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.
In 1904, Woolf sent an article she'd written about Haworth
Parsonage in Yorkshire, the Bronte sisters' family home, to a London weekly
called The Guardian. The editor accepted it happily and from that
point on, Woolf was a regular contributor. She was happy to have
found an outlet for her early works of journalism. She was soon
regularly employed to write reviews as well as articles. In the meantime,
the Stephen children had comfortably settled in their new home
at forty-six Gordon Square in Bloomsbury. Family relatives, including
the Duckworth half-siblings, had been shocked by the Stephens'
decision to move into Bloomsbury, which was certainly a step down
from the posh Kensington neighborhood in which they'd grown up.
But Vanessa, Woolf, Thoby and Adrian felt stifled by the stiff
Victorian social code that they'd suffered their entire lives.
The move into Bloomsbury was a break from social shackles, in many
ways. Thoby began to invite his Cambridge buddies to the house,
and instituted Thursday evening get togethers. Clive Bell, Sydney
Saxon-Turner, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Desmond MacCarthy
and John Maynard Keyes-a veritable laundry list of the most influential
painters, writers and thinkers of the next thirty years-converged
on forty-six Gordon Square. Woolf and Vanessa sat in on the gatherings
and were slightly awed by Thoby's friends.
The men were initially extremely reserved, often sitting
in chairs silently for hours. They were cerebral, and they expected
the same of Woolf and Vanessa. It was a welcome change from the
social expectation that women simply marry and master social skills. Thoby's
friends respected Woolf and Vanessa's great intelligence and talent
and expected them to make something of it. While the circle-christened
the Bloomsbury Group-grew closer and more intense, those outside
of it grew jealous and judgmental. Many of Woolf's non-Bloomsbury
friends were not impressed with Thoby's friends. They found them
untidy and impolite. Even more shocking was the fact that Woolf
and Vanessa were staying up until all hours conversing with them
and swapping philosophies and ideas. For young, unmarried women,
this was unacceptable social behavior at the time.
