Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Virginia Woolf and G. B. S.

On the day before Bernard Shaw's ninety-third birthday in l949, a sale of his library in London attracted press attention. Up for auction at Sotheby's were shelves of books he had emptied from the flat he was vacating at Whitehall Court. He now lived entirely at Shaw's Corner, the former rectory at Ayot St. Lawrence in Hertfordshire. To push up the prices he had put, in the spidery holograph of his last years, autobiographical flyleaf inscriptions in some of the most rare volumes, including T. E. Lawrence's privately printed Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and editions of Bunyan, Dante, and Shakespeare. The prices--Londoners had been struggling in straitened circumstances since the war--were disappointing. Lawrence's memoir of Arabia, which might have brought many thousands between the wars, fetched only £460. An original edition of Aubrey Beardsley's Morte Darthur, not quite as valuable, brought only £58. Without Shaw's flyleaf assistance, a presentation copy of A Room of One's Own from Virginia Woolf brought a meager £6.10. ¹

Had Shaw written an inscription in the Woolf book, what might he have disclosed? I think we can discover that, for in her lifetime he told her. Yet even devotees of Virginia Woolf see little association with G.B.S. other than that in March 1907, when Virginia and her brother Adrian took over, from Shaw, the lease of 29 Fitzroy Square, where he had lived with his mother until his marriage in 1898. Vanessa was now Mrs. Clive Bell, and the unmarried Stephen siblings needed their own address, preferably within walking distance of Bloomsbury. Although the tall row house with iron railings was run down and not as respectable as Gordon Square, Virginia's builder had checked for her with local police, who reassured her, as Duncan Grant, a friend--and neighbor with two rooms nearby at number 22--recalled, that a relic of earlier grandeur "was a beadle to march round the square . . . in a top-hat and a tail-coat piped with red and brass buttons." It would cost £150 to refurbish the interior to her liking, a rather large investment for a house with a lease to expire in October 1911, when the Stephens relocated to 38 Brunswick Square. But at Fitzroy Square, with most of its houses broken up into flats, studios, and offices, Virginia and Adrian were rare tenants, occupying the entire structure, complete to cook, maid, front-door bell, and a dog, Hans. ²

While she remained satisfied with the house and the neighborhood, Virginia had always seemed impatient with the works of the previous occupant. Living with his ghost changed nothing. "Bernard Shaw kept us on the rack for 3 hours last night," she complained to a friend about Shaw's new, and talky, country-house comedy, Misalliance, then at the Duke of York's Theatre; "His mind," she deplored, "is that of a disgustingly precocious child of 2--a sad and improper spectacle to my thinking." ³ Her outraged tone made her sound less like a Bloomsbury rebel than her father's daughter. Shaw had long identified Sir Leslie Stephen with what he called the sect of "Secular Morality--the party of Matthew Arnold, George Eliot and Mrs Humphry Ward, of the Ethical Societies of America, of South Place [Chapel], Leslie Stephen and so on." ⁴

There was no reason for Virginia to encounter Shaw in person before she married Leonard Woolf. Since one of her conditions for their marriage in 1912 was that he could not return to Colonial Service administration--he had spent nearly seven years in Ceylon, then considered part of India--he sought work in London that might exploit his experience. Becoming involved in journalism and in Labour Party politics, he was soon involved with Sidney and Beatrice Webb and Bernard Shaw. ⁵ The...