There have been numerous biographies of Virginia Woolf, and each biographer has developed his or her own interpretation of the events described in the evidence you have worked on in the previous section. When a biographer interprets evidence such as the above, she takes into account a number of different factors: the context in which the story is told (letter, lecture, autobiography and so on); the person or people to whom the story is told; and the way the story is told (tone and style), before coming to any conclusion about how reliable the information is, and what its significance was for the subject of the biography. A biographer's interpretation will also be influenced by the belief system of the biographer (which is in turn affected by the broader belief systems of her culture), and her feelings of sympathy or identification with a particular person in the biography (feelings which may be determined by events in the biographer's own history).

The availability of evidence is probably the single most important factor in a biographer's recreation of a particular event in a subject's life. Interpretations of Virginia Wools’ relations with her half-brothers changed as more and more of her private papers were discovered and published, including:

	An abridged version of her diary (edited by Leonard Woolf), published in 1953
	The collected letters Woolf published in six volumes between 1975 and 1980
	The autobiographical pieces (edited by Jeanne Schulkind), published in 1976
	The unabridged diaries, published in five volumes between 1977 and 1984, with
	An additional volume of the early diaries in 1990

In this section, you will, read, and think about, various different biographical accounts of what happened to Virginia Stephen at the hands of her half-brothers.

 I. Leonard WooIf, Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911-1918 (New York: Harcourt, 1963). Although this is not a straightforward biography of Virginia Woolf, much of Leonard Woolf's story of his own life also tells the story of his wife's life during the years of their marriage. Even though Leonard knew about both Gerald and George's encounters with Virginia, he does not recount them in his autobiography. He makes hardly any mention of Gerald, and has the following to say about George:

As a young man he was, it was said, an Adonis worshipped by all the great and non-great ladies.¹⁰

 II The first biography: Aileen Pippett, The Moth and the Star: A Biography of Virginia Woolf (New York: Little, Brown, 1953).

This is the first full-length biography of Virginia Woolf, and Pippett, its author, remembers meeting WooIf briefly, “in a Bloomsbury attic, by candlelight.”¹¹ This biography was written before the publication of Woolf's unedited diaries, letters, the Memoir Club lectures, and the autobiography. Thus, although Pippett did have access to an abridged version of Woolf's diary, published by her husband Leonard as A Writer's Diary in 1953, and to unpublished letters from Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, she seems not to have read any of the documents that provide evidence of Woolf's sexual encounters with her half-brothers. The following extracts from The Moth and the Star describe George and Gerald Duckworth, and the atmosphere of Woolf's childhood home.

Virginia was the third of four children born to Julia and Leslie Stephen in the first few years of their marriage. Close in age, they were very closely linked in feeling. First came Vanessa, so dearly loved by Virginia that no words could ever express her feelings. She was the elder sister to whom one went for protection and comfort when clouds darkened a childish sky. She was the rock, the refuge, as well as the playmate, the friend, the co-conspirator, the secret sharer. Then came Thoby, whom Virginia adored, and whose approval she sought, whose praise she treasured, whose memory remained always bright, the golden, glorious brother. And then Adrian, the merry, mischief-loving, incomparably comical younger brother, to whose defense Virginia was ready to rush if ever he should be in need. Come the four corners of the world in arms, the four young Stephen children were ready.

          Between them and their stepbrothers and stepsister there was not, of course, the same extremely close tie. There was, in the first place, the difference of age, and this gap in the years was fortunate, since it tended to reduce the inevitable tensions and jealousies between the two groups.

          The Duckworths were part of the machinery of life to the Stephens; they could be useful or they could be a nuisance; they could be looked to for fun or fuss, as the case might be, but for the most part they were incomprehensible. Sometimes they impinged, and then again they vanished. They had their own orbits around the joint center of their expanding universe.¹²

 Questions

1. How do you think the fact that Aileen Pippett met Virginia Woolf (and interviewed many people who knew and admired her) may have influenced her representation of her?

