The Intertextual Relationship of Virginia Woolf and Leslie Stephen
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"[H]e comes back now more as a contemporary": The intertextual relationship of Virginia Woolf and Leslie Stephen Thomas Breckin Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Leeds Trinity University School of Arts and Communication August 2018 2 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement The right of Thomas Breckin to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 3 Abstract This thesis examines Virginia Woolf’s relationship with her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, focusing upon the ways in which Woolf alludes to him and his work through her own writing, and how she uses these allusions for very deliberate effect. Specifically, it considers Woolf’s ability to characterise Stephen, and thus her relation to him, in different ways through this literary method. It will be demonstrated why and in what contexts Woolf takes these different perspectives on Stephen, with the argument being made that she has no intention in solving the inconsistencies found amongst them. The contradictory nature of these conflicting versions of Stephen is a part of Woolf’s method of writing of him; it dismisses the idea of one authoritative truth. In employing this approach to conceptualising her father as a writer, Woolf is also able to claim certain aspects of both the Victorian and modern eras, and allows Woolf to maintain a literary connection with Stephen and her Victorian heritage that has the effect of preserving both. At other times, it sees her employing strategies in her writing that distance Woolf from both Stephen and the past. This thesis will also look to re-position Stephen by continuing the recent research that has seen him presented as a more positive figure in Woolf’s life than past criticism has allowed. It will examine the progressive outlook that frequently guided his life and career, particularly in comparison with Woolf’s own often radical nature, and demonstrate that Woolf’s reflections on Stephen’s ideas can be seen as a continued dialogue between the two. This is a crucial aspect of Woolf’s method of reconstructing the dynamic between father and daughter, as it moves their relationship away from the intersubjective and towards the intertextual. Acknowledgments 4 I would like to express my deep gratitude to Professor Jane de Gay for her expert supervision and endless encouragement and support. Her guidance has been invaluable and I could not have wished for a better supervisor for my thesis. I would also like to thank Professor Eleanor McNees for her generous time and meticulous feedback on my final chapters. I would like to thank Leeds Trinity University for funding my PhD, Duke University (and particularly the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library and its kind librarians) for being so hospitable during my research trip, and Gladstone’s Library for their scholarship. Thanks also to Dr Anne Reus, Professor Graham Roberts, and Dr Nathan Uglow. Finally, I would like to thank my parents for their lifelong encouragement and more recent proofreading, and Sarah and Esmé for their love and motivation. 5 Table of Contents Abstract 3 Acknowledgments 4 Table of Contents 5 Abbreviations 7 Introduction 8 Chapter 1: Leslie Stephen 34 Stephen’s Life 36 Woolf on Stephen 77 Conclusion 90 Chapter 2: Literary Theories, Histories, and a Re-writing of the Novel 92 Victorian and Modernist Literary Theory: Stephen and Woolf in Context 96 The Literary Theories of Stephen and Woolf 105 Conclusion 132 Chapter 3: Philosophy: English Utilitarians and Kitchen Tables 135 Philosophical Theories 136 Writing Philosophy 161 Ethics 184 Conclusion 198 6 Chapter 4: Biography: From the DNB to Orlando 200 Stephen on the DNB and biography 202 Woolf and the New Biography 216 Orlando 246 Conclusion 272 Conclusion 275 Bibliography 283 7 Abbreviations APA A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897-1909, ed. by Mitchell A. Leaska (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990) Apology Leslie Stephen, An Agnostic’s Apology and Other Essays (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1893; repr. 1903) CR1 The Common Reader: 1st Series (London: Hogarth Press, 1925) CR2 The Common Reader: 2nd Series (London: Hogarth Press, 1932) D The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5 vols, ed. by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1977-84) E The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols, ed. by Andrew McNeillie and Stuart Clarke (London: Hogarth Press, 1986-2000) English Leslie Stephen, English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Duckworth & Co. (1904) History Leslie Stephen, A History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1876) L The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols, ed. by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (1975-80) LL Frederic William Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen, (London: Duckworth & Co., 1906) MBk Sir Leslie Stephen’s Mausoleum Book (London: Cox & Wyman Ltd., 1977) MoB Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed. by Jeanne Schulkind, (1976; repr. London: Triad/Granada, 1978) O Orlando: A Biography (1928; repr. London: Wordsworth Classics, 2003) ROO A Room of One’s Own (1929; repr. London: Wordsworth Classics, 2012) TG Three Guineas (1938; repr. