Because the memoirs are in different stages of revision it has occasionally been necessary to adapt editorial practice to deal with specific problems. When this has been done, mention has been made in the appropriate note. With that exception, the following editorial principles have been applied to the texts uniformly.
Deletions made by Virginia Woolf have not been included unless they are necessary for the sense of the passage and no substitute has been provided. In such cases the deleted words have been enclosed in square brackets. Partial deletions, which are not uncommon, have been silently completed. In those few cases where Virginia Woolf added a word or a phrase but failed to make the deletion necessary to accommodate the addition, the oversight has been silently corrected. For example, in “Old Bloomsbury”, the first version of one passage reads: “True, we still had Thursday evenings as before. But they were always strained and ended generally in dismal failure.” Virginia Woolf then added ‘often’ before ‘ended’ but failed to delete ‘generally’. Where an addition has made it necessary to alter the grammatical form of a word, the change has been listed in Appendix A. Deletions which are of interest have been noted.
Just as some of Virginia Woolf’s deletions were incomplete, so were some of her additions and corrections. When it was impossible to incorporate them into the text without serious disruption to the thought they have been omitted and noted. In those instances where a word or phrase was added by Virginia Woolf in such a way as to make it clear that it was merely being considered as an alternative, the later version has been used except where the first is clearly preferable. In very few instances indeed is any point of significance involved; however, alternative readings have been noted if they are of interest or if there is doubt as to the choice Virginia Woolf would have made.
In early drafts, Virginia Woolf’s practice regarding punctuation, spelling and capitalization was highly erratic and she often used abbreviations which never appeared in her published work. On occasion, obvious oversights coupled with typing mistakes and incomplete or hastily made corrections have resulted in a profusion of errors; at others, the careful attention to these matters which characterizes her published works is evident. It was Virginia Woolf’s practice to submit her work to her husband, Leonard, for revision of these details and he, in publishing her posthumous works, did not hesitate, as he writes in the editorial preface to The Death of the Moth,fn1 ‘to punctuate’ the essays and correct ‘obvious verbal mistakes’. Although the liberties that Leonard Woolf would have been justified in taking could not be similarly justified by anyone else, his practice has at least served as a general guideline for the kinds of corrections which have been made in the present text; for it is equally clear that in the case of these memoirs – unlike that of the Diary or the Letters – Virginia Woolf would most certainly have made the spelling, punctuation and capitalization conform to standard usage, except where a nuance was involved, had she decided to publish them.
Hence punctuation has been altered to conform to Virginia Woolf’s own practice in her published works. Hyphens, italics, question marks, full stops, double quotes for dialogue, apostrophes for possessives and contractions have been added where appropriate; ‘and’ has been substituted for the ampersand; abbreviations and numbers have been written out where it was her practice to do so. Apart from these uncontroversial examples, punctuation has been altered only to avoid ambiguity, to correct obvious oversights, or to conform to a pattern established in a sentence or passage which was momentarily overlooked. No attempt has been made to make Virginia Woolf’s idiosyncratic and highly expressive punctuation conform in other respects to conventional usage. When, for example, an exclamation point occurs in the middle of a sentence, it is retained if it is appropriate to the sense of the passage. All typing errors have been corrected. Spelling and capitalization have been regularized to conform to common usage unless a nuance is involved.
The sense or the grammar of a sentence has occasionally necessitated the addition of a word which has been enclosed in brackets. However, more than one word in brackets without a note indicates words deleted by Virginia Woolf as explained above. All doubtful readings and illegible words have been noted except in those few cases where a legible and acceptable alternative is available.
The individual Editor’s Notes contain a brief description of the subject matter of the memoir in order to avoid cumbersome annotations of the text; the date and circumstances of writing; and a description of the typescript or manuscript on which the edited text is based as well as any unusual problems.
