Angels and ministers of grace

Despite its provocative title, this is not a salacious book. Any reader hoping for disclosures about Woolf’s lesbian love affairs will be disappointed. But do we really need another book on Virginia Woolf when there are already two excellent biographies, by Quentin Bell and Hermione Lee, and numerous essays – such as Helen Dunmore’s perceptive Virginia Woolf and her Relationships with Women in Issue 23 of the Charleston Magazine? Wouldn’t we do better to reread Woolf’s own extraordinary prose in, say, The Waves, which I am now doing, encouraged, I admit, by reviewing the above?

Vanessa Curtis is co-founder of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and editor of the Virginia Woolf Bulletin. She explains that

my intention is to reveal, through these unique and remarkable women, a side of Virginia Woolf that is perhaps not so widely seen. For this purpose also I have intentionally researched the lives of some women who are not usually considered to have been even cursory members of the ‘Bloomsbury Group’.

There were actually only two women in the original loosely formed ‘Bloomsbury’ – Virginia and her older sister Vanessa. Curtis’ first chapter, ‘The Angels in the House’, denotes the Victorian ideal of women as self-sacrificing. The three ‘angels’ are Virginia’s grandmother Maria, her mother Julia, and her half-sister Stella Duckworth. Curtis, confusingly, depicts ‘angel’ Maria as a hypochondriac making demands on her daughter. Maria died when Virginia was ten. Three years later, Virginia lost her mother Julia, which precipitated her first breakdown. Curtis is right to emphasise the lasting effects of that bereavement and the ones that followed – Stella died two years later, leaving Vanessa as surrogate mother to her three younger siblings, Virginia, Thoby and Adrian. In 1904 their father Sir Leslie Stephen died and in 1906 Thoby, Virginia’s favourite brother, of typhoid fever.