2. How does Aileen Pippett represent the dynamics of Woolf's family when she was a child?

3. How does Pippett seek to persuade us of her own authority and accuracy as a biographer?

4. How has the fact that Pippett had not read the letters, the Memoir Club lecture, or the autobiography, influenced her account of Woolf's relationship with the Duckworth brothers?

5. Given your reading of the evidence provided in Section 1, how accurate is Pippett's picture of Woolf's childhood here?

6. How does Pippett's writing style reflect her point of view and her impressions of Woolf's personality and childhood?

III. Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf’s: A Biography, 2 vols (London: Hogarth, 1972).

This was the first major biography of Virginia Woolf written by Vanessa Bell's son, art historian Quentin Bell, who knew Virginia intimately, and had access not only to all the family papers, but to Virginia's (and his own) closest relatives. For many years, until the publication of the unabridged letters and diaries, this was the definitive biography. 

George Duckworth was the model brother. The eldest of the Duckworth children, he was now twenty-seven, very handsome, comfortably well-off, pleasant, urbane and generous. His devotion to his half-sisters was exemplary. He made them presents, he took endless trouble to arrange treats, parties, excursions; he would even go off butterfly hunting with them and this for a fashionable young man represents a considerable sacrifice.

After their mother's death his kindness knew no bounds; his was an emotional, a demonstrative nature; his shoulder was there for them to weep on; his arms were open for their relief.

At what point this comfortably fraternal embrace developed into something which to George no doubt seemed even more comfortable, though not nearly so fraternal, it would be hard to say. Vanessa came to believe that George himself was more than half unaware of the fact that what had started with pure sympathy ended by becoming a nasty erotic skirmish. There were fondlings and fumblings in public when Virginia was at her lessons and these were carried to greater lengths - indeed I know not to what lengths - when, with the easy assurance of a fond and privileged brother, George carried his affections from the schoolroom into the night nursery.

To the sisters it simply appeared that their loving brother was transformed before their eyes into a monster, a tyrant against whom they had no defence, for how could they speak out or take any action against a treachery so covert that it was half unknown even to the traitor? Trained as they were to preserve a condition of ignorant purity they must at first have been unaware that affection was turning to concupiscence, and were warned only by their growing sense of disgust. To this, and to their intense shyness, we may ascribe Vanessa's and Virginia's long reticence on the subject .... It would have been hard for [George's] half-sisters to know at what point to draw a line, to voice objections, to risk evoking a painful and embarrassing scandal: harder still to find someone to whom they could speak at all. Stella, Leslie, the aunts - all would have been bewildered, horrified, indignant and incredulous.

… [George] came to pollute the most sacred of springs, to defile their very dreams. A first experience of loving or being loved may be enchanting, desolating, embarrassing or even boring; but it should not be disgusting. Eros came with a commotion of leathern wings, a figure of mawkish incestuous sexuality. Virginia felt that George had spoilt her life before it had fairly begun. Naturally shy in sexual matters, she was from this time terrified back into a posture of frozen and defensive panic.

I do not know enough about Virginia's mental illnesses to say whether this adolescent trauma was in any way connected with them.¹³

*Bell adds a footnote to the last paragraph of the first edition stating that although Leonard Woolf and Dr. Noel Richards maintain that George's attentions began shortly after Julia Stephen's death, Woolf's then unpublished memoirs (the Memoir Club lectures) establish the fact that they either started in or were continued until 1903 or 1904, when Leslie Stephen was dying. He adds: "There is some reason to think that George's interest in Virginia was from the first peculiar" and then quotes from Woolf’s 1941 letter to Ethel Smyth. In later editions of Bell's biography the footnote is amended to read: "a document... which came to light after the first publication of this volume makes it clear that the half-brother here referred to was Gerald, not George". That document was presumably "A Sketch of the Past". Apart from this change in the footnote, Bell did not alter subsequent editions of his biography to reflect what he had learned by reading "A Sketch of the Past".