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (1966) TL To the Lighthouse (1927; repr. London: Wordsworth Classics, 2003) VO The Voyage Out (1915; repr. London: Wordsworth Classics, 2012 8 Introduction I suppose my feeling for her [Lady Ritchie] is half moonshine; or rather half reflected from other feelings. Father cared for her; she goes down the last, almost, of that old nineteenth Century Hyde Park Gate world. Unlike […] most old Aunts she had the wits to feel how sharply we differed on current questions; and this, perhaps, gave her a sense […] of age, obsoleteness, extinction. […] I admired her sincerely; but still the generations certainly look very different ways. (Virginia Woolf’s diary entry from 5 March 1919) (D1 247) He [Thomas Hardy] did not let the talk stop or disdain making talk. He talked of father – said he had seen me, or it might have been my sister but he thought it was me, in my cradle. He had been to Hyde Park Place […]. What impressed me was his freedom, ease, and vitality. He seemed very ‘Great Victorian’, doing the whole thing with a sweep of his hand and setting no great stock by literature; but somehow, one could imagine, naturally swept off into imagining and creating without a thought of its being difficult or remarkable. (Woolf’s diary entry from 25 July 1926) (D3 100) The first of the diary entries above, detailing the passing away of her father’s sister-in-law, Anny Thackeray Ritchie, reveals a glimpse of a side of Woolf’s nature that forms the basis of much of the work to be done by this thesis. When she writes of her aunt, Woolf could well be talking about the Victorian era itself, as though in a way Anny had personified to Woolf ‘that old nineteenth century Hyde Park Gate world’. We are thus privy to Woolf’s feelings towards that world – intrinsically connected with her father, Leslie Stephen; an admirable age, but now obsolete; and looking in a different direction to the new generation of the twentieth century. The second diary quotation, from Woolf’s meeting with an aging Thomas Hardy, provides similar insight but with a contrasting tone. This time, with Hardy now standing in as the personification of the ‘Great Victorian’, Woolf divulges a different attitude towards the era, deferential to its freedom of mind and its natural effortlessness in creating greatness with just ‘a sweep of his hand’. The only common denominator is the reference to Stephen, as though he signified both the great and the obsolete Victorian for Woolf. 9 Woolf notes her admiration for Hardy again in her essay, ‘Modern Fiction’ (1925). She writes of the qualities of James Joyce as a writer (and specifically a modernist writer), but follows this with an entirely unfavourable comparison with Hardy (E4 161). Woolf’s diary also records an intriguing entry on Joyce, describing him and his writing as reminding her of ‘some callow board school boy, full of wits and powers, but so self-conscious and egotistical that he loses his head’ (D2 199-200). It is tempting to see this description as being applicable to how Woolf at times considered the modern age as a whole; exuberant but overly self-conscious, particularly when compared to the effortlessness of Hardy and his Great Victorians. While, of course, these quotations can also be read as Woolf’s personal accounts of Lady Ritchie and Hardy, they do demonstrate her penchant for personifying the Victorian age in her writing. This technique allows Woolf to say much about the period in which she was born and of which she saw the end. Her work, including novels, essays, diaries and letters, demonstrate a writer with a powerful and emotive connection with the Victorian. The prestige of her family heritage, with Stephen and the Thackerays on the one side, and Julia Margaret Cameron and the Pre-Raphaelite circle on the side of her mother, Julia Stephen, makes it seem almost impossible that Woolf could ever have escaped the influences of the Victorian age. And, indeed, she clearly does not; from the story of a daughter both burdened by and lovingly respectful of her familial legacy in Night and Day (1919), to her wrangling with Lytton Strachey over the importance of the Victorians in their correspondence (L2 45- 48), Woolf’s oeuvre resonates with a pride in the traditions and achievements of her illustrious antecedents.