For the sake of brevity, the initials ‘VW’ and ‘LW’, for Virginia and Leonard Woolf respectively, have been used in the footnotes. The manuscripts and typescripts (ms and ts) are referred to by their Library reference numbers, for example, ‘MH/A.5a’, except that after the initial mention, the ‘MH’ (Monks House) has been omitted because all the papers come from that collection. The two-volume biography by Quentin Bellfn2 is referred to simply as ‘QB’ followed by the appropriate volume and page numbers. The letters, edited by Nigel Nicolson, assisted by Joanne Trautmann, are referred to as ‘Letters, followed by the appropriate volume number. No attempt has been made to be exhaustive in the identification of persons mentioned in the memoirs. In those cases where the individual was of minor or passing significance to Virginia Woolf, or significant because of being representative of a type, as the context makes clear, identification has not generally been made. Quentin Bell’s biography is available for those interested in such details; also the six volumes of Letters, as mentioned above, and the five-volume Diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by Olivier Bell, assisted by Andrew McNeillie. The period in general and ‘Bloomsbury’ in particular are amply documented.
Jeanne Schulkind
1976
Reminiscences
EDITOR’S NOTE
THESE REMINISCENCES OF Julia Stephen, Stella Duckworth and Vanessa Bell, the three figures who stood successively at the heart of the Stephen/Duckworth menage at 22 Hyde Park Gate, were addressed to the first child of Vanessa and Clive Bell. Julian, however, can only be held responsible in a very remote sense for inspiring this memoir; for, according to Quentin Bell, it was begun before Julian’s birth (February 1908) when Virginia was spending the summer holidays of 1907 in Playden, just north of Rye, where the Bells were staying.fn3 The memoir is mentioned in two letters after Julian’s birth: one, from Virginia to Clive, written on 15 April 1908, and another from Vanessa to Virginia from Cleeve House, of 20 April 1908.fn4 In the letter to Clive it is clear that Virginia’s feeling for Vanessa was a major source of inspiration: “I have been writing Nessa’s life; and I am going to send you 2 chapters in a day or two. It might have been so good! As it is, I am too near, and too far and it seems to be blurred, and I ask myself why write it at all? seeing I never shall recapture what you have, by your side this minute.”fn5
At the age of twenty-five, Virginia Woolf was very conscious of being an apprentice at her chosen craft. She had been reviewing since the end of 1904, but her own first ‘work of imagination’ as she called ‘Melymbrosia’ (published in 1915 as The Voyage Out) was only just begun. Of the exercises which she conscientiously assigned herself, descriptions of places visited and the lives of close friends or relations formed an important part.fn6 She showed these experiments only to a few intimates and on various occasions she declared her intention of rewriting them at set intervals. It is in such a provisional light that the “Reminiscences” should be read.
Yet, in addressing the memoir to the next generation and in broadening her subject to include the Stephen family so that no meaningful distinction can be made here between biography (of Vanessa) and autobiography, Virginia Woolf continued a practice which might almost be said to have attained the status of a family tradition. For her grandfather, James Stephen, had written his memoirs for the use of his childrenfn7 and her father, Leslie, had followed suit in writing the ‘Mausoleum Book’, addressed to his children and step-children.fn8
Virginia Woolf begins the memoir with her childish impressions of Vanessa, who was three years her senior, recreating as she goes a vivid impression of the vitality, affection and security which distinguished life in the Stephen family. This family life was brutally transformed by the deaths of Julia, her mother, and then Stella, those traumatic events which seemed to bear the message that life had begun in earnest for the Stephen children.
