Virginia Woolf's Influential Forebears

Julia Margaret Cameron, Anny Thackeray Ritchie and Julia Prinsep Stephen

Marion Dell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137497284
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria europea

Virginia Woolf's Influential Forebears reveals under-acknowledged nineteenth-century legacies which shaped Woolf as a writing woman. Marion Dell identifies significant lines of descent from the lives and works of Woolf's great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, the writer she called aunt, Anny Thackeray Ritchie, and her mother, Julia Prinsep Stephen.

1

‘And Finally Virginia’: Cameron, Ritchie, Stephen and Woolf’s Constructs of her Ancestry

Woolf flamboyantly constructs her own ancestry: ‘Marie Antoinette loved my ancestor: hence he was exiled; hence the Pattles, the barrel that burst, and finally Virginia’ (L6: 461). She here traces a direct line to her great-great-grandfather, Ambroise-Pierre Antoine de L’Étang, who was born in 1757. Family story has it that as a dashing young Chevalier he was appointed to the household of Marie Antoinette, but left France hurriedly when he became too close to the young Queen.¹ He went to Pondicherry, a French settlement in India, where he married Thérèse-Josephe Blin de Grincourt. They lived remarkably long lives through some of the most turbulent and exciting of times. They faced death, defeat and loss on many occasions, but they were resilient and adaptable survivors. Had de L’Étang remained in Paris he might have been guillotined in the Revolution, but soon after he arrived in Pondicherry it was taken by British forces. He again managed to survive possible death or captivity, allegedly by negotiating with the English commander. His equestrian skills and experience were in high demand, and for the rest of his life he remained in India training and breeding horses for the British East India Company and the Nawab of Oudh. He died in 1840, aged 83. While de L’Étang led an adventurous, nomadic life, Thérèse frequently travelled back to France with her daughters. Finally she moved there permanently, dying in Paris in 1866 just three months short of her 100th birthday.

Pattledom

Possibly de L’Étang’s most lasting legacy was his looks. His aquiline, aristocratic nose and deep-set hooded eyes evidence dominant genes, clearly seen through the generations, and inherited by both Julia Stephen and Virginia Woolf. Anglicised versions of his daughters’ names, Julie, Adéline and Virginie, were also passed down and continue to be popular in the family. His daughter, Adéline de L’Étang, married the infamous James Pattle in Calcutta. James and Adéline had seven daughters who survived to adulthood and who collectively became known as Pattledom.² One of these Pattle sisters was Julia Margaret Cameron and another Maria (Mia) Jackson, Woolf’s maternal grandmother. Woolf describes them:

Half French, half English, they were all excitable, unconventional, extreme in one form or another, all of a distinguished presence, tall, impressive, and gifted with a curious mixture of shrewdness and romance. (E4: 280)

James Pattle died suddenly in Calcutta and Adéline decided to repatriate his body, preserved in a barrel of brandy. During the voyage to England the barrel allegedly burst, and Adéline also died. These incidents gave rise to yet more lurid, sensational and speculative stories, exploited not least by Woolf herself (E4: 280; L6: 461).

Woolf’s problematic response to her past

Though Woolf relishes the romance and scandal of these ancestral narratives, her retellings reveal her conflicted response to her past. She frequently renders her relationship invisible. In her diary she remembers Lady Strachey telling her ‘stories of beautiful dead Pattles & Dalrymples [...] how “Dal” was charming; though not a good man to marry; how Dr Jackson was so handsome & kind’ (D1: 107). However, she disassociates herself by not claiming ‘Dr Jackson’ as ‘my grandfather’. In her essay ‘Pattledom’ she notes how, had it not been for James Pattle, a great many ‘ladies of beauty and charm and wit and character’, including Lady Troubridge herself, would not have existed (E4: 280). Woolf again omits herself from this matrilineage; but must have enjoyed the in-joke. As many of her readers were aware, James Pattle was her great-grandfather as well as Lady Troubridge’s. Without him, she too would not have existed, so she must also be one of the ladies with beauty, charm and wit. In a playful letter to Ethel Smyth she does overtly claim kinship to the Pattles and the Chevalier de L’Étang (L6: 461). This letter, dated 12 January 1941, just a few weeks before her death, reveals that her fascination with, and reinvention of, her ‘large connection’ lasted throughout her life.