 Questions

1.  How does Quentin Bell represent George Duckworth in this extract? How does this contrast with the pictures of George in Leonard Woolf' s autobiography (quoted above), ,and in "22 Hyde Park Gate"? Is Bell sympathetic to George, and how can we tell?

2.  How does he use the evidence that was available to him (apparently he had read the Memoir Club lectures and the letters, but not "A Sketch of the Past", when he wrote this)? Does he simply record what happened, or is he interpreting it here? If he is interpreting, how would you describe his attitude to the events he is describing?

3.  How are Virginia and Vanessa Stephen represented in this extract? How does Bell's writing style help to establish a picture of them and of their world? Is Bell sympathetic to them, and how can we tell?

4.  Does this extract seem more like history, or like fiction? Why? What are some of the differences in our expectations of each genre?

5.  Do you think that Bell’s intimacy with the people he writes about here has affected his interpretation of events? How?

6.  What is the effect of his mentioning Gerald's encounter with Virginia only in a footnote?

IV. Roger Poole, The Unknown Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

 This biographical study, which includes literary criticism, as well as a chronological discussion of Virginia Woolf's life, is a detailed analysis of Virginia Woolf's nervous breakdowns. It argues that she was not "insane", as Quentin Bell had said, but mistreated and oppressed by Leonard Woolf and her doctors, who were dismissive of her own analyses of her distress and its causes because it was more comfortable for them simply to categorize her as "mad". Moments of Being, which includes "22 Hyde Park Gate", "Old Bloomsbury" and Sketch of the Past, appeared while Poole was working on his book, as did the first three volumes of Woolf’s collected letters, and the first volume of her unabridged diary. So Poole (and his readers) had easy access to Woolf's own descriptions of what her brothers did to her. This extract is from the opening chapter of the book. Poole quotes Moments of Being at length. 

The recent publication of the autobiographical papers under the title Moments of Being has allowed a new insight into some of the factors which might have led to intolerable nervous strain on at least one of the occasions Bell calls "mad," the period in 1904. There is also evidence of a continuous sort of stress which we had no means of knowing about until the publication of these papers. And this stress is set up by her two half-brothers Gerald and George.

When he wrote his biography, Professor Bell, even if he had read the materials now newly published, had not seen their significance, for he does not distinguish between the activities of Gerald Duckworth and George Duckworth. Both, at different times of Virginia Woolf's life, had a very great effect upon her, as both interfered with her sexually. For this we have the irrefutable evidence of Virginia's own memoirs ....¹⁴

This connection of the feeling of shame in her own body with both the mirror and with Gerald Duckworth was to affect Virginia’s whole emotional and sexual life, was to affect her marriage with Leonard, and would have a great deal to do with the causes of her several breakdowns … It seems that in these pages of A Sketch of the Past, there is enough evidence to solve most of the mysteries which Leonard Woolf and after him Quentin Bell have presented as insoluble [Poole refers here to the causes of Virginia Woolf’s breakdowns]. It may well be that Virginia never summoned courage to tell Leonard about the interference from Gerald Duckworth when she was very young, nor the interference from George when she was much older. But it explains a lot of the feelings of “guilt” of which Virginia talked when she was supposedly “insane”, and which Leonard insisted were quite unfounded. It explains a lot too about the reasons why Virginia had the nervous collapses when she did; above all it explains the problem of why one of the most serious ones immediately followed her honeymoon with Leonard in 1912 …¹⁵

There was the, definitely, sexual interference from both half-brothers. Gerald’s took place when Virginia “was very small” and may or may not have continued in some form or other up to 1895. But some form of interference was begun by George, either as early as 1895, or soon thereafter, and continued until 1904 … The time-span is extremely wide. It stretches from a possible sixth year up to and including a definite twenty-second year. The interference from Gerald must have lain somewhere between the sixth and the thirteenth year, and the interference from George must have begun somewhere after the thirteenth year. The sheer length and continuity of these interferences must give one reason to pause before one starts to apply the word “insane” to Virginia.¹⁶

 Questions

1.  What role does the newly revealed evidence of Virginia Woolf's childhood sexual abuse play in Roger Poole's argument that she was not "insane"?

