Week 19 - 19th Century Quaker Women Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 16 (Summer 1998), 1-22. 1 2 “Caroline Emelia Stephen (1834-1909) and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941): A Quaker Caroline Emelia Stephen was the youngest of this generation of Stephen siblings and the only Influence on Modern English Literature,” Quaker Theology, 3 (2000) by Alison M. girl. There are two distinctive and contradictory portraits of her that emerge. The first has its roots in Leslie Stephen’s book of family remembrances, The Mausoleum Book, in which he Lewis, Ph.D. writes that Caroline’s health was damaged and her life ruined by an unrequited love who left Caroline Emelia Stephen has enjoyed a long-standing reputation among Friends as a Quaker and died in India (54-5). theologian. Quaker Strongholds (1891) is considered a "Quaker classic;" one hundred years Though there is absolutely no substantiation for this story, it has taken on a life of its own and is after its first publication, Friends General Conference book catalog calls it "one of the clearest repeatedly retold by most of the Woolf scholars and critics who do not ignore the existence of visions of our faith." Stephen was also the author of Light Arising: Thoughts on the Central Caroline entirely. Quentin Bell, Woolf’s nephew and biographer, follows his grandfather’s lead Radiance (1908) and The Vision of Faith (1911). in forwarding the theory that Caroline’s ill health was due to a broken heart. The picture he People who know Caroline Stephen and her writings are often unaware that Virginia Woolf, presents of Caroline is that of "an intelligent woman who fell, nevertheless, into the role of the one of the most innovative forces within the genre of the modern English novel, was her niece. imbecile Victorian female" and who "at the age of twenty-three settled down to become an Woolf used concepts of psychology and relativity to produce new ways of expressing invalid and an old maid" (Bell, 6-7). This romantic story of a lost love persists in the most consciousness in works such as Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). In recent Woolf biography by James King: "Early in life she had fallen in love with a young man addition to her progressive artistry, she is known for her strong stands on feminism and who had not been responsive and had taken himself off to India. In Milly [CES], Leslie saw a pacifism. Copies of Light Arising and Quaker Strongholds were in Virginia Woolf’s private woman whose life had been destroyed by a broken heart. Leslie saw Milly as weak-willed and library to the end of her life. So much of the old forms and the family ties of her past life were indecisive"." (25). jettisoned when she and her siblings recreated themselves in Bloomsbury that it seems unlikely We are indebted to feminist scholar Jane Marcus for being the first to look at Caroline Stephen that she would have retained these books for purely sentimental reasons. They must have been seriously in the realm of Woolf criticism. Marcus put forth an alternative viewpoint, espoused meaningful to her on some deeper level. by Woolf herself, that Caroline’s ill health was rather due to the fact that she played the role of In light of this, it is informative to look at the link between these two women, who were both "a dutiful Victorian daughter and sister, nursing at the sickbeds and deathbeds of her family" outstanding in their respective fields, and particularly interesting to consider the influence of ("Niece," 15). Woolf recognized in her aunt the same pattern played out in the lives of her own Stephen’s Quakerism upon Woolf’s writing. mother and half-sister and stated in her aunt’s obituary that "attendance upon her mother during First, some brief family background. The Stephen family, for at least two generations prior to her last long illness injured her health so seriously that she never fully recovered" (Marcus, Caroline, was part of the so-called "Clapham Sect," a group of Anglican evangelicals, known "Thinking," 29). for their progressive social stands such as the abolition of slavery. Her grandfather, James Caroline’s mother died in 1875; Caroline suffered another collapse the same year while caring Stephen, was involved with this group from the beginning, and her mother was Catherine Venn, for Leslie and his daughter following the death of his first wife. It is perhaps not surprising that the daughter of John Venn, the Rector of Clapham and an influential figure within the sect. Her Leslie Stephen might have been eager to shift some of the blame for Caroline’s broken health father, also a James Stephen, had five children with Catherine. from himself to a mythical lover. Even more damaging is the