Woolf, Cameron, Stephen and Ritchie

Woolf’s relationships with the three of her forebears in this study vary in large part because of the different ways in which she knew them. Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–79) was the oldest of the three.³ She was born in Calcutta but spent her formative childhood with her grandmother, Thérèse de L’Étang, in Versailles. She married Charles Hay Cameron in Calcutta, where she had five children and played an influential role as a society and official government hostess. When they retired to Dimbola, the house she created at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, she began the photographic career which revealed her as an innovative artist. Financial problems led the Camerons to sell Dimbola and move to their coffee estates in Ceylon, where she died. Woolf, born in 1882, therefore never met her and had to rely on the memoirs and anecdotes of others for her material.

Julia Prinsep Stephen (1846–95) was the youngest daughter of Cameron’s sister, Maria (Mia), who was also born in India and lived there with her husband John Jackson, a doctor.⁴ Stephen was born in Calcutta; she lived there until she was two, when she was sent to join her sisters, Adeline and Mary (later Vaughan and Fisher), also being brought up by their great-grandmother Thérèse de L’Étang in Paris, and by their aunt and uncle, Sara and Thoby Prinsep, in London. When John Jackson returned from India the family moved to Frant, in Kent. Julia married Herbert Duckworth there in 1867. Only three years after their marriage Herbert Duckworth died suddenly leaving Julia with two young children, George and Stella. Gerald was born six weeks later. During this traumatic period Julia was supported by family and friends, including Anny Ritchie and her sister Minny, then married to Leslie Stephen. In 1878, Julia married the then widowed Leslie Stephen, who moved, with his daughter Laura, into Julia’s home in Hyde Park Gate. Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia and Adrian were born there between 1879 and 1883. Julia Stephen died when Virginia was 13. Woolf therefore knew her mother, but only with what she termed the ‘curious focus’ (Sketch: 78) of a child. Again she was reliant on the memories of others, especially Anny Ritchie and Leslie Stephen.

Anny Thackeray Ritchie (1837–1919), daughter of the novelist William Thackeray, was Leslie Stephen’s sister-in-law by his first marriage, so not genetically connected to Woolf.⁵ However, Woolf recognises her close family connection by always calling her Aunt Anny, and Ritchie embraces the role. She was born in London, but at the age of three, when her mother became mentally ill, she and Minny were sent to live with their grandmother in Paris. They later returned to Thackeray’s grand Kensington home, where they became part of his literary and artistic circle. This included Cameron, who became Ritchie’s close friend and mentor. Thackeray died leaving many debts and the sisters had to move to a smaller house. Ritchie continued to develop her writing career from a sense of vocation, but also as a source of income. When Minny married Leslie Stephen, he moved into the sisters’ home. Despite differences in temperament, Ritchie remained close to him after Minny’s death and throughout her life continued to care for her niece Laura. She did not marry Richmond Ritchie until she was 40. They had two children. Unusually for a married woman and a mother at that time, she continued her increasingly successful and prolific writing career. She visited Freshwater frequently, and when the Camerons moved to Ceylon she bought The Porch, a guest cottage they had built near Dimbola. In her last years she lived there permanently. Woolf was 37 when Ritchie died, so they knew each other, and each other’s work, well. Ritchie spanned the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, becoming what Woolf called a ‘transparent medium’, mediating for her the worlds of Cameron and Stephen.

Interconnections: Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen

There are striking similarities and interconnections in the lives of Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen, which influenced Woolf. The Pattles, Camerons, Prinseps, Thackerays and Ritchies were part of a powerful Anglo-Indian network which also included families whose younger generations became Woolf’s friends and relations, such as the Stracheys, Grants, Dickinsons and Smyths. Their Indian and French connections gave them fluency in languages, a cosmopolitan outlook, a love of travel and the arts, and a wide social network. They were well educated, though not academic. Their sophistication and cultural confidence, and their delight in each other’s company and in laughter and amusement, offered Woolf an alternative to her paternal inheritance from the Clapham sect. Circumstances in their childhoods and early lives meant that they were also independent, resourceful, self-reliant and unconventional. Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen provided role models of lively, independent, professional women. Woolf had the problem of negotiating their legacies not only as Victorian antecedents, but also as successful women artists. Cameron was a highly acclaimed, if controversial, photographer; Ritchie a popular bestselling writer. Stephen is to some extent an exception. Her writing was largely unpublished, and her nursing, though she approached it seriously as a profession, was unpaid.

