Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf

by Panthea Reid

More than fifty-five years after her death, Virginia Woolf remains a haunting figure, a woman whose life was both brilliantly successful and profoundly tragic. As the author of Mrs Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, The Waves, Orlando , and Between the Acts , she helped reinvent the novel for the
modernist era. And through A Room of One's Own , Three Guineas , and other writings, she continues to inform feminist thought. Yet this supremely gifted woman of letters endured crippling bouts of depression--the incandescent artist who captivated some of the most noted men and women of her time died
alone, wading out into the depths of the river Ouse to drown, hoping to find "rest on the floor of the sea." Until now, we have had no adequate explanation of why she did so.
In this bold and compassionate new biography, Panthea Reid at last weaves together the diverse strands of Virginia Woolf's life and career. In lucid and often poetic prose, she offers a dazzlingly complete portrait that is essential to our reading of Woolf. Rich in detail and imaginative
insight, Art and Affection meticulously documents how the twin desires to write and to be loved drove Woolf all her life. Drawing on a wealth of original documents, many unfamiliar and heretofore unpublished, including the surviving letters of Woolf's parents and grandmother, the vast collections of
letters written among Bloomsbury friends and acquaintances, the manuscripts of Woolf's writing, her suicide notes, and other sources, Reid allows Woolf and her intimates to speak for themselves.
Her findings correct many misconceptions about Woolf's upbringing and her most significant relationships. She reveals, for instance, that recent reports of sexual abuse in Woolf's childhood have been exaggerated--that while the writer was sexually traumatized by her half-brothers and emotionally
scarred by her father, she was most deeply wounded by the neglect of her mother (often depicted as the very model of Victorian maternal devotion) and by her love for and rivalry with her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell. Reid describes the competition between the sisters that became for Virginia a
contest between their arts, the pen versus the brush. The effects of this rivalry were not uniformly negative--Reid shows that Virginia's jealous preoccupation with modern painting sparked her own aesthetic vision and experimentation with written forms--but the end results were tragic. Virginia's
flirtation with Vanessa's husband, carefully documented here, so alienated her sister that after 1910 Virginia never again felt secure of Vanessa's affection. Reid presents powerful evidence that fear of losing both Vanessa's love and her own writing gift ultimately triggered Woolf's final suicidal
depression. She also reevaluates Virginia's marriage to the writer and publisher Leonard Woolf. Reid also finds that Leonard was surprisingly supportive of Virginia's erotic relationship with Vita Sackville-West and that his constant devotion provided Virginia with the secure emotional soil in which
art and affection could flourish and she could keep at bay, until her fifty-ninth year, the demons of manic-depression. Reid shows how, until the end, Virginia Woolf's own "insatiable desire to write something before I die" most sustained her.
Brimming with new revelations and graced with sixty-six rare photographs and illustrations, Art and Affection is the definitive new account of the triumphs and tragedies that molded Virginia Woolf into one of the most original voices in modern literature.

Genres: Biography

624 pages, Hardcover

First published December 12, 1996

About the author

Has also written under the name Panthea Reid Broughton.

Reviews

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

You have to envy Panthea Reid her ambition. To even approach the project of writing yet another biography of Virginia Woolf is daunting enough, but to try to shape on paper the life of a literary giant who questioned the whole enterprise of biography-writing would have been enough to send me whimpering away, tail between my legs. Woolf once called biography “the most restricted of all the arts” and objected to the way biographers “pretend they know people” without having access to the inner workings of their minds, to the basic evanescence of personality. In her own work—most notably Orlando, a fictional biography of Vita Sackville-West—she strove to upend the form, to represent her subjects as having not only “granite-like solidity,” but also personalities of “rainbow-like intangibility.” Knowing this about your subject, it must take a boatload of courage—and maybe even a little smidgeon of grandiosity—to even begin.

