Woolf encountered the woman upon whom she would model
Sally in Mrs. Dalloway only briefly. Madge Symonds
was married to one of Woolf's uncles, and she was a beautiful,
thoroughly modern woman who was a writer. Woolf found her enchanting
and may have fallen in love with her. She was one of a number of
captivating women who would capture Woolf's attention and find
their way into her fiction.
In 1901, Thoby, who was at Cambridge, met a number of extremely
intelligent, interesting young men-fellow students. Lytton Strachey,
Leonard Woolf and Clive Bell were among them. Woolf and Vanessa
would not meet these young achievers for a few more years, however.
The sisters were still studying at home during the days and completing
household chores in the evening while their brothers were being
educated at the best schools England had to offer. For the rest
of her life, Woolf would feel herself behind the curve and poorly
educated because she was not granted the opportunity to attend
college simply because she was a female. It seemed a bitter injustice,
and she never forgot it.
Around this time, two more fascinating women came into
the sisters' lives. Kitty Maxse was an intelligent, calm, lovely
woman who was married to the editor of the National Review, Leopold
Maxse. Julia had introduced them and took pride in having successfully matched
them. Although Kitty and Woolf didn't quite hit it off (she found
a confidante, however, in Vanessa), Kitty was likely the model for
Clarissa Dalloway. Violet Dickinson first visited the family at their
new summer place in Fritham in 1902. Dickinson was over six feet
tall, was an unusual and intelligent woman and evoked very complex
feelings in twenty-year-old Woolf. In the letters the two women
shared, it is fairly clear that Woolf was deeply in love with Violet,
though that love was likely never consummated. Violet would remain
a friend of Woolf's for many years, though they would drift apart
when Woolf began her foray into the Bloomsbury Group.
That same year, 1902, Leslie Stephen grew more frail and
more ill, and it was clear that he was dying. Though he hung on
for about a year, Woolf and Vanessa had to deal with a series of
already grieving, wailing female family relatives who taxed the
girls' nerves. On February twenty-two, 1903, Leslie Stephen died.
Woolf was emotionally distraught and exhausted by the
year she had spent watching her father die. That year, she and
her four Stephen siblings moved out of the Kensington house at
twenty-two Hyde Park Gate and bought a house in then-shabbier Bloomsbury. Before
moving in, the siblings traveled to Italy for a holiday. Woolf, still
emotionally delicate, was weary and irritated halfway through the
trip, and wanted to go home. While Vanessa felt somewhat freed by
her father's death (after Stella died, he'd made Vanessa his crutch and
made many demands on her time and emotions), Woolf was desperately
sad. The group stopped in Paris and met with Thoby's friend and
painter Clive Bell.
Almost as soon as the siblings returned to London, Woolf
had a breakdown. She began to hear voices, her pulse raced, and
her heart beat at what seemed a dangerous pace. Violet arrived
in London to take Woolf to her home at Burnham Wood, and there
Woolf first attempted suicide by throwing herself out of a second
story window. She was unharmed by the incident and slowly began
to recover.