fact that he makes every effort to The eldest surviving son was James Fitzjames, later 1st Baronet, who continued to follow his denigrate Caroline’s writing. Her work is "little" he says, perhaps in contrast to his own "big" ancestors’ religious views in form, but had in reality lost his faith. His nieces and nephews work. He misnames Quaker Strongholds in his memoir as Strongholds of Quakerism, and calls remembered him as a stern figure, regularly attending church but no longer believing: "He has it "another little work of hers" (Mausoleum, 55). lost all hope of Paradise, but he clings to the wider hope of eternal damnation" (qtd. in Bell, 8). Instead of a weak-willed woman whose life amounted to nothing because of her inability to James’ youngest son was Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s father. catch a man, a very different view of Caroline Stephen is found in the writings of female family Leslie Stephen broke publicly with the tradition of his forefathers by renouncing his holy orders members and Quakers. Her niece Katherine Stephen, who was to become president of while on fellowship at Cambridge and becoming an agnostic (the intellectual sticking point for Newnham College, described her as someone who was generous with "toleration and him was the story of Noah’s Ark and the Flood). He was eventually knighted for his editorship appreciation. But she was not among those who suffer from indecision or from recognising too of the Dictionary of National Biography, the epic work of the lives of dead white men of the clearly the importance of various conflicting views of the same question" (xxxii). Rufus Jones, British Empire. Woolf recalled her childhood as being dominated by the great horizontal row of in his Later Periods of Quakerism, describes her as "the foremost interpreter in the Society in books that her father kept producing. Her later reminiscences painted him as "brutal" toward England of Friends’ way of worship" and as "a woman of broad culture, of rare insight, of women, with a penchant for rages and emotional outbursts, and a continuous state of neediness beautiful personality, possessed of a graceful literary style" (969). that drained the women who cared for him (Moments, 145-6). Jones’ praise of her contrasts sharply with Leslie Stephen’s opinion, but is more in line with Virginia Woolf’s assessment. She described her aunt as "one of the few to whom the gift of 3 4 expression is given together with the need of it, and in addition to a wonderful command of forth all her spiritual experiences. All her life she has been listening to inner voices, and talking language she had a scrupulous wish to use it accurately. Thus her effect upon people is scarcely with spirits" (Letters, 229). yet to be decided, and must have reached many to whom her books are unknown" (qtd. in This revelation may have been very important to Woolf, who had been troubled by voices at the Marcus, "Thinking," 29). In Quaker Strongholds, Caroline Stephen recounts the general worst points in her mental illness. To hear of someone having a similar experience cast in a dissatisfaction she felt with her spiritual life prior to her conversion to Quakerism: positive light must have been reassuring to her. On another level, her aunt’s experiences might What I felt I wanted in a place of worship was a refuge, or at least the opening of a doorway have also encouraged her to take her own "inner voice" more seriously, a necessary step in towards the refuge, from doubts and controversies; not a fresh encounter with them. Yet it becoming a writer. seems to me impossible that any one harassed by the conflicting views of truth, with which just It was during this period of recuperation that Virginia began to explore her writing talents more now the air is thick, should be able to forget controversy while listening to such language as that seriously. While at The Porch, she aided F.W. Maitland in the preparation of her father’s of the Book of Common Prayer. It seems to me that nothing but silence can heal the wounds biography. Both Violet and Caroline encouraged Virginia’s own writing. Some of her first made by disputations in the region of the unseen (44). known pieces of writing are the comic "anti-biographies" she wrote of Violet and Caroline at The disputations regarding the spiritual were taking place not only within society at large, but this time. She also began to write and submit short articles to The Guardian, a church-related also within her own family. Leslie Stephen had become a leader of the so-called "naturalistic weekly, and at one point she even considered writing a description of Quaker meeting for this movement" and had written several influential agnostic pamphlets and essays.