This is not to say that Reid was foolish. Even the conventional biography, which this is, has much to tell about a life. In fact, I was looking for conventionality when I sought this book out—or at least a book that followed a standard chronology. I have been a devotee of VW since I first read her in college—I often tell people that she was the writer who made me want to write—but until now, I only knew gossipy tidbits about her life: her affair with Vita Sackville-West, her supposed sexual abuse as a girl, her manic depression and eventual suicide by drowning. I wanted to know something beyond these sensationalisms, to get a sense of her life from start to finish: where she was born, how she grew up, who her parents were, how she spent her days. Art and Affection delivers on chronology, sometimes to a fault—there are sections, particularly late in the book, where the writing plods and you get the sense that you’re reading through the notes Reid took on the highlights of VW’s diaries. But if you’re fascinated by VW like I am, you don’t even mind these passages so much. The dailiness of her life becomes kind of a slow-moving plot, shaped by Reid’s organizing idea: that VW’s life and work were driven by her obsession with the paragone, Reid’s term for the competitive aesthetic conversation between painters and writers. Here is Reid on paragone: “This is the crux of the dilemma that has plagued aesthetic discussions throughout time: Is art to be valued for its relationship to the world or for its transformation of that world? Should the human mind replicate or reshape nature? Do the visual or the verbal arts better achieve the superior goal?” (468) These questions fascinated VW throughout her life, and pushed her writing toward the post-impressionistic aesthetic she finally achieved. And Reid suggests that VW’s painter of painters, the one with whom she was always arguing and conversing and whose approval she sought more than anyone else’s, was her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell. “As it always was for Virginia,” she writes, “the theoretical debate between the arts [of painting and writing] had its roots in her private emotions.” (55)

Reid sets the stage by describing VW’s childhood—her “saintly” and yet distant mother, Julia Duckworth, who was always off tending to some sickly family member, leaving the children with their father, the bookish Leslie Stephen. Leslie and Julia were both widowed, and when they married, they joined their families—Leslie’s daughter Laura, who was “not mentally sound” and was eventually consigned to an asylum, and Julia’s three children, George, Gerald, and Stella Duckworth. Then, together, Leslie and Julia had four more children of their own: Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, and Adrian. So it was a household full of kids that Julia left behind on her various nursing trips, and while they had help—they were upper middle class British, not aristocrats, but keepers of servants and the owners of two homes—the children still felt their mother’s absence when she was gone. For Virginia, Vanessa became a kind of substitute mother, but a flawed one. Vanessa’s preferred sibling was Thoby, on whom she’d lavished attention ever since his birth. They were so inseparable, their father used one name for the both of them, calling them “Vato, Tova, Nessaby, or his Ragamice” (10). From birth, then, Virginia was vying in a losing battle for Vanessa’s affection. When Adrian was born, and Julia hoped her second girl-boy pair might form a dyad, Virginia’s attention was elsewhere; Vanessa’s attention was the prize she most sought.

It’s clear that Reid is a subscriber to psychoanalytic criticism, and she bases much of her argument about VW’s rivalry with Vanessa on the primacy of the mother-daughter bond. This theory, while plausible and even convincing, can occasionally come off as a little too facile, a little pop-psych-y. Granted, Art and Affection was published in 1996, at a time when Freud was still heroic in some lit-crit circles. And, I will admit, I tend to react badly to anything that smacks of Freud. But I did find myself raising objections in my mind from time to time as I read, wondering if Reid’s theories about Virginia’s relationship with Vanessa got in the way of allowing us to see the actual relationship, which was surely as shifting and evanescent and rainbow-like as the sisters’ personalities themselves.

Vanessa is a fascinating character: hauntingly beautiful—Reid includes a portrait of her as a teenager, gazing sultrily at the camera, her lips Angelina-Jolie-full, her eyes daring the viewer to engage with her—and a wild child: a gifted painter, free in her associations and her speech (Virginia often spoke of Vanessa’s “bawdy talk”), eager to toss aside all the Victorian proprieties and expectations she had grown up with. Reid also characterizes her as “callous,” “self-absorbed,” and “undemonstrative,” judgments that seemed to me a bit harsh. It’s apparent that Virginia was a demanding sister, often overtly requesting displays of affection, which she must have known had a tendency to drive Vanessa away. Vanessa once—in what I imagine was a fit of annoyance—described Virginia’s letters to her as “Sapphic” and insisted that an uninitiated reader would have thought they were lovers. Certainly VW was emotionally unstable. Since childhood, she had been known to fly into rages, and after their mother died, she sank into a two-year depression, which she later characterized as “her first breakdown.” Their half-sister Stella then became the Stephen children’s new surrogate mother and emotional crutch for Leslie Stephen—a man who was also emotionally demanding, the “alternately loved and hated father”—and after she died, Vanessa was the logical next in line for the role. She refused to play it—she loved her freedom too much, and had apparently learned well what happened to the women who bent to Leslie’s demands—and when Leslie died in 1904, Vanessa was outwardly gleeful. VW had mixed feelings about losing her father, but Vanessa’s glee apparently infuriated her. She stopped speaking to Vanessa, and a few months after Leslie’s death, threw herself out of a friend’s window in a half-hearted suicide attempt. All this to say that it makes some sense to me why Vanessa might have been a little wary around her sister, maybe even a little cold and distant. Young and ambitious herself, full of passion for art and life, she was thrown into the position of having to be responsible for three younger and fairly needy siblings. She doesn’t appear to have been a person who responded well to neediness.