 V. Lyndall Gordon, Virginia Woolf's A Writer's Life (New York: Norton, 1984). This biography uses Woolf's fiction to recreate her life, reading her novels as a "creative response" to her memories.¹⁷  Gerald is mentioned only once in the biography. 

Her lifelong dislike of her half-brothers was to be for her a reasonable response to their suppressed sexuality. When she was about six her grown-up half-brother [Gerald was eighteen] lifted her on to a table and explored her private parts. The child was bewildered by the covertness which demanded her complicity and which, she instinctively knew, was too shaming to mention ....¹⁸

 After Stella’s death the three men in the household began to prey on the two younger sisters in different ways. From the time of Julia’s death, Leslie Stephen was ravenous for sympathy (“like a lion seeking whom he could devour”) … The second man was Stella’s bereaved husband, Jack Hills, who played on their emotions … Finally, there were George’s embraces which went beyond the bounds of decency but which he masqueraded, even to himself, as overmastering brotherly affections. This is the most sinister kind of predator, the kind who masquerades as protector. His apparent solicitude led them, intermittently, to trust him. In any case, convention forbade any mention of it, for to complain of George would reflect on the purity of their own minds …¹⁹

 [Later, Gordon suggests that Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, was in part a response to her relations with her half-brothers:]

Rachel [the heroine of The Voyage Out, who has been kissed by Richard Dalloway, a fellow passenger on the boat she is traveling on] has a lurid vision of hunched women playing cards in a tunnel under the Thames who will reappear in the delirium of her final fever. Here, Virginia Stephen could not transmute life into art. Rachel’s response is excessively fevered, for Dalloway is not much of a threat. It makes sense only in terms of Virginia’s fear of her half-brother who, masked by respectability, would prowl by night and pounce. We can follow, through Rachel, Virginia Stephen’s analysis of the way a natural response is frozen. Lying in her cabin later that night, Rachel, with the instinct of a terrified animal, plays dead …²⁰ 

All mention of George Duckworth in her letters and satires dismissed him lightly as a fatuous snob but in her last breakdown, the doctor reported, she said that she was haunted by George Duckworth whom she had “evidently adored”. If this is true, it would explain her blaming George for earlier breakdowns. George, as his sisters’ first “lover”, exerted some power over Virginia when he would invade her bedroom [Gordon then quotes “22 Hyde Park Gate”] … It is impossible to know what truly happened. After Julia and Stella died and Leslie Stephen withdrew, an adult offer of emotional warmth – however uncontrolled and ill-judged – may have been irresistible to a girl like Virginia. George was thought very handsome. …In any case, his mastery as effective head of the family, his age (he was thirty-six, his sister twenty), her dependence (he had a thousand pounds a year, she had fifty) backed his overtures. [Gordon then describes George’s insistence on “correct behaviour”] … He remained a virgin until his marriage … George’s combination of lurking desire and propriety led, predictably, to conflicting signals. Though he fondled his sister by  night, by day he ridiculed her appearance and spoke of her as “the poor goat”.

          The hypocrisy of George was the hub of Virginia’s troubles. She came to fear that sexual love would always be connected with contempt and so to her idea of marriage as “a very low down affair”. That George Duckworth was furtive and absurd did not mean that he was not dangerous … Under the circumstances Virginia retained a fair spark of optimism. There is hope of a better kind of love in The Voyage Out and she was able to make an interesting marriage.²¹

 Questions

1.  What impression does Gordon give of Gerald's actions in her brief mention of him?

2.  Gordon describes George's activities as one of three different ways in which Vanessa and Virginia were "preyed on" by the men in the house. What is the effect of including a description of these events in a list that also includes accounts of the emotional neediness of both their father and their brother-in-law?

