The Voyage Out

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Virginia Woolf. The Voyage Out

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VIRGINIA WOOLF, BORN Adeline Virginia Stephen on 25 January 1882, was thrust headlong into the world of books. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a consummate man of letters—founder and editor of the massive Dictionary of National Biography, friend of writers such as George Meredith, Henry James, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and George Eliot, and husband, in his first marriage, to Thackeray’s daughter Minny. After Minny’s death, he married a widow named Julia Duckworth, with whom he had four children in quick succession—Vanessa (1879), Thoby (1880), Virginia, and Adrian (1883). During Virginia’s childhood the household at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington, contained not only her brothers and sister but four half siblings as well: George, Stella, and Gerald Duckworth, and Laura Makepeace Stephen, the mentally ill daughter Stephen had from his first marriage. It was a terrifically bookish environment. Visitors to the house were the cream of Victorian literary society, and the Stephens had an extensive library, which they used to educate their children. Vanessa trained to become a painter, and Virginia was set on becoming a writer, but they were taught at home while their two brothers went off to public schools and then to Cambridge.

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He was silent for a moment. Silence seemed to have fallen upon the world.

“That is what I have felt ever since I knew you,” he replied. “We are happy together.” He did not seem to be speaking, or she to be hearing.

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