Like Woolf, all three were concerned with the conditions of women’s lives. While Woolf’s involvement was largely through her writing, and focused on the daughters of educated men, her forebears were also actively involved in helping women of all classes. As Sylvia Wolf argues, ‘Cameron’s response to beauty, eradicating class as it did, was so extreme as to constitute an almost political statement. Her tableaux are parables of radical democracy’ (1998: 15). She gave dignity and employment to women, and men, of other races in her Ceylon portraits (Ford 2003: 195–203). Ritchie’s essays such as ‘Toilers and Spinsters’ reveal her concern for the opportunities for employment and education for all women, as I discuss in Chapter 3. She and Stephen shared an active interest in philanthropy: visiting workhouses, housing developments for the poor, hospitals in London, and in Ritchie’s case also in France. They worked within an influential and radical campaigning network which included Octavia Hill, Charles Booth and Jeanie Senior.

Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen were part of a supportive network in both their domestic and working lives. Their correspondence with family and friends was prolific but anyone now tweeting or texting will be familiar with these quotidian minutiae of women’s lives which Woolf satirises as their ‘enormous daily volubility’ (E4: 379). The writing and recording of lives was of crucial interest to all four women. Their auto/biographical writing elides boundaries between fact and fiction, public and private, domestic and professional. All wrote and kept huge collections of letters, which along with photographs were circulated around the family. All except Stephen kept a diary or journal, albums and scrapbooks. It is through such a bricolage of shared lives that family history is transmitted to the next generation, as Woolf explores in Night and Day and The Years, and as she herself did through her own letters and photograph albums.

Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen provided Woolf with a model of a strong sisterhood. Leslie Stephen noted their ‘ardent friendship’ and love and support of each other. He instanced how Julia Stephen helped Anny ‘copy and arrange her manuscripts’, and posed for Cameron’s photographs, and how all three ‘engaged in the cult of Tennyson’ (MB: 42). They were instrumental in constructing and promoting each other’s work, and the professional reputations of Cameron and Ritchie. Stephen wrote the DNB entry on Cameron, celebrating her generosity and capacity for friendship, as well as her poems and translations and her photography which gained medals in England, Europe and America (JDS: 214–15). Cameron compiled a personalised album of photographs for Ritchie, playfully inscribed, ‘Fatal to Photographs are Cups of tea and Coffee, Candles & Lamps, & Children’s fingers’ (Olsen 2003: 178). Ritchie’s novel The Story of Elizabeth (1863) is dedicated to Cameron, whose guest she was at Freshwater during its completion. It is partly set on the Isle of Wight. Old Kensington (1873) is dedicated to Stephen’s children, Georgie and Stella, among others. Ritchie used Stephen’s home, Saxonbury, as a setting and fictionalised Stephen as Dorothea. She dedicated Miss Angel (1875), her biography of Angelica Kauffman, to her. Both Stephen and Ritchie were the subjects of Cameron’s photographs. Ritchie played an active role in the public presentation and promotion of Cameron’s work by, for instance, reviewing her 1865 exhibition at Colnaghi’s in the Pall Mall Gazette, and urging contacts at the South London Museum (now the V&A) to buy Cameron’s photographs.