3.  How does Gordon characterize the dynamic between George and Virginia? What does she suggest was Virginia's response to what happened between them?

4.  In Gordon's opinion, how long-term were the effects of George's actions?

 VI.  Louise DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work (London: Women's Press, 1989).

DeSalvo's book is not a standard biography, but contains biographical portraits of Virginia's sisters Laura Stephen, Stella Duckworth, Vanessa Bell and a much longer portrait of Virginia Stephen as a child and an adolescent. DeSalvo sees Virginia's early sexual abuse as crucial to an accurate understanding of her personality and her fiction. Almost the whole book is devoted to discussion and interpretation of her relations with George and Gerald, and only a representative series of extracts is given here. The first extract is supported by DeSalvo's claim that Virginia Woolf repressed her memory of Gerald's assault on her until she uncovered it while she was writing "A Sketch of the Past" which, DeSalvo asserts, she wrote in an attempt to understand the roots of her depression. 

Uncovering that memory confronted her with some extremely disquieting realities: that the pattern of abuse lasted for many, many years, from roughly 1888, when she was six or seven, through 1904; that she was abused by more than one family member; that it was a central formative experience for her; and that a pattern of abuse existed within the Stephen family. She began to understand that sexual abuse was probably the central and most formative feature of her early life…²²

[After quoting Woolf’s account of Gerald's abuse in "A Sketch of the Past" DeSalvo continues:]

No more significant a place could exist for sexual assault than this - being fingered by someone on a ledge where plates of food were placed on their way to and from the dining room. Can there be any mystery in why Virginia Woolf had trouble eating later in life?... The very sight of a plate of food must have made her sick, recalling her feelings of disgust and shame, although not perhaps the incident that prompted them.

          I strongly suspect that what intensified the horror of the experience was the fact that Virginia was able to see herself in the mirror: she was watching herself being assaulted. No wonder that she developed a dread of looking at herself in that mirror, in any mirror…

          Two important moments of being which Woolf describes: the one, when “everything suddenly became unreal; I was suspended; I could not step across the puddle” [from “A Sketch”] in the path. She cannot explain why she couldn’t step across the puddle, but the act of opening her legs wide enough to stretch across a puddle of water was horrifying to her possibly because she would be able to see in the puddle a reflection of her legs, open wide, which she  might have associated with her abuse…²³ 

          But embedded in Virginia's retelling of her memory [of Gerald's abuse] is the idea that she herself was responsible for causing what happened to her: she says she remembered "resenting, disliking it"; but she also says that she believed "it is wrong to allow" parts of the body "to be touched". What she no doubt carried around with her throughout her life was a deep-seated feeling of guilt, a feeling that somehow she should have been able to prevent what happened to her, that she was responsible for it, that there was something about her that invited this abuse …this is not at all uncommon for contemporary victims of sexual abuse…²⁴ 

The Duckworth brothers' sexual molestation of Vanessa and Virginia is surely reprehensible. But they lived as outsiders within the Stephen family. Leslie admitted in his memoirs that he had never acted as a father to Julia's children, so that when she married they lost her to Leslie and to the Stephen children. Gerald and George probably took out their rage against their mother and stepfather on the bodies of their stepsisters, who might have seemed to have been given preferred            status in the Stephen home  … Whatever the pathology of George and Gerald, it was part of a family pattern that involved emotional deprivation. They were not monsters. They were victims who victimized in reprehensible ways ....²⁵ 

[Further on in the same chapter, DeSalvo quotes the letter to Ethel Smyth, reproduced above, and comments:]                  

The association between her abuse, “breaking the hymen,” and self-censorship is significant. It is a detail that she does not include in her autobiography, which was written earlier. It is quite possible that she had not yet unlocked the fact that Gerald had broken her hymen … at the age of six or seven, Virginia Woolf was no longer a virgin.²⁶

       [Further on, DeSalvo quotes the letter to Vanessa in July 1911, where Virginia describes telling Janet Case about George’s visits to her bedroom:]

Although Virginia does not report the content of what she told Janet (for of course Vanessa already knew), … [it] was upsetting enough to make Case sick enough to have to excuse herself to go to the W.C. …²⁷

 Questions

1. What kind of evidence does DeSalvo use to support her claim that Virginia Woolf's sexual abuse by her brothers was crucial to her development? What role is played by speculation in DeSalvo’s account?

