The Voyage Out Read Free

nothing so simple as a villain, but by all known accounts the word “difficult” would be a generous description of him as husband and father. A prominent historian and biographer (he would probably be both proud and horrified to learn that, almost a century after his death, he is primarily known as Virginia’s father), he believed himself to be a genius, worried that he was not a genius, and laid claim to all the privileges to which genius at its most romantic may consider itself entitled. He suffered noisy, melodramatic agonies (over his work, over household finances); he threw tantrums; he required extravagant amounts of attention, sympathy, and reassurance and, receiving them, often demanded more. His determination not to suffer fools gladly, or at all, could terminate a dinner party; and his idea of an ideal evening’s entertainment often involved all present sitting silent as he read aloud.
    At the same time he did in fact attend carefully to young Virginia’s education, gave her excellent books to read, took genuine pleasure in her precocity. She recognized his failings but loved him, and she and Vanessa argued the subject of his selfishness versus his goodness all their lives.
    He was first married to one of Thackeray’s daughters, with whom he had a “backward” (possibly autistic) daughter named Laura, and after his first wife died he married Julia Duckworth, a widow with three children of her own, one of them a son namedGerald, who would sexually molest Virginia when she was six and would, over two decades later, publish
The Voyage Out
under the imprimatur of his publishing company, Duckworth & Co.
    Julia, Virginia’s mother, was a woman of great beauty and magnetism, the willing handmaiden to Leslie’s tyrannical fragility, and while Julia and Leslie Stephen are most directly portrayed as Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay in
To the Lighthouse
, traces of one or both of them appear throughout Woolf’s fiction. Helen Ambrose’s husband, Ridley, is a version of Leslie, similarly self-absorbed but far less demanding; and some aspects of Virginia’s complicated feelings about Julia—rage and romance prominent among them—may have informed the invention of Clarissa Dalloway, that shimmering vision of aloof sophistication who appears, enchants, and vanishes.
    When Virginia was thirteen Julia died of rheumatic fever and, more ambiguously, of the incessant strain that accrued from having been married to Leslie. She was just forty-nine. The day after Julia’s death, when Virginia was taken in to see the body, she believed she saw a man sitting on the edge of her deceased mother’s bed. Although she recorded no details about the hallucination (she was half convinced she’d simply pretended to hallucinate, to draw attention to herself) one thinks of Rachel’s dream in
The Voyage Out
, in which she finds herself “… alone with a little deformed man who squatted on the floor gibbering, with long nails. His face was pitted and like the face of an animal.”
    After her mother’s death Virginia suffered the first of the breakdowns that would plague her the rest of her life. She became so anxious that for months she was not allowed to read or study, and was kept to the simplest possible regimen of rest, regular meals, and short walks. She often became hysterical and paranoid; as she would write years later in the notes for her essay “A Sketch of the Past,” “I was terrified of people—used to turn red if spoken to.” 1
    After Julia Stephen died her place was taken by Stella, Julia’s daughter from her previous marriage. Stella consoled Leslie in his transports of grief and guilt. She managed the Stephen household.When she married, Leslie proposed that she and her new husband live in the Stephen house; the young couple managed to mollify him by moving into a house several doors down. Within two years of Julia’s death, Stella died herself.
    Leslie then turned to eighteen-year-old Vanessa to be his new helpmate, and