Julia Jackson, daughter of Maria, one of the beautiful Pattle sisters, and Dr Jackson, was born in 1846. In 1867, when she was twenty-one, she married Herbert Duckworth, a barrister, who died three years later on 19 September 1870. The three children of the marriage were George (b. 1868); Stella (b. 1869); and Gerald, born after the death of his father in 1870. Eight years of widowhood ended in 1878 when Julia married Leslie Stephen whose first wife Minny, daughter of Thackeray, had died in 1875 leaving one child, Laura, whose mental deficiency was becoming increasingly apparent. There were four children born to Julia and Leslie Stephen: Vanessa (b. 1879); Thoby (b. 1880); Virginia (b. 1882) and Adrian (b. 1883). When Julia died in 1895 Stella assumed her responsibilities in the house at Hyde Park Gate. She married John Waller (Jack) Hills in 1897; she died three months later. It was now Vanessa’s turn to be her father’s ‘angel in the house’, a role which ill suited her. Jack is just emerging from the black grief into which Stella’s death had plunged him when the memoir ends somewhat abruptly – perhaps because of the difficulty, as Quentin Bell has suggested, of describing Vanessa’s affair with Jack.
The text (Library reference number MH/A. 6) is based on fifty-six pages typed by Virginia Woolf, with corrections by her in soft black and blue lead pencil and black ink.fn9 The corrections are minor, confined for the most part to single words or phrases which involve matters of style rather than changes of thought. The typing, for Virginia Woolf, is unusually careful. There are a number of infelicitous phrases, inelegant repetitions, grammatical confusions and obscurities of thought such as are rarely found in her later work and which she would surely have resolved had she prepared the text for publication.
The Memoir Club Contributions
EDITOR’S NOTE
THESE THREE MEMOIRS were written by Virginia Woolf to be read aloud to the Memoir Club which had been formed in March 1920. It represented a re-grouping of ‘Old Bloomsbury’ which had dispersed during the war. According to Leonard Woolf, the thirteen original members of the Memoir Club corresponded exactly to the group of friends known to each other as ‘Old Bloomsbury’ and to the outside world, more simply, as ‘Bloomsbury’.fn10 He includes the following: Vanessa and Clive Bell, Virginia and himself, Desmond and Molly MacCarthy, Adrian Stephen, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Saxon Sydney-Turner and Lytton Strachey. Quentin Bell, in his book on Bloomsbury, does not mention Adrian Stephen and Saxon Sydney-Turner in the list of original members of the Memoir Club but adds that had it been formed in 1913 it would probably have included not only these two but ‘Gerald Shove perhaps and H. T. J. Norton’.fn11 Such a discrepancy calls attention to an important fact, perhaps one of the few indisputable facts about Bloomsbury, and that is that the vagueness which characterizes its outer limits extends, although to a lesser degree, to its innermost circle.
The group met periodically to dine, to read memoirs and enjoy each other’s company. They agreed at the start upon ‘absolute frankness’ and this comes through in the memoirs that follow but, as Leonard Woolf warns, ‘absolute frankness, even among the most intimate, tends to be relative frankness’, and there is a hint of that too.fn12 In each of the selections there is an author playing to her audience: familiar but not exactly intimate, reminiscent but never sentimental, clever and often facetious, gambolling over surface oddities rather than probing – thoughtfully, hesitantly – the nature of memory and consciousness, of self and reality, as in “Sketch of the Past”.
22 Hyde Park Gate
EDITOR’S NOTE
“22 HYDE PARK GATE”, although written almost twenty years before “Sketch of the Past”, takes up the narrative of the Stephens not much beyond the point where the latter ends, that is, after Stella’s death but before the death of Leslie Stephen in 1904 and the move of the remaining Stephens to Bloomsbury. In his role as elder brother, George Duckworth undertook, on his own initiative, to chaperone first Vanessa’s, and then Virginia’s, launching into ‘Society’. Needless to say, it was not, in either case, a successful launch.
