Gubar Susan - A Room of Ones Own (Annotated)

Copyright 1929 by Harcourt, Inc.

Copyright renewed 1957 by Leonard Woolf

Annotated Edition copyright 2005 by Harcourt, Inc.

Introduction copyright 2005 by Susan Gubar

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Woolf, Virginia, 18821941.

A room of ones own/Virginia Woolf; annotated and with an introduction by Susan Gubar; Mark Hussey, general editor.1st Harvest ed.
p. cm.(A Harvest Book)

1. Woolf, Virginia, 18821941Authorship. 2. LiteratureWomen authorsHistory and criticismTheory, etc. 3. Women and literatureGreat Britain. 4. Women authorsEconomic conditions. 5. Women authorsSocial conditions. 6. AuthorshipSex differences. I. Gubar, Susan, 1944 II. Title.
PR6045.O72Z474 2005
823'-912dc22 2005004202
ISBN 978-0156-03041-0

e ISBN 978-0-544-53516-9
v1.0215

V IRGINIA W OOLF was born into what she once described as a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth century world. Her parents, Leslie and Julia Stephen, both previously widowed, began their marriage in 1878 with four young children: Laura (18701945), the daughter of Leslie Stephen and his first wife, Harriet Thackeray (18401875); and George (18681934), Gerald (18701937), and Stella Duckworth (18691897), the children of Julia Prinsep (18461895) and Herbert Duckworth (18331870). In the first five years of their marriage, the Stephens had four more children. Their third child, Virginia, was born in 1882, the year her father began work on the monumental Dictionary of National Biography that would earn him a knighthood in 1902. Virginia, her sister, Vanessa (18791961), and brothers, Thoby (18801906) and Adrian (18831948), all were born in the tall house at 22 Hyde Park Gate in London where the eight children lived with numerous servants, their eminent and irascible father, and their beautiful mother, who, in Woolfs words, was in the very centre of that great Cathedral space that was childhood.

Woolfs parents knew many of the intellectual luminaries of the late Victorian era well, counting among their close friends novelists such as George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James. Woolfs great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron was a pioneering photographer who made portraits of the poets Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, of the naturalist Charles Darwin, and of the philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle, among many others. Beginning in the year Woolf was born, the entire Stephen family moved to Talland House in St. Ives, Cornwall, for the summer. There the younger children would spend their days playing cricket in the garden, frolicking on the beach, or taking walks along the coast, from where they could look out across the bay to the Godrevy lighthouse.

In addition to the premature deaths of her mother and half sister, there were other miseries in Woolfs childhood. In autobiographical writings and letters, Woolf referred to the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her two older half brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth. George, in one instance, explained his behavior to a family doctor as his effort to comfort his half sister for the fatal illness of their father. Sir Leslie died from cancer in 1904, and shortly thereafter the four Stephen childrenVanessa, Virginia, Thoby, and Adrianmoved together to the then-unfashionable London neighborhood of Bloomsbury. When Thoby Stephen began to bring his Cambridge University friends to the house on Thursday evenings, what would later become famous as the Bloomsbury Group began to form.

In an article marking the centenary of her fathers birth, Woolf recalled his allowing a girl of fifteen the free run of a large and quite unexpurgated libraryan unusual opportunity for a Victorian young woman, and evidence of the high regard Sir Leslie had for his daughters intellectual talents. In her diary, she recorded the many different kinds of books her father recommended to herbiographies and memoirs, philosophy, history, and poetry. Although he believed that women should be as well educated as men, Woolfs mother held that to serve is the fulfilment of womens highest nature. The young Stephen children were first taught at home by their mother and father, with little success. Woolf herself received no formal education beyond some classes in Greek and Latin in the Ladies Department of Kings College in London, beginning in the fall of 1897. In 1899 she began lessons in Greek with Clara Pater, sister of the renowned Victorian critic Walter Pater, and in 1902 she was tutored in the classics by Janet Case (who also later involved her in work for womens suffrage). Such homeschooling was a source of some bitterness later in her life, as she recognized the advantages that derived from the expensive educations her brothers and half brothers received at private schools and university. Yet she also realized that her fathers encouragement of her obviously keen intellect had given her an eclectic foundation. In the early years of Bloomsbury, she reveled in the opportunity to discuss ideas with her brother Thoby and his friends, among whom were Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, and E. M. Forster. From them, she heard, too, about an intense young man named Leonard Woolf, whom she had met briefly when visiting Thoby at Cambridge, and also in 1904 when he came to dinner at Gordon Square just before leaving for Ceylon (now called Sri Lanka), where he was to administer a far-flung outpost of the British Empire.

Virginia Woolfs first publications were unsigned reviews and essays in an Anglo-Catholic newspaper called the Guardian, beginning in December 1904. In the fall of 1906, she and Vanessa went with a family friend, Violet Dickinson, to meet their brothers in Greece. The trip was spoiled by Vanessas falling ill, and when she returned to London, Virginia found both her brother Thobywho had returned earlierand her sister seriously ill. After a misdiagnosis by his doctors, Thoby died from typhoid fever on November 20, leaving Virginia to maintain a cheerful front while her sister and Violet Dickinson recovered from their own illnesses. Two days after Thobys death, Vanessa agreed to marry his close friend Clive Bell.

While living in Bloomsbury, Woolf had begun to write a novel that would go through many drafts before it was published in 1915 as The Voyage Out. In these eady years of independence, her social circle widened. She became close to the art critic Roger Fry, organizer of the First Post-Impressionist Exhibition in London in 1910, and also entered the orbit of the famed literary hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell (cruelly caricatured as Hermione Roddice in D. H. Lawrences 1920 novel Women in Love). Her political consciousness also began to emerge. In 1910 she volunteered for the movement for womens suffrage. She also participated that February in a daring hoax that embarrassed the British Navy and led to questions being asked in the House of Commons: She and her brother Adrian, together with some other Cambridge friends, gained access to a secret warship by dressing up and posing as the Emperor of Abyssinia and his retinue. The Dreadnought Hoax was front-page news, complete with photographs of the phony Ethiopians with flowing robes, blackened faces, and false beards.

To the British establishment, one of the most embarrassing aspects of the Dreadnought affair was that a woman had taken part in the hoax. Vanessa Bell was concerned at what might have happened to her sister had she been discovered on the ship. She was also increasingly worried about Virginias erratic health, and by the early summer 1910 had discussed with Dr. George Savage, one of the familys doctors, the debilitating headaches her sister suffered; Dr. Savage prescribed several weeks in a nursing home. Another element in Vanessas concern was that Virginia was twenty-eight and still unmarried. Clive Bell and Virginia had, in fact, engaged in a hurtful flirtation soon after the birth of Vanessas first child in 1908. Although she had been proposed to twice in 1909 and once in 1911, Virginia had not taken these offers very seriously.