Virginia Woolf's family history is important, psychologically and genetically. It has been said that all her literary work is a product of her memories, of her acute sense of the past and her ties with her Victorian childhood
Her father was a distinguished Victorian man of letters , founder of the Dictionary of National Biography, fifty when Virginia was born in 1882. His first wife was a daughter of the novelist, William Thackeray. Throughout Virginia's childhood most of the distinguished men of letters of the time passed through the family house.
There was a family history of mental illness, predominantly of mood disorders. On her mother's side there was a long history of mildly eccentric and very active women; on her father's side generations of quiet gloomy men. On both sides there were writers galore. She was one of four children of her father's second marriage; several had psychological symptoms during their lives. She also had four step-siblings. Three - George, Gerald and Stella Duckworth - were from her mother's first marriage; none were to develop mental illness.
Her father also had a daughter from his first marriage to Minnie, Thackeray's daughter. Her mother, William Thackeray's wife, had a puerperal psychosis after the birth of Minnie, and never fully recovered. Minnie's child, Laura, was abnormal from birth. The family attempted to teach her at home. Leslie Stephen in particular was reluctant to admit that she was mentally handicapped. In childhood she had nervous tics, speech difficulties, was violent, had attacks of wild howling, and was sluggish and disobedient. She behaved oddly - once she threw scissors in the fire. From the age of ten she was secluded from the other children in the attic rooms. She spent her adult life in institutions. In 1897 the family are recorded as visiting her at Earlswood. She died in a York hospital in 1945, aged 75.
There is no record of her stepsister, Virginia, ever visiting her; indeed, she had robust views on the mentally handicapped. After walking past an outing of 'imbeciles' in January, 1915, she noted in her diary: 'They should certainly be killed.' But she had news of Laura in 1921 from Vanessa, who wrote to tell her that an aunt -'dear old Kate'- had visited Laura and found her 'the same as ever, and never stops talking, and occasionally says "I told him to go away" or "Put it down then" quite sensibly; but the rest is un-intelligible.' The final mention of Laura comes from Virginia, stirred to recall by the death of George Duckworth in 1934. In a letter to her sister, who like Virginia shared his unwelcome attentions in childhood, she wrote: 'Leonard says Laura is the one we could have spared.' This confirms that Laura was also molested by Duckworth. The letter also shows that the whole subject was well known to Leonard.
Virginia's brother Thoby, a brilliant scholar who died young, tried to throw himself from the window of his preparatory school in 1894 while recovering from an attack of influenza; he had a screaming attack at the time and a similar one at home a month later.Her brother Adrian suffered from 'a variety of nervous disorders'(Dunn,90). He was 'prone to suicidal despair'. At one time a lover of Duncan Grant, he was said to have a tormented preoccupation with the past.
But, despite all this, the major family history of affective
illness is on her father's side of the family. Her father Sir Leslie Stephen was an eccentric man with a depressive
personality. His father, Sir James Stephen had at least three
breakdowns; and her first cousin on her father's side, the
brilliant young J K Stephen developed mania and died in an
asylum.
Her grandfather, Sir James Stephen, was a lawyer and civil
servant, one of the great colonial administrators. His first
breakdown, in 1824, began after he had tried to combine bar and
civil service duties; his second, in 1832, after attempting to
get through parliament the bill on the emancipation of slaves.
Fourteen years later, after the death of a son from typhoid, he
had another attack. He was advised to retire prematurely, but
didn't accept that he was ill. He felt unappreciated, and was
gloomy - each tick of his clock, he wrote, 'sounds like a knell'
J K Stephen, Virginia's cousin, was the toast of Eton for his
prowess at the wall game. He had an early success with his
poems, Lapsus Calami - Slips of the Pen. After a brilliant
Cambridge undergraduate career, great things were expected of
him. For a time he tutored the Duke of Clarence at Cambridge. In
his twenties he developed fits of wild excitement and
depression. There were violent scenes. Virginia Woolf recalled
him charging into the nursery and skewering a loaf with a sword
stick. The committee of his club had to post a policeman at the
door to prevent him entering. Sir George Savage, the specialist
who was later to treat Virginia, arranged for his confinement in
a mental hospital, where he starved himself to death in 1892.
His illness was blamed on a head injury in 1886, but all the
descriptions extant point to mania. His father - nicknamed the
Grim Giant, while his son was the Genial Giant - always refused
to recognise that his son was mentally ill, and refused to make
any allowances for his condition. His connection with the Duke
of Clarence has led to fanciful speculation that he might have been Jack the Ripper, because his death followed the Duke's by
three weeks, and the suppressed first edition of his poems
contained a fantasy about killing prostitutes. Memorials were
set up at Eton and Cambridge by the family; his homosexuality
was carefully concealed.
