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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.

Julia Stephen’s sudden death from influenza in 1895 led to the first of the series of mental breakdowns that would plague Virginia throughout her life. (Though a few scholars have attempted to lay the blame for her illness on definable traumas—such as the sexual abuse by her half brother George that began two years after her mother’s death—possibly her DNA was the real culprit; she appears to have been a victim of bipolar disorder.) Her beloved half sister Stella Duckworth (who had become something of a surrogate mother to her) died two years later. After her father’s death in 1904, Virginia had a severe collapse and was confined briefly to a nursing home, where she attempted suicide by throwing herself out a window.

Vanessa, meanwhile, arranged for the four siblings to move from their childhood home to 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. Here Thoby initiated regular Thursday-evening gatherings for the coterie of bright young men he had come to know at Cambridge, including Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner, and John Maynard Keynes—the germ of what would become known as the Bloomsbury group. (The group also included David Garnett, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, and E. M. Forster.) The gatherings continued even after Thoby’s death of typhoid in 1906 and Vanessa’s marriage to Clive Bell in 1907.

Virginia had begun writing professionally in 1905, mostly for the Times Literary Supplement (in that first year, she contributed thirty-five reviews and essays). In 1912, when she was close to finishing her first novel (called Melymbrosia before she changed the title to The Voyage Out), Leonard Woolf returned on leave from his colonial administrative job in Ceylon. They saw each other with new eyes and were married that August. He proved to be an exceedingly patient and nurturing husband. When Virginia had a severe mental breakdown the following year, he nursed her back to health. The Voyage Out had already been accepted for publication (by Duckworth, the company founded by her half brother Gerald), but it did not come out till 1915, when she had recovered. Duckworth also published her second novel (Night and Day, in 1919), but she and Leonard published most of her later work themselves at the Hogarth Press. The Hogarth Press began with a tabletop hand press that they bought in 1917, largely as therapy for Virginia. At first they did all the hand typesetting themselves. But the work expanded, and their little press eventually turned into a full-fledged publishing house, bringing out work not only by Leonard and Virginia but by Keynes, Forster, T. S. Eliot, Maxim Gorky, Katherine Mansfield, Sigmund Freud, Christopher Isherwood, and others.

The Voyage Out is a more conventional and easily readable novel than some of her later works. In the 1920s she did some of her best writing and—especially with Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931)—became known as an innovator, largely because of her use of stream-of-consciousness techniques to show the depths and subtleties of her characters’ thoughts and feelings. The 1930s were a less happy decade for the Woolfs, darkened by the deaths of friends and the prospect of war. In 1940 they were bombed out of their London flat and moved to their country home, Monks House, in Sussex. The following spring, as she neared the end of her final novel, Between the Acts, Woolf again began to be severely depressed, and was consumed by the idea that the book was worthless and unpublishable. Leonard, deeply worried, called in their local doctor. Virginia was not happy about seeing the doctor, and demanded assurance that she would not be put into a nursing home, but after the doctor left (Leonard recalled later) she seemed cheerful.

Two days later, on 28 March 1941, Virginia filled her pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse. The suicide note she left for Leonard said

I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer.¹

That sort of love, that sort of happiness—what an extraordinary thing that is to contemplate. It is such a rarity in life and in marriage that one can not help but think that the core fact of this woman’s life is not that she was hounded by madness but that she was blessed by love. That is a message too, perhaps, of this book you are about to read, The Voyage Out.

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.

“Very happy,” she answered.

They continued to walk for some time in silence. Their steps unconsciously quickened.

“We love each other,” [he] said.

“We love each other,” she repeated.

The silence was then broken by their voices which joined in tones of strange unfamiliar sound which formed no words. Faster and faster they walked; simultaneously they stopped, clasped each other in their arms, then releasing themselves, dropped to the earth. They sat side by side. Sounds stood out from the background making a bridge across their silence; they heard the swish of the trees and some beast croaking in a remote world.

“We love each other,” [he] repeated, searching into her face. Their faces were both very pale and quiet, and they said nothing.

T. N. R. ROGERS

¹ The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. VI, p. 481.