Bloomsbury bed hopper or frigid? How TV’s got my aunt Virginia Woolf so wrong
‘I find the climax immensely exaggerated’
ASuNNY afternoon in 1934, at my father’s family home in Buckinghamshire. He is seven years old, holding the hand of his aunt Virginia. He had discovered a grotto built into the hillside of the garden, and he wanted to share his secret with her. ‘I remember leading Aunt Virginia by the hand, as small children do, to show her,’ he tells me. ‘We knelt down and gazed into the gloom and I remember calling her name, “Vir-gin-yer, Vir-gin-yer”, to hear the echo, and she calling mine, “Ce-cil, Ce-cil”. We listened to our names echoing and laughed …’
It’s a touching picture of Virginia Woolf, immersed in her young nephew’s world, kneeling to explore the secret grotto together. My father also remembers visiting his aunt and uncle Leonard as a teenager, and how she would quiz him: ‘When you arrived at their house, she would ask you about your journey and she wanted every detail. “OK, you came by train. Tell me about the people in the carriage,” she would probe. It was the novelist’s search for copy, ideas.’
This was a woman who was curious about people and passionately interested in human life. In all the stories my father tells of his aunt, she is warm and kind, and loved children. To those who knew her, she was great fun at parties and always up for practical jokes. It’s a very different impression from the usual portrayal of Virginia Woolf: the dark lady of letters, the tortured genius, the anti-Semitic snob, the childless intellectual, the spiteful socialite.
In almost 75 years since her suicide, my greataunt Virginia has become a household name. Everyone has heard of her, from taxi drivers to American tourists (although almost none of those I meet have read her books).
The haunting profile photograph by George Beresford of a beautiful 20-year-old Virginia in 1902 adorns teatowels, mugs and posters the world over, and her quotes are shared daily on Instagram and Pinterest. For years there was even a Virginia Woolf Burger Bar at the Hotel Russell in Russell Square, London, where Virginia set her 1919 novel Night And Day.
Virginia has been called a lot of things over the years but you wouldn’t call her sexy. She wrote almost nothing about sex. There are exactly two romantic kisses in her entire literary oeuvre — one in The Voyage Out, another in Mrs Dalloway.
Yet there is still plenty of speculation about Virginia’s sex life, or lack of one. Now a new three-part BBC Two drama, Life In Squares, which starts on Monday at 9pm, gives the raunchiest portrayal yet of the Bloomsbury Group, a circle of libertine artists, writers and intellectuals of which my great-aunt was a founding member.
Having watched a preview of the first episode and a teaser of the second and third, it seems to me the series is more bonkbuster than serious biopic, yet I have no doubt it will be a hit. The title, taken from a line (attributed to Dorothy Parker) that the Bloomsbury Group ‘ painted in circles, lived in squares and loved in triangles’ provides a clue to the drama’s main focus: their tangled love lives and sexual antics.
The focus is two sisters, Vanessa Bell (Phoebe Fox) and Virginia Woolf (Lydia Leonard), played in later life by Eve Best and Catherine McCormack, though male characters provide much of the sexual drama. They include the economist John Maynard Keynes, artist Duncan Grant (James Norton and, in later life, Rupert Penry- Jones) and writer Lytton Strachey.
The drama makes great television, but how accurate is it? Reading Virginia’s letters and diaries, and getting to know her through my father, I can’t help but wonder. To me, it seems that the sex and scandal around the Bloomsbury Group becomes more risqué as each generation becomes l ess shockable and hungrier f or salacious details. And I fear that all the gossip and stories take us farther away from the real woman.
That’s not to say there wasn’t plenty of sex going on — plus a fair amount of bed-hopping and partner-swapping, too. In one of the most tangled Bloomsbury triangles, Vanessa married Clive Bell and had two children with him, then l i ved with and had a daughter with homosexual Duncan Grant — a daughter who went on to marry one of her father’s gay lovers.
There’s no doubt that Vanessa liked sex, either. She writes from her honeymoon in 1907: ‘Copulation continues to be a tremendous success.’
But with Virginia, it’s hard to separate fact from fiction. Over the years countless theories have been proposed. Was she sexually abused as a child, was her marriage ever consummated, was she having a passionate affair with her friend Vita Sackville-West, or was she simply frigid? While there was plenty of sex going on for the rest of the Bloomsbury Group, Virginia seemed strangely unable to join in.
There was always a kind of braggadocio to Virginia. She liked to shock, and to appear far more adventurous than she really was.
‘Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money,’ she once said, sounding like a sexually experienced young woman. But shortly after her marriage to Leonard in 1912, she confided to a female friend: ‘I find the climax immensely exaggerated.’ Couldn’t she enjoy sex, or was it simply no big deal?
The much talked-about love affair with Vita Sackville-West may have been overblown, but something certainly went on. Virginia based her novel Orlando on Vita, and there’s no doubt the two women felt passionately about each other for a time. Vita confessed to her husband that she had been to bed with Virginia twice, which suggests Virginia wasn’t entirely frigid.