2. How does DeSalvo make use of the testimony of contemporary (1980s) survivors of childhood sexual abuse? How far is this testimony relevant to Virginia Woolf’s experience?

3. What is DeSalvo’s attitude to the Duckworth brothers?

4. How does DeSalvo seek to convince her readers that sexual abuse was central to Woolf’s subsequent mental disorders? What evidence does she draw on, and how does she use it?

5. How convincing is her reading of the letter to Ethel Smyth?

6. How accurate is her reading of the 1911 letter to Vanessa? (To answer this question, you will need to think about the tone and context of the original text.)

7. Is DeSalvo’s interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s relations with her half-brothers linked to contemporary (1980s) attitudes to childhood sexual abuse? If it is, does that make it less useful for a reader in 2001?

8. From whose point of view is this biographical narrative written?

 VII. Quentin Bell, Elders and Betters (London: John Murray, 1995). This collection of essays on Bloomsbury personalities started out as an autobiography. Twenty-three years after the publication of his biography of Virginia Woolf, Bell returns to the question of his uncles' relations with their half-sisters in an essay on his mother, Vanessa Bell. 

George was also a problem in quite a different way. He loved his half-sisters; he loved them enthusiastically; he loved them in altogether too demonstrative a way, kissing, fondling, toying with them and embracing them as if he were not so much a brother as an accepted lover.

Here, because enormous publicity has been given to the story of George's activities and because this publicity has been accompanied by wild speculation, I must pause to state the proven facts of the case.

Gerald, the younger Duckworth boy, inspected Virginia's private parts when she was about five years old. It was a horrid act, but we may doubt whether he was the first schoolboy to do such a thing; it is not a misdemeanor which justifies us in suspecting the offender of anything more serious. There is nothing else at all against Gerald.

George was certainly guilty of stupid and inconsiderate behaviour. Both Virginia and Vanessa suffered from his unwanted attentions, but it remains unclear exactly what happened and when. Undoubtedly his actions could have been a prelude to rape, but for the following reasons we may conclude that they were not.

We have every reason to think that both Vanessa and Virginia were virgins when they married .... In 1904 Sir George Savage, the mental health specialist who treated Virginia, was told by Vanessa about George Duckworth's misbehaviour, and there was an interview with the offender. Sir George was a friend of the family and a public figure of some consequence. If Vanessa had suggested that there was a real danger that George might get his half-sister with child - the scandal would have been colossal - the physician would surely have taken drastic steps; at the very least he would have separated George from Virginia. We can't tell what he did say at that interview, but in fact George proposed to join the Stephen children when they went to live in Gordon Square after their father’s death in 1904 and in a moment of weakness his proposal was accepted. It was in fact he who changed his mind. This would seem fantastic if we believe that copulation took place.

Bell then notes an early discussion of Gerald that Vanessa Bell, "the most reliable witness", kept silent on the subject, and that her children only learned what had happened years after she had died. An early letter from Vanessa to her cousin noted that it was possible that George was unaware of the seriousness of what he was doing. Bell continues:]

It is possible provided we assume that George did not actually rape his sisters. In her letters to Fredegond Vanessa, our best witness, never said that he attempted this.²⁸

 Questions

1.  Why do you think Bell returned to the subject of the Duckworth's relations with Virginia and Vanessa? Has he changed his interpretation since he published the biography?

2.  Could the information given about the interview with Sir George Savage be interpreted in any other way?

3.  What assumptions does Bell seem to have about the significance of what he calls "copulation" or “rape”?

4.  Whose side is he on? How can we tell?

VIII.  Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto and Windus, 1996). This biography, the most detailed and substantial to date, debates the question of what happened with Gerald and George at considerable length.