There were other gloomy men further back in the paternal
ancestry but the most interesting and important of all is her
father Sir Leslie Stephen - 'The Godless Victorian' of Noel
Annan's biography.
He was a most distinguished Victorian man of
letters, founder of the Dictionary of National Biography,
contributing many of the entries in years of labour, and an
outstanding pioneering alpinist.
Father and daughter had much in common, and Virginia had
powerful feelings of love and hate for him which she only
exorcised in To the Lighthouse, where, as Mr Ramsay, he is
portrayed without disguise. Both were tall and gaunt, both
walkers. Both could write a judicious, readable review. They
differed in their thinking: he was clear, logical, while she was
imaginative. Both loved poetry; both could be charming at times,
but both could be rude. He had rages; she was spiteful. Both
disliked money matters, both were workaholics. Both feared
unkind reviewers. Both leaned on women for support.
Both recognised themselves in the other. Virginia in her last
years, wrote about him in Moments of Being. He, on her ninth
birthday, wrote to his wife: 'she is certainly very like me' and
'she will certainly be an author in time'.
But he was a difficult man, more so after his second wife's
death. Virginia wrote in her diary years later: 'If he had lived
longer his life would have entirely ended mine. What would have
happened? No writing, no books; inconceivable.' Elsewhere:
'that old wretch, my father'. 'But he was an adorable man, and
somehow, tremendous. As a child condemning, as a woman of 58
understanding - I should say tolerating. Both views true?.'
Sir Leslie was ill in 1888, and again two years later - worn out
by his work on the great Dictionary of National Biography. He
suffered from insomnia and 'fits of the horrors'.
He pleaded poverty constantly to his children, and even in
public. Once he told the writer Edmund Gosse that he was
completely ruined: there was only £1000 left. Gosse and other
men of letters were dismayed and decided to have a whip round,
but first asked for more details of his financial difficulties.
They found that his bank balance was reduced to £1000, but that
his income and capital were substantial and intact. When he
became a widower there were regular weekly scenes when he went
over the household accounts with Vanessa and Virginia.
He was histrionic in grief and in his rages. His daughter
thought he consciously modelled his tantrums - his 'berserker
fits' - on Thomas Carlyle, believing such outbursts befitted a
man of letters wishing to play the great Victorian.
He was famously taciturn, even when he met distinguished men of
letters - he did not speak a word during a lunch with Robert
Louis Stevenson.
He would pride himself on being a 'hopeless misanthrope' and
would 'tune up his glooms', first to gain his wife's sympathy,
and later the childrens. But his self-dramatisation infuriated
them, especially Vanessa. Virginia was less resistant. When he
stumbled towards her from Julia's death bed, she put out her
hand to him. He rejected it and hurried on. The scene was
imprinted on her memory for life. After the death the girls
heard him passing their room, talking to himself: 'I wish I were
dead - I wish I were dead - I wish my whiskers would grow.'
He was obviously neurotic, and a depressive personality. He was
especially gloomy after his second wife's death, but there is no
real evidence of manic-depressive illness. He was enormously
productive, despite his gloom and sense of failure. This sense
of failure can be seen in Virginia's illnesses, and could be
seen as an identification with her father. The immediate
conviction, when ill, that she is worthless and that her work is
worthless is identical.
Her mother is a less vivid personality. She occupied herself
greatly with good works and published in 1883 a book on the
management of sick rooms, later to be reprinted by the Hogarth
Press. The years of widowhood had left her stern and melancholy.
She died of rheumatic fever, aged only 49. Like her husband she
was the most positive of disbelievers, and passed her atheism to
her daughter, together with her gift for summing up character.
She is faithfully portrayed as Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse.
'This is not made up - it is the literal fact,' Virginia wrote
while engaged on the novel; and when Vanessa read it in 1927 she
wrote to her sister: '... a portrait of mother which is more
like her to me than anything I could ever have conceived of as
possible. It is almost painful to have her so raised from the
dead...... You have given father too I think as clearly but
perhaps, I may be wrong, that isn't quite so difficult.....it is
so shattering to find oneself face to face with those two
again.....'
In summary there is a strong history of depressive illness and
manic depressive psychosis on the paternal side of the family,
together with many eccentric and gloomy personalities, and
generations of varied creativity on both sides.
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