Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears: Julia Margaret Cameron, Anny Thackeray Ritchie and Julia Prinsep Stephen

222 Pages·2015·0.73 MB·English

by  Marion Dell (auth.)

Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears
Also by Marion Dell
VIRGINIA WOOLF AND VANESSA BELL: Remembering St Ives
Virginia Woolf’s
Influential Forebears
Julia Margaret Cameron, Anny
Thackeray Ritchie and Julia Prinsep
Stephen
Marion Dell
© Marion Dell 2015
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ISBN 978-1-349-58019-4 ISBN 978-1-137-49728-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137497284
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Contents
Acknowledgements viii
List of Abbreviations x
Family Tree xiv
Introduction: ‘Born into a Large Connection’ 1
1 ‘And Finally Virginia’: Cameron, Ritchie, Stephen
and Woolf’s Constructs of her Ancestry 11
Pattledom 12
Woolf’s problematic response to her past 12
Woolf, Cameron, Stephen and Ritchie 13
Interconnections: Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen 14
Woolf’s narratives of Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen 18
2 ‘Knocking at the Door’: Heredity, Legacy and
Transition in Night and Day 20
‘Knocking at the door’: Ritchie and border crossings 20
Literary transformations 22
Generic ambivalence in Night and Day 23
Continuities and porous boundaries 24
Genetic legacies 27
Inherited roles for women 29
Life-writing 33
A large connection 35
Ambivalence, liminality and Woolf’s ‘third space’ 36
3 ‘The Transparent Medium’: Anny Thackeray Ritchie 38
Daughters of educated men 39
Ritchie’s achievements 40
Woolf’s apprenticeship 43
Lines of influence from Ritchie’s essays 44
‘A very feminine kind of writing’ 49
Writing Lives 53
Lines of descent from Ritchie’s novels 62
v
vi Contents
Ritchie’s proto-modernism 65
Crafting memories 66
Woolf’s obscuration of Ritchie’s legacies 67
Woolf’s covert acknowledgement of Ritchie:
the trope of the door 70
4 ‘Take my lens. I bequeath it to my descendents’:
Julia Margaret Cameron 72
Cameron’s legacy 72
‘The Searchlight’: genesis 74
Cameron and Woolf: recontextualisation, imaginative
retelling and fictionalised auto/biography 80
Ritchie as ‘transparent medium’ between
Cameron and Woolf 82
Woolf’s representations of Cameron 83
Woolf’s suppression of Cameron’s achievements 85
Blurring boundaries: Cameron’s influence in Woolf’s work 87
Public and private spheres 89
Photograph albums: visual auto/biographies
and family histories 91
Woolf’s visual inheritance: identity,
perspective and angles of vision 95
Cameron’s proto-modernism: commonalities with Woolf 97
Woolf’s use of the visual: lines of influence 99
Cameron, Stephen and Woolf: arresting beauty 102
5 ‘Closer than any of the living’: Julia Prinsep Stephen 105
Constructs of Stephen 106
The Angel in the House 107
Stephen’s achievements: the ‘real’ woman 111
Stephen’s writing and its influence on Woolf 112
Stephen’s atheism and philanthropy 116
Stephen’s mentorship of the young apprentice 118
Stephen’s legacies: laughter and gossip 122
The absent mother 124
Woolf’s engagement with the Angel in the House 125
The Angel, photography and ways of seeing 127
Retrieving the lost mother: invisible presences 128
Living life through from the start: reimagining Stephen 131
Contents vii
6 ‘Let us be our great grandmothers’:
Heredity and Legacy in The Years 134
Recreating family histories: The Years and
A Sketch of the Past 135
Resurrecting Julia Stephen 138
The Years and Night and Day 140
Street music and echoes of Ritchie 145
Yorkshire roots 149
Recovering family histories: Woolf and Ethel Smyth 151
Endings and continuities 151
Julia Margaret Cameron: the continuing
influence of the visual 154
Cycles, liminality and Woolf’s ‘third space’ 157
Conclusion: Invisible Presences’ and ‘Transparent
Mediums’: Virginia Woolf’s Nineteenth-Century Legacies 158
Woolf’s ambivalent responses to Cameron,