In her discussion of Gerald, Lee quotes at length from "A Sketch of the Past" and the 1941 letter to Ethel Smyth and then goes through a whole range of different interpretations of the incident (some of which we have already encountered above): that it froze Virginia's sexuality, that it drove her mad, that it gave rise to her eating problems, that it triggered her fear of illness, that she displaced her own feelings of attraction to her Father onto her brothers, that she associated the mirror with masturbation, and that her guilt feelings arose from her having enjoyed the experience. Then Lee continues: 

Only by hypothesizing can this childhood incident be made to explain all of Virginia Woolf’s mental history. Certainly it was a distressing and disturbing  memory which seems to have been buried for many years. But there were many more long-term, problematic and influential features in her childhood than this, and it distorts the thick complexity of her family life to isolate and emphasize this one. It is not possible to say whether the act was repeated: we simply do not know. It is not possible to prove that this act of sexual interference led directly to her mental breakdowns. It is a distortion, though a tempting and easy one, to elide this incident with the much later and much more damaging story of George’s sexual activities, and to think of the Duckworth brothers as conspiratorial rapists. [Lee then cites DeSalvo’s claim in her reading of the 1941 letter to Ethel Smyth that Virginia lost her virginity during her encounter with Gerald, and notes:]

The associations in the letter to Ethel between masturbation, “breaking the hymen”, and the memory of Gerald are surely more complicated and indirect than this. The letter is a much about the fear of admitting to sexual feelings in autobiographical writing as it is about sexual abuse. “Breaking the hymen” is her metaphor for losing one’s virginity as a writer, for breaking through self-censorship …

But certainly this memory of sexual shame in early childhood is a powerful one, and it would be rash to ignore or belittle the damage done to her sense of herself, at this moment, by the much older half-brother’s predatory intrusion. Over and over again in her re-creations of the imaginative world of childhood, there is a moment of fear or shame or panic, the image of a safe private world being invaded, often with the strong sense of sexual threat … in her transformations of her childhood memories, moments of ecstasy and moments of horror are placed in dangerous proximity.²⁹

 Questions

1.  What is the effect of Lee's listing of all the different interpretations of Gerald's abuse (as outlined in the introductory paragraph above)?

2.  What does Lee see as the most significant evidence that Gerald's actions had a long-term effect on Virginia?

3.  How significant does Lee suggest this incident was in Virginia's later life and development?

4.  How does Lee convey her own authority and accuracy as a biographer?

As for George's activities, Lee summarizes and quotes at length all the available sources (including an earlier, unpublished version of “22 Hyde Park Gate”), noting that for all their explicitness, there is still "something inconclusive about them ..., the memoir was perceived, and acknowledged, to be - at least to an extent - a fabrication".³⁰ In a detailed analysis of Virginia Woolf's two letters to Vanessa describing her conversations with Janet Case and Elena Richmond, Lee comments: 

The passages are written for comic effect, and they take pleasure (as her letters to Vanessa often do) in reclaiming intimacy through the gruesomeness of their shared memories, and in demonstrating how shocking Virginia has been, rocking these elderly women back on their heels with these frank revelations. The whole document [letter about Janet Case] makes a show of sexual frankness for Vanessa’s approval and amusement.³¹ 

[Lee also notes that throughout Woolf's letters, in little asides here and there:] George Duckworth was a regular butt of satire. Yet there are some anomalies .... When Virginia was ill in 1913, Leonard accepted George's invitation for her to be looked after at his house in Dalingridge: a surprising move, if by then Leonard knew the story of her childhood. And when George died in 1934, she makes none of the usual references to incest and seduction in her diary, but thinks of him with a "genuine glow"... The evidence of outside witnesses [including Vanessa] also leaves a mixed impression ....