Such memorialisation, collaboration, celebration and promotion of each other’s work prefigures relationships between members of the Bloomsbury Group. Also shadowing the Bloomsbury Group are two artistic circles in which Cameron, Stephen and Ritchie were involved, those at Little Holland House and at Freshwater. The Little Holland House Circle was a salon run by Cameron’s sister Sara and her husband, Thoby Prinsep, at their London home. The artist G.F. Watts was resident there for nearly 30 years and Thackeray, Tennyson, Browning, Ellen Terry, Burne-Jones and Holman Hunt were among the luminaries who frequented it. This coterie is an intertext in Ritchie’s Old Kensington (OK: 138) and in Night and Day (N&D: 106). Woolf imaginatively recreates her mother there (Sketch: 86–8), but her aesthetic transformations of such scenes from the past rely on appropriation of others’ accounts, often her older cousin Herbert Fisher’s or Ritchie’s. The Freshwater Circle, which Ritchie fictionalises in From an Island (1868–69), included the Camerons at Dimbola, the Tennysons at Farringford, and Watts and the Prinseps at The Briary.⁶ From the 1860s Freshwater became increasingly bohemian and popular. Frequent visitors included Thackeray, Ritchie, the Stephen family and Lewis Carroll. Woolf appropriates Ritchie’s and Stephen’s accounts of life there as source material for Freshwater and ‘The Searchlight’, as I discuss in Chapter 4, but typically obscures them and her own connection with them. In ‘The Old Order’ (E2: 167–76), her review of Henry James’ autobiography, Woolf again distances herself by constructing the Victorians as other. She notes positive qualities in their cultural coteries but employs parody and hyperbole to mock their cult of hero worship, distancing her own generation from such excess. James was an habitué of both these circles. Woolf singles out his sharp observations of both the great and lesser figures of the epoch, instancing George Eliot, Mrs Greville or Lady Waterford. However, Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen are completely written out of Woolf’s account of these artistic groups, although they and their families were founder members and provided the locations for those she specifically names.

As a woman, Woolf cast herself as a member of the Outsiders’ Society (TG: 309). Woolf was arguing from a gendered perspective, but her Anglo-Indian inheritance also created a social tension. Victoria Olsen convincingly argues that like the Pattles, Woolf and Vanessa Bell sought out the company of others with similar backgrounds, ‘Little Holland House, Freshwater, and Bloomsbury may have seemed exclusive, and peopled by England’s elite, but they were born of a feeling of distance and alienation from the small, closed worlds of English society’ (2003: 267). Possibly because of this perceived alienation, Woolf’s work reveals a strong sense of the stability and importance of place and property, for instance in repeated constructs of 22 Hyde Park Gate, and her beloved summer home Talland House in St Ives, as locations in Night and Day, To the Lighthouse, The Years and A Sketch of the Past; just as Ritchie utilises her home in Old Kensington, and Stephen uses hers in her children’s stories.

The absent mother and mother–daughter relationships are significant tropes in Woolf’s work, especially in To the Lighthouse and The Years, and are another part of her literary and familial inheritance. Family rupture caused by loss of the mother was a stock scenario of Victorian literature and a reality in Victorian lives. Herbert Duckworth’s and Laura Stephen’s mothers died when they were three. Cameron and Ritchie grew up separated from their mothers, effectively orphaned. The Pattle sisters gathered into the extended family network orphaned children and those sent home from India, as Ritchie describes three-year-old Dolly in her novel, Old Kensington (OK: 8–10). Stepmothers and surrogate mothers were common in Victorian families, especially Anglo-Indian ones. Ritchie took in the motherless daughters of her cousin Edward Thackeray. Cameron adopted one child and fostered others. Mia Jackson lived with her orphaned Vaughan grandchildren. Julia Stephen was Laura Stephen’s stepmother and surrogate mother for others. Woolf felt neglected by her mother and was distraught when she died; but the loss of a mother was not unusual at that time. It is nevertheless reflected in the tension in Woolf’s work between the links forged with the past through long-lived parents and broken links caused by the death of the mother.

Woolf’s narratives of Cameron, R...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Family Tree
• Introduction: ‘Born into a Large Connection’
• 1 ‘And Finally Virginia’: Cameron, Ritchie, Stephen and Woolf’s Constructs of her Ancestry
• 2 ‘Knocking at the Door’: Heredity, Legacy and Transition in Night and Day
• 3 ‘The Transparent Medium’: Anny Thackeray Ritchie
• 4 ‘Take my lens. I bequeath it to my descendents’: Julia Margaret Cameron
• 5 ‘Closer than any of the living’: Julia Prinsep Stephen
• 6 ‘Let us be our great grandmothers’: Heredity and Legacy in The Years
• Conclusion: Invisible Presences’ and ‘Transparent Mediums’: Virginia Woolf’s Nineteenth-Century Legacies
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index