After their father died, Vanessa moved the Stephens from buttoned-up Hyde Park to bohemian Bloomsbury, happily cutting ties with the stuffy aunts and cousins they’d left behind. Bloomsbury is Bloomsbury, of course—famous for its heat, intellectually, artistically, erotically. VW and VB’s paragone debate was informed and enriched by the company they began keeping at their Bloomsbury pad, where Thoby’s Cambridge friends—including E.M. Forster, Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, and Leonard Woolf—started to make a habit of hanging out at their house. Soon enough, the Bloomsbury Group was born, a loose association of artists, writers, philosophers, and intellectuals who debated questions of aesthetics and argued passionately over books and ideas with one another late into the night. Bloomsbury was a second family for the Stephen children, and also served as VW’s Cambridge. The discussions held there further expanded her ideas about what good writing and art were and should be.

Eventually, after Thoby died suddenly of typhoid fever, Vanessa accepted Clive’s marriage proposal, and Virginia and her younger brother Adrian moved out, to another house in the neighborhood. But the two households remained close—even uncomfortably so. With Vanessa absorbed by her first pregnancy, Clive began flirting with Virginia, and she, feeling bereft of Vanessa, flirted back. She showed Clive drafts of her novel in progress (ultimately The Voyage Out), and he praised her for her “genius.” They exchanged letters, griping together about how tiresome the baby (Julian) was—“a child is the very devil!” VW wrote—and alluded to dreamy rendez-vous, none of which ever came to pass. Still, their letters were bold. In one, Virginia asked Clive to “kiss his wife most passionately, in all my private places—neck--, and arm, and eyeball, and tell her—what new thing is there to tell her? how fond I am of her husband?” Clive praised Virginia’s writing, sent her poems he’d written for her, and eventually declared his love for her. Unsurprisingly, Vanessa was annoyed by VW and Clive’s emotional entanglement, and distanced herself further from VW, a thing that for her was a punishment almost impossible to bear. At least this is how Reid would have it.

Of course, Vanessa was no paragon of virtue herself. Her ideas about freedom were not limited to art or the intellect or the degree to which she was willing to don the shackles of family obligation. Clive may have been a cad by flirting with Virginia and striking things up again with a former mistress of his while Vanessa took care of their baby, but she did not seem overly wounded by his behavior, and eventually took a lover of her own, the artist and critic Roger Fry. And it was lucky for Virginia that she did, for next to Vanessa, Fry became her second most important artistic influence, and the person with whom she could continue her exploration of the paragone without the sisterly psychodrama. Here is Reid on Fry:

In his commitments to work, skepticism, and personal integrity, Fry was rather like Leslie Stephen and became something of a father figure for Virginia Woolf. Both Stephen and Fry believed in the ultimate moral good of art, but they were radically different in their notion of where to locate that goodness. Stephen had praised literature chiefly for inspiring a sense of beauty and inculcating right behavior, whereas Fry saw the morality of art in aesthetic experiences totally dissociated from everyday practicalities. Through those experiences, he believed, humankind becomes civilized.
(105)

Whether or not Fry was a father figure is, again, open to question. But he was certainly an important aesthetic influence. VW had often questioned the idea that “morality [should be] essential to art” herself, and Fry’s insistence that it wasn’t, that art should not be representational, but should exist for its own sake, freed her to strive for this in her own work.