It seems clear that whatever the facts, they were turned into running jokes which may have been, in part, a form of competition with people who had more scandalous sex lives, more sensational narratives of damage or desire, than Virginia Woolf. But the jokes also seem to have been a way of talking about events which she herself felt to be the source of lasting pain and harm.

It is impossible to think about this story innocently, without being aware of what has been made of it .... But what matters most in this story is what Virginia Woolf made out of what happened. Here the commentator can only point to the gap between the available evidence and the story she drew from it. There is no way of knowing whether the teenage Virginia Stephen was fucked or forced to have oral sex or buggered. Nor is it possible to say with any certainty that these events, any more than Gerald's interference with the child Virginia, drove her mad. But Virginia herself thought that what had been done to her was very damaging. And to an extent, her life was what she thought her life was. She used George as an explanation for her terrifyingly volatile and vulnerable mental states, for her inability to feel properly, for her sexual inhibition. And yet she also violently resisted Freudian explanations of a life through childhood traumas, and would have been horrified by interpretations of her work which reduced it to a coded expression of neurotic symptoms.³²

 Questions

1. Does Lee come to any definitive conclusions in her discussion of George's actions?

2. How does she weigh the evidence for and against the notion that George did Virginia lasting harm?

IX. Nigel Nicolson, Virginia Woolf (New York: Viking Penguin, 2000). This recent book, one of the new series of Penguin Lives, was written by the son of Vita Sackville-West, with whom Virginia Woolf had a brief lesbian affair in the 1920s, and who remained a close friend until Virginia's death. Nicolson has written elsewhere in very admiring terms about Virginia Woolf and about his parents' open marriage (both were gay), and he was one of the editors of Woolf's Collected Letters.³³ 

Another side of her childhood was darker. Her two half brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth, regarded Vanessa and Virginia as sexual objects, first of wonder, then of desire. Virginia recalled how once at St. Ives Gerald lifted her onto a table, and out of curiosity, put his hand under her skirt and examined her private parts. To Virginia, who was always exceptionally modest about her body, this was repulsive. She never forgot it. She did not accuse Gerald of any other indiscretions. George became the monster. After Julia's death, he would enter Virginia's bedroom, fling himself onto her bed, and take her into his arms. She wrote later of his "violent gusts of passion", and of his behavior as "little better than a brute's". The suggestion was that he had committed, or at least attempted, incest with the girls, and this was Quentin Bell's belief when he first wrote of these incidents. The term "incestuous relationship" is how he summarized them in the index to the first volume of the life of his aunt. Other biographers took up the..... theme … [Louise de Salvo] uses the term incest without qualification.

The allegation is far-fetched. Soon after Quentin Bell's book was published, I visited George Duckworth’s son Henry at his Sussex house to inquire whether his father had kept any letters from Virginia that might throw more light on the matter. Appalled by Bell's innuendoes, he gave me five letters with permission to publish them, because he believed they would prove beyond doubt that the relationship between George and his half sisters stopped short of any reasonable reproach. He argued that it was almost inconceivable that a girl who had been subjected to such brutal treatment could address her seducer as "My dear old Bar" and "My dearest George," or that Vanessa, the other victim of his endearments, would have gone happily to Paris with him in 1900 and two years later to Rome. (Quentin Bell, in his last book, Elders and Betters, modified his censure of the Duckworth brothers. He concluded that whatever George's lust may have been, he never carried it to the extent of rape. Nasty erotic fumblings are the most we need suppose .... In recollection, Virginia made more of a drama of the affair thru the facts justify.³⁴

 Questions

1. In Nicolson's opinion, why was Virginia upset by Gerald’s actions?

2. How convincing is Nicolson’s refutation of the charge that George systematically abused Virginia?

3. What are the assumptions underlying Nicolson’s discussion of whether or not what happened between them was rape?

4. Why does he refer to what went on as “nasty erotic fumblings”? What is the intended effect of that phrase on the reader’s interpretation of George’s actions?

5. Why is Nicolson anxious to prove that Virginia made too much fuss about the whole affair?

Next: Assignment and Notes