Woolf & “Taboo Questions”

TOWARD THE END of Part 1 of her five-part biography of Virginia Woolf, Vivane Forrester writes: “I want to hear it all; I want to be told everything.” By “everything,” Forrester means that she wants to know the answers—even if they are unpleasant—to “taboo questions” about Woolf’s life, such as why Woolf’s anti-Semitism is “almost never mentioned, never or rarely alluded to, and sometimes even denied” in critical discussions of her work. Taboo questions—and the complicated, sometimes contradictory answers to them—are what occupy Forrester’s biography, and at the end of this book, which won the Prix Goncourt de la Biographie in 2009, I certainly felt that I knew everything there is to know about many of the personal issues that have occupied Woolf scholars for many years.

Working against the assumptions about Woolf put forth by Quentin Bell in his 1972 biography of his aunt, Forrester provides a number of revelations, with the aim of showing how Woolf was not the “mad,” “frigid” woman Virginia’s husband Leonard Woolf constructed and Bell reinforced. These revelations—based on Forrester’s reading of Woolf’s diary and letters, as well as the letters of Leonard, Lytton Strachey, and Vanessa Bell—include: Strachey urged Leonard to propose to Virginia as a way to escape a dreadful, colonialist job in Ceylon, where he whipped Arabs and oversaw executions; Virginia’s anti-Semitism, shared by other members of the Bloomsbury circle, led her to exclude Leonard’s mother from their wedding, and eighteen years after their marriage, Virginia continued to regret “marrying a Jew”; Leonard took revenge on Virginia for her actions toward his mother by convincing Virginia she was not fit to have children, without ever taking her to see the doctors who supported his view; Virginia’s loneliness as a result of not having children caused her to “spoil her sister’s marriage” by flirting with Vanessa’s husband, Clive Bell; Leonard suggested a suicide pact to Virginia should Hitler’s Nazi Party invade England at the beginning of World War II; without Leonard, Virginia attempted suicide several weeks before her death, “return[ing] from a walk soaked, distraught” but claiming she had “slipped in a stream”; Octavia Wilberforce, a doctor with no expertise regarding mental health issues, influenced Virginia as much as Leonard and Vanessa in the last days of her life, urging her to stop working as a solution to her depression, the equivalent of the “rest cure” Virginia dreaded.

There is no doubt that some of this information is helpful in understanding the complicated relationships between Virginia, Leonard, members of their families, and their friends and how these relationships influenced Woolf’s work. For example, the biographical information in Part 2 about Virginia’s father’s (Leslie Stephen’s) grief after the death of his wife Julia, which was extreme to the point of “bordering on necrophilia,” facilitates a complex understanding one of Woolf’s last pieces of writing, a sketch titled “The Symbol,” written a month before Virginia’s death. Forrester relays how Virginia and the other Stephen children were “forbidden to grieve with [Leslie] around their shared memories and their shattered life” but were expected to read Leslie’s memorial to Julia, The Mausoleum Book, which “broadcasts with great emotion the intimacy of the couple.” Further, Forrester details how, after Julia’s death, Leslie came to rely on Stella Duckworth, Julia’s daughter from her first marriage, in the way he had his wife, to the degree that he suggested an intimate relationship to Stella (but did not act on it) and resisted her marriage to Jack Hills. Leslie Stephen’s approach to his own grief, Forrester argues, created “an atmosphere of incest” in the family that allowed George and Gerald Duckworth to sexually abuse Virginia and Vanessa. Despite feeling rage toward her father for creating this atmosphere, Virginia would care for Leslie in his last days, as he was dying from cancer, and feel “remorse” for making Leslie feel ashamed about his...