His two sisters were the most precious things that remained to him. His home had always meant more to him - more than he could say, and here he became agitated, struggled for composure, and then burst into a statement which was at once dark and extremely lurid. We were driving Gerald from the house, he cried - when a young man was not happy at home - he himself had always been content - but if his sisters - if Vanessa refused to go out with him - if he could not bring his friends to the house - in short, it was clear that the chaste, the immaculate George Duckworth would be forced into the arms of whores .... The end of it was that he begged me, and I agreed, to go a few nights later to the Dowager Marchioness of Sligo's ball. [Woolf then describes a number of different parties to which she went with George.]...

At last -at last- the evening was over.I went up to my room, took off my beautiful white satin dress, and unfastened the three pink carnations...

Sleep had almost come to me. The room was dark. The house silent. Then, creaking 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. Beloved –“ and he flung himself on my bed, and took me in his arms.

Yes, the old ladies of Kensington and Belgravia never knew that George Duckworth was not only father and mother, brother and sister to those poor Stephen girls; he was their lover also. [The lecture ends here.]

Questions

1. How does Virginia Woolf prepare her listeners for the climactic end of her lecture?

2. How might the context of the lecture (an intimate evening with old friends) have affected the way in which she told the story?

3. What response is Woolf trying to call up in her listeners? What impression is she giving of herself and her attitude to these events?

4. What picture of George emerges from this extract?

5. How reliable is this extract as evidence of what actually happened?

III. Extract from "Old Bloomsbury", Virginia Woolf's second contribution to the Memoir Club, delivered near the end of 1921, or in 1922. This extract, also from Moments of Being, follows the text of a thirty-seven page typescript with hand-written corrections by Virginia Woolf.

It was long past midnight that I got into bed and sat reading a page or two of Marius the Epicurean for which I had then a passion. There would be a tap at the door; the light would be turned out and George would fling himself on my bed, cuddling and kissing and otherwise embracing me in order, as he told Dr Savage later, to comfort me for the fatal illness of my father - who was dying three or four storeys down of cancer.⁶

Questions

1. What new piece of information does this extract reveal? Can we trust its accuracy?

IV. Extract from a letter to Vanessa Bell, 20 February 1922. This letter describes a conversation with Elena Richmond, who, as Elena Rathbone, had attended many of the same parties as Virginia Woolf and George Duckworth in the early 1900s.

 I had great fun with Elena the other day, however. I think she is quite the nicest human being I have ever met – solid – splendid – sedate – with the body of a matron and the mind of a child and the tastes of a schoolboy; so maternal to me that I fell in love with her at once – Perhaps I always have been in love with her. Well this gigantic mass of purity sat down by my side and I told her the story of George. It is only fair to say that she began it … “I am going to be perfectly frank about your brother – your half brother – and say that I have never liked him. Nor has Bruce [Richmond, her husband]. I never did like him even in the old days.” This being so, I couldn’t resist applauding her, and remarking that if she had known all she would have hated him. The queer thing with Elena is that one never knows what penetrates, what slips off. She was shocked at first; but very soon reflected that much more goes on than one realizes. [She imagines Elena spreading the story around.] Don’t you think this is a noble work for our old age – to let the light in upon the Duckworths – and I daresay George will be driven to shoot himself one day when he’s shooting rabbits.⁷

 Questions

1.  How do the context and tone of this extract affect our reactions to what Virginia Woolf implies?

2.  What attitude does Woolf herself adopt here to the story she has to tell? 

V. Extract from “A Sketch of the Past”. In April 1939, Virginia Woolf began to write an informal autobiography, structured somewhat like a diary, with dated entries, the last of which was written on 17 November 1940. Schulkind’s edition of “A Sketch of the Past” incorporates a typescript with corrections by both Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and a manuscript, whose first few pages overlap with the last few pages of the typescript, and which seems to be an earlier version of the same text.

I … detect another element in the shame which I had in being caught looking at myself in the glass in the hall. I must have been ashamed or afraid of my own body. Another memory, also of the hall, may help to explain this. There was a slab outside the dining room door for standing 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. I can remember the feel of his hand going under my clothes: going firmly and steadily lower and lower. I remember how I hoped that he would stop; how I stiffened and wriggled as his hand approached my private parts. But it did not stop. His hand explored my private parts too. I remember resenting, disliking it - what was the word for so dumb and mixed a feeling? It must have been strong, since I still recall it. This seems to show that a feeling about certain parts of the body; how they must not be touched; how it is wrong to allow them to be touched; must be instinctive.⁸

Questions

1. How does the context of this extract (part of an autobiography which as far as we know, only Leonard read) affect our understanding of it?

2. In this extract, what interpretation does Woolf herself offer of what happened to her, and of her reactions to it?

VI. Extract from a letter to Ethel Smyth, 12 January 1941. Ethel Smyth was a composer and musician, significantly older than Virginia Woolf, who became Woolf's friend in the last decade of her life. Smyth published several frank volumes of memoirs, and she and Woolf discussed memoir-writing at length. This letter was written only a couple of months before Woolf died.

 But as so much of life is sexual - or so they say - it rather limits autobiography if this is blacked out. It must be, I suspect, for many generations, for women; for its like breaking the hymen - if thats [sic] the membrane's name - a painful operation, and I suppose connected with all sorts of subterranean instincts. I still shiver with shame at the memory of my half brother, standing me on a ledge, aged about 6, and so exploring my private parts. Why should I have felt shame then?⁹

 Questions

1. How does the context of this extract affect your reading of her description of Gerald's actions?

2. What interpretation of the event does Woolf offer in this extract?