VW is famous for having written, in her provocatively hyperbolic way, this sentence: “On or about December 1910, human character changed.” It’s maybe not such a coincidence that 1910 was the same year she and Vanessa met Roger Fry. Nor is a coincidence that in December of 1910, Fry’s curated exhibition—called “Manet and the Post-Impressionists,” and including such artists as Picasso, Cezanne, Gauguin, and VanGogh—shocked London, displaying art that was unconcerned with the representation of nature, art that was, in Fry’s words, “in revolt against the photographic vision of the nineteenth century.” The exhibit was not well-received, but it made an obvious impact on VW. Still at work on The Voyage Out, she began to revise it with post-impressionistic ideals in mind. “Similes became metaphors,” Reid writes, “and language became shapes or ‘blocks.’ She even integrated some of Roger Fry’s interest in Turkish art into her South American setting” (121). VW’s relationship with Fry lasted the rest of his life. “Nobody,” she once wrote, “—none of my friends—made such a difference to my life as he did.” After his death, she agonized over his biography—a true labor of love, for she insisted on finishing it, even though it endangered her shaky mental health. In the end, she was satisfied with what Reid describes as its “artistic, symphonic design,” even though she didn’t manage the original experiment she’d conceived of: to include herself as a character and “voice” within the biography.
And this is where Reid excels, I think: in discussing VW’s growth as an artist through her life-long interest in and rivalry with visual art, and her efforts to reconcile her own dual impulses—toward representation, ethics, and the “novel of fact” on the one hand, and toward pure form, pure poetry, or, as she put it in a passage from an early diary, a “symmetry by means of infinite discords, showing all the traces of the mind’s passage through the world.” Next to and intertwined with the chronology of VW’s life, Reid traces her artistic development, book by book and effort by effort, from A Voyage Out all the way through to Between the Acts, where Reid feels she finally achieved the perfect blend of ethics and aesthetics, of representation and music, of political relevance and formal design, of granite and rainbow. With her last novel, she “thereby proved that her writing could be both aesthetic and relevant, artistically contained and provocative of more than disinterested contemplation” (439).

So although Art & Affection may not be the kind of biography that Woolf herself might have desired—though it does generously quote from her diaries and letters, and in that way, allows us some access to VW’s shifting, “shivering fragments” of personality—it succeeds, in the end, as a record of both her personal life and her artistic achievements. It’s a big embrace of a book, and there’s much I haven’t touched on—her husband Leonard, most notably, who was unfailingly steadfast, and was probably the primary reason she lived as long as she did. If you’re hungry for more, read the book. It’s worth the time, in the end, if you can take Reid’s psychoanalytic leanings with a grain of salt. And reading it will give you a sense of why it’s possible to say that, “On or about 1922, with the publication of VW’s first experimental novel Jacob’s Room, literary art changed.”

[Joan Colby · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best biography of Woolf that I have read. Reid’s research is extensive and admirable, but more than that her easy style of writing draws the reader into Woolf’s life, much the way a novel does. Yet, everything is footnoted and attributed, so one can’t doubt Reid’s excellence as a scholar. She debunks the myth of Woolf’s bi-polar condition being caused by childhood sexual trauma (though that certainly may have affected Woolf’s sexual life), noting how bi-polar (then called manic-depression) normally manifests in late teens or early twenties. Psychotropic drugs had not yet been invented so Woolf had to simply combat her demons. She and Leonard appear to have had a close and supportive relationship which made it possible for Woolf to write her books. Her relationship with her sister Vanessa was fraught with competition and, on both parts, but particularly Vanessa’s, the kind of teasing that can be cruel. Woolf’s contact with the avant garde painters of Vanessa’s circle initiated the idea of trying to imitate what non-representational art was doing pictorially, in the medium of language. Woolf was fortunate to be financially secure and to have had contacts with the major literary and artistic figures of her day. Despite her illness, from which she was somewhat freed during her most productive years, Woolf’s production of novels, reviews, non-fiction, as well as her and Leonard’s efforts with Hogarth Press show a focused determination and energy. The advent of WWII with the threatened invasion of Britain, the bombings that destroyed their London house, and the prospect of the Woolfs being interned in concentration camps if the Germans succeeded (they were high on Himmler’s list) brought on another of Virginia’s depressions. She and Leonard has discussed a joint suicide if Britain were invaded. With her mind disturbed and fearing another prolonged attack and its effect on Leonard, Virginia committed suicide at the age of 59.

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved it. Long but soooo worth it.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting bio of Woolf. Long but one is not aware of it as it reads so smoothly.