In the entry for 26 May 1921 in A Writer’s Diary, Virginia Woolf refers to a conversation she had had on the 25th with Maynard Keynes. “The best thing you ever did, he said, was your Memoir on George. You should pretend to write about real people and make it all up. I was dashed of course (and Oh dear what nonsense – for if George is my climax I’m a mere scribbler).”fn13 The memoir must have been presented to the Memoir Club some time between its formation in March 1920 and 25 May 1921, the date of the conversation with Keynes.fn14
The text brings together two typescripts: MH/A.14 and MH/A.15. A.14 consists of twenty-one pages typed by Virginia Woolf with a great many corrections in pen and pencil. The pages have been erratically numbered, suggesting that the typescript may have passed through several stages of revision. A. 15 consists of fifteen pages typed by Virginia Woolf, with more than her customary care;fn15 yet, on the last page, the line of type slopes off the page, in mid-sentence. There are no written corrections. A.15 is without doubt a revision of pages i—11 of A. 14 for it incorporates the pen and pencil corrections on these pages. The text below follows the A. 15 typescript as far as it goes and then continues with the A. 14 typescript where it joins A. 15 in mid-sentence (p. ii,1. 19). Although A.15 is clearly more finished stylistically than A.14, the difference between the two texts is not substantial. The copious written corrections of A. 14 indicate considerable reworking, although there is little doubt that many further changes would have been made had Virginia Woolf completed the A. 15 version.
Old Bloomsbury
EDITOR’S NOTE
“OLD BLOOMSBURY” FOLLOWED “22 Hyde Park Gate” as Virginia Woolf’s contribution to the Memoir Club and was probably delivered within a year of the latter, that is, near the end of 1921 or in 1922.fn16 It takes up where “22 Hyde Park Gate” ends, at “the height of the season of 1903”, but it passes quickly over the move from Hyde Park Gate after Leslie Stephen’s death to the establishment of the Stephens at 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury.
In viewing the origins of “Old Bloomsbury” from the angle of Hyde Park Gate, Virginia Woolf is giving an account which would, in some respects at least, differ from that given by one who had passed through Cambridge on the way to Bloomsbury; just as the accounts of those who belonged to the Cambridge ‘Apostles’ do not in every respect accord with that of Clive Bell, for example, who did not belong.fn17 The many versions of where it all started and when – at Cambridge with the ‘Midnight Society’ or the ‘Apostles’ in 1899, with ‘Thursday evenings’ at Gordon Square in 1905, or in the district of Bloomsbury about 1912, as Leonard Woolf suggestsfn18 – merely underline once again the vagueness of the limits of Bloomsbury.
The throwing open of windows which flooded with fresh air and light the dark, cramped, heavily upholstered upper middle class Victorian world in which many of the ‘Bloomsberries’ had spent their youth, did not happen all at once, as this memoir makes clear. Virginia Woolf conveys – albeit with the emphasis other than where it might have been placed by one of the painters of the group, say Vanessa Bell or Roger Fry – the drama and the humour of certain critical events in the development of pre-war Bloomsbury.
The text (Library reference number MH/A.16) is based on thirty-seven pages typed by Virginia Woolf with corrections in pen and pencil. The beginning of the last paragraph, however, comes from a one-page mutilated and corrected typescript which was separated from A.16 and is now in the Berg Collection. The curator has generously given permission for this fragment to be included here. The typescript is erratically paginate
d in overlapping groups; the quality of the typing is poor; and the corrections are sometimes lengthy and often difficult to decipher.
Am I a Snob?
EDITOR’S NOTE
VIRGINIA WOOLF WROTE “Am I a Snob?” when she was at the height of her fame and near the end of the career that was being so painstakingly prepared when the first memoir in this collection was written. It was read to the Memoir Club on 1 December 1936.fn19
In “Sketch of the Past”, Virginia Woolf noted the curious division in her life at Hyde Park Gate: “Downstairs there was pure convention; upstairs pure intellect.” After the first years in Bloomsbury the world of ‘convention’ – the world of George Duckworth, of Kitty Maxse – had clearly given way to the world of intellect. Humiliation, frustration and sheer boredom had marked many of her early encounters with the ‘beau monde’ and yet some aspects of ‘society’ never ceased to fascinate her: the bright lights, the people talking, the strip of red carpet rolled out on the pavement.