Ritchie and Stephen 159
Accounting for Woolf’s response 161
Woolf’s unresolved conflict with her past 164
Boundaries and boundary crossing 171
Continuities and lines of descent 175
Ambivalence: Woolf’s nineteenth-century legacy 178
Notes 182
Select Bibliography 192
Index 201
Acknowledgements
I acknowledge the incalculable debt I owe to the late Professor Julia
Briggs, without whose inspiration and guidance this research project
would never have been started; and the equally huge debt to the
Revd Dr Jane de Gay and Dr Delia da Sousa Correa, without whom
it would not have been finished. I would like to thank friends and
colleagues in the Virginia Woolf Society for their support and advice,
especially Sheila Wilkinson, Stephen Barkway, Stuart Clarke and
Dr Claire Nicholson. A huge thank you to my husband John Dell
and my daughter Dr Helen Dell for all their unstinting patience and
practical support.
My thanks also go to: Tom Atkins at Random House. Quotations
from Virginia Woolf’s Diaries, volumes 1–5, Letters, volumes 1–6
and Essays volume 6, Moments of Being, A Passionate Apprentice and
The Pargiters, are reproduced by permission of The Random House
Group Ltd.
Julian Bell and Henrietta Garnett for permission to reproduce
extracts from the Maria Jackson Letters Collection, lodged at Sussex
University.
Sarah Burton and Sarah Baxter at the Society of Authors.
Unpublished drafts of ‘The Searchlight’ are reproduced by permis-
sion of The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the
Estate of Virginia Woolf.
Dr Darren Clarke at The Charleston Trust.
Fiona Courage at Sussex University, and for permission on behalf
of the University as the owners to reproduce unpublished material
from the drafts of Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Searchlight’, letters from the
Maria Jackson Letters Collection, and a letter from Madge Vaughan.
Graeme Edwards at the Somerset Archives and Local Studies
Service and for permission to quote from the unpublished diaries of
Arthur Duckworth.
Rachel Flynn and Dr Brian Hinton at the Julia Margaret Cameron
Trust, Dimbola.
Ron Hussey at Houghton, Mifflin Harcourt.
viii
Acknowledgements ix
The following excerpts reprinted by permission of the copyright
holders Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt: The Diary of Virginia Woolf
vol. 1, copyright 1977 Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett; The Essays
of Virginia Woolf vol. 3, copyright 1989 Quentin Bell and Angelica
Garnett; The Essays of Virginia Woolf vol. 4, copyright 1994 Quentin
Bell and Angelica Garnett; The Essays of Virginia Woolf vol. 5, copyright
2009 by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett; The Letters of Virginia
Woolf vols 1–3, copyright 1975, 1976, 1977 by Quentin Bell and
Angelica Garnett; Moments of Being, copyright 1976 by Quentin Bell
and Angelica Garnett; Mrs Dalloway, copyright 1925 renewed 1953 by
Leonard Woolf; A Haunted House, copyright 1944 renewed 1972
by Harcourt Mifflin Harcourt; Orlando, copyright 1928 renewed
1956 by Leonard Woolf; Roger Fry, copyright 1940 renewed 1968 by
Leonard Woolf A Room of One’s Own, copyright 1929 renewed 1957
by Leonard Woolf; The Years, copyright 1977 by Quentin Bell and
Angelica Garnett; Three Guineas, copyright 1938 renewed 1966 by
Leonard Woolf; To the Lighthouse, copyright 1927 renewed 1954
by Leonard Woolf; The Waves, copyright 1931 renewed 1959 by
Leonard Woolf; All rights reserved.
Karen Kukil and Barbara Blumenthal at the Mortimer Rare Book
Room, Smith College, and for permission to reproduce the cover
image.
Julian Pooley at the Surrey History Centre for permission to quote
from unpublished records from the Royal Earlswood Asylum.
John Vaughan for permission to reproduce extracts from an unpub-
lished letter from Madge Vaughan, lodged at Sussex University.
Catherine Wilson and John Aplin for assistance with the literary
estate of Anny Thackeray Ritchie.