Towards men, however, she was decidedly ambivalent. When Leonard proposed to her, she told him: ‘As I told you brutally the other day, I feel no attraction i n you. There are moments — when you kissed me the other day was one — when I feel no more than a rock.’
There is more evidence for Virginia’s lack of interest in sex. In 1967 a Bloomsbury friend, Gerald Brenan, recalled: ‘Leonard told me that when on their honeymoon he had tried to make love to her, she had got into such a violent state of excitement that he had to stop, knowing as he did that these states were a prelude to her attacks of madness… so Leonard had to give up all idea of ever having any sort of sexual satisfaction.’
Perhaps most disturbingly for my father and the family are the continuing allegations of abuse in Virginia’s childhood. Her half-brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth, are said to have committed incest — some even say rape — with the young Virginia and Vanessa. Again, the evidence is patchy. Virginia recalled how once, in their holiday home at St Ives, Gerald lifted her onto a table and, out of curiosity, put his hand under her skirt and examined her private parts. She was modest, shy even, and found this traumatic.
After her mother’s death in 1895, Virginia recalled George coming into her bedroom and flinging himself onto her bed, taking her in his arms in ‘violent gusts of passion’ with behaviour ‘little better than a brute’s’. The American writer Louise de Salvo
claims that ‘sexual abuse was probably the central and most formative feature of her early life’, carried out by ‘virtually every male member’ of the household. My father calls this book ‘poisonous and unfounded’.
While Virginia clearly felt conflicted and confused by sexual intimacy, the family strongly refutes the allegations of childhood rape, said by some to have contributed to her recurrent nervous breakdowns.
Whatever the cause, ultimately her fragile mental state became too much to bear. In what has undoubtedly added to Virginia’s myth and mystique — but, lest we forget, was also a terrible family tragedy — she committed suicide by drowning in 1941.
Plagued all her life by severe mental illness, she would struggle to sleep or eat, hear voices, and at times could be violent. As she wrote in her final note to Leonard: ‘I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another one of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time.’
And so on March 28, 1941, Virginia l eft their home at Rodmell in Sussex, walked to the nearby River Ouse, filled her pockets with stones and waded in. She could swim but allowed herself to drown. Her husband, Leonard, discovered her missing within hours but her body was only found three weeks later, by children playing by the river.
More than seven decades on, I am increasingly conscious of a responsibility to safeguard Virginia’s memory. As the Bloomsbury set are brought to life once again by this latest TV series, I’m struck by how few of the original members, or even people who knew them, remain with us. Representing the group as they really were, without a modern perspective clouding our view, becomes harder with every generation that discovers them.
Yes, I admit I still feel a burst of pride when I hear of shows like this being made. Virginia’s enduring appeal is, I like to think, due as much to her intellect and sharp observations as to her colourful personal life — yet it’s the family memories and personal anecdotes that remain most precious.
I have read Virginia’s letters and diaries from every stage of her life, from the youthful excitement of Bloomsbury to the bouts of depression and madness. I cherish the Duncan Grant paintings that hang in my parents’ house — and the table that still stands in my parents’ kitchen, on which the Woolfs started the Hogarth Press (the printing press on which they published T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in 1923).
And I’ve always loved the stories about my great-aunt and uncle: how Leonard invited T. S. Eliot for lunch and only gave him ‘a bag of chips and a bottle of beer’; how Leonard was so careful with money that he used newspaper instead of lavatory paper at home; how Virginia likened Tom Eliot to ‘a great toad with jewelled eyes’ and how s he announced her engagement: ‘I am to marry a penniless Jew.’
But above all, I cherish my father’s recollections. He lived in Leonard’s London home for 30 years — as close as father and son — and resembles him more as the years go by. At a recent conference in the U.S., the interviewer said: ‘It is striking, your resemblance to Leonard.’ My father replied: ‘Of course. It’s the family face.’
So while I welcome the continued celebration of my great-aunt, nothing I have read or seen has managed to conjure up that vanished world of Virginia and Leonard Woolf as poignantly as my father. Often he would describe them at work — Leonard digging in the garden, wearing old corduroys, Virginia writing with a rollie cigarette hanging off her lip and a plank across her armchair as a writing desk.
He still fondly recalls his childhood visits: ‘It was so busy. They were great workers ... they’d go away on holiday but most of the time they tended to work.
‘What was nice was being left on your own to amuse yourself — you weren’t entertained. They got on with their lives and didn’t expect you to interrupt them. Or Leonard would be up in his study typing away and Virginia would be in her little hut in the garden writing. But they had their circle of friends, and in the evening they would be listening to music or playing bowls on the lawn.’
This is a quiet, industrious, contented side of Virginia that you don’t often hear about, still less see, with the latest homage Life In Squares being no exception.
Perhaps inevitably in this anythinggoes age, the steamy BBC drama is a long way from the reality of their lives in those early Bloomsbury days — though I can’t deny it makes compelling television.
Nearly a century on, it’s hard to imagine what Virginia and Vanessa would have made of it. I, for one, prefer to think of them in softer, more innocent times.
Virginia’s half brother fondled her on a table