Significant Others - Sir Leslie Stephen

Episode Date: August 31, 2022

Virginia Woolf’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen, wanted nothing more than to be a genius—but he created one instead.Starring: Jameela Jamil as Virginia Woolf and Luke Millington-Drake as Sir Leslie Stephen. Source List:“Virginia Woolf and Leslie Stephen: History and Literary Revolution,” by Katherine C. HillTo The Lighthouse, by Virginia WoolfA Room of One’s Own, by Virginia WoolfA Writer’s Diary, by Virginia WoolfVirginia Woolf, by Hermione LeeThe Common Reader, by Virginia WoolfVirginia Woolf, Quentin Bell“A House of One’s Own,” by Janet Malcolm“A Beautiful Mind - Laura Makepeace Stephen and the Earlswood Asylum Medical Archives,” by Dr. Madeleine OakleyBloomsbury Group“Virginia Woolf and Leslie Stephen,” by Louise A. DeSalvoRob Roy, by Sir Walter Scott

This episode contains mention of suicide and sexual violence. Welcome to Significant Others, a podcast that takes a look at the less familiar side of history. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien, and in this episode, we meet a man who wanted nothing more than to be a genius, but he raised one instead. genius, but he raised one instead. He wouldn't send her to school, but he did give her the key to his library, and literature would never be the same again. This time, on Significant Others, meet Sir Leslie Stephen. Virginia Woolf was born at a time when women were not allowed to learn alongside their brothers. Yet by the time of her death, she had become one of the 20th century's most notable authors. Her work exists in dialogue with every writer from the Greeks to those working today,

and her formal innovations bent the evolutionary arc of narrative prose. How did a woman who did not go to school become a major contributor to the modernist movement? Largely thanks to the man about whom she wrote, if he had not died, his life would have entirely ended mine. That man was her father, Sir Leslie Stephen. And her feelings for him were so deeply contradictory, they drove her mad, literally. How is she supposed to feel about a man who had cultivated her mind, but then done nothing to ensure she would be free to use it? A man who saw women as props for his own comfort, but was the first to see her as a writer. He was

entitled, narcissistic, and dangerously selfish. And yet, without him, she may never have had a career at all. He was her father, and she loved him. He was her father, and she hated him. Before he was Virginia Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen was a literary critic, an historian, and an academic. He was ultimately knighted for his work, but he was not just a straight-up member of the establishment. In fact, it could be said that the revolutionary spirit that led Virginia Woolf to invent a new form of the novel came to her directly through him. The Stephen family had a long, progressive legacy. Both Leslie's father and his grandfather were respected lawyers who were instrumental in abolishing slavery from England. And Leslie,

who broke with tradition early by joining the clergy instead of the bar, ultimately realized, once his father had died, that he didn't actually believe in God after all, and he certainly wasn't meant to be celibate. He then struck out at the age of 30 to attempt a new career as a writer. Two decades later, his two greatest contributions to the world of literature were born, the Dictionary of National Biography and his daughter, Virginia. Writing, as it turns out, was in the blood. In tracing the Stephen clan back to the 18th century, Quentin Bell, Virginia's nephew and biographer, wrote, There was scarcely a one who did not publish, and never, certainly, a generation which did not add something to the literary achievements of the family. And literature was always a part of the

family's life. Leslie delighted his children by reciting poetry by heart. In the nursery, he would read to them aloud, not children's stories, but proper literature. For example, Walter Scott's Rob Roy. You have requested me, my dear friend, to bestow some of that leisure with which Providence has blessed the decline of my life in registering the hazards and difficulties which attended its commencement. The recollection of those adventures, as you are pleased to term them, has indeed left upon my mind a checkered and varied feeling of pleasure and of pain, mingled, I trust, with no slight gratitude and veneration to the disposer of human events, who guided my early course through much risk and labor, that the ease with which he has blessed my prolonged life

might seem softer from remembrance and contrast. These readings would be followed, naturally, by textual analysis. At the end of a volume, my father always gravely asked our opinion as to its merits, and we were required to say which of the characters we liked best and why. I can remember his indignation when one of us preferred the hero to the far more lifelike villain. Indignation was likely a gentle word. Virginia wrote that just after her father had died when she was young and still in mourning for him. Later, when she had many more years of perspective on the man, she would call him exacting, violent, histrionic, demonstrative, self-centered, self-pitying, deaf, alternately loved and hated.

But the hatred would come later. In the early years, it was all admiration and love. At the age of six, Virginia horrified her older sister, Vanessa, by announcing that she preferred their father to their mother. The favor was apparently reciprocated. Among the four Stephen children, Virginia was Leslie's pet, his Ginia. In admiration of him, she spun her own stories at bedtime and started a newspaper at the age of nine to record events in and around the house. Leslie took notice.

She is very like me, I feel. He suspected that writing might even become Ginia's trade. Unless she marries somebody at 17. Virginia was fully aware of her desire to impress him. What have you got hold of? He would say, looking over my shoulder at the book I was reading, and how proud, priggishly I was if he gave his little amused surprise snort when he found me reading some book that no child of my age could understand. I was a snob, no doubt, and read partly to make him think me a very clever little brat. And I remember his pleasure, how he stopped writing and got up and was very gentle and pleased when I came into the study. However welcoming he may have been when his daughter entered his sphere of scholarship, it was always very clear who owned the books. In her diaries,

young Virginia kept meticulous track of the titles her father lent her and the rate at which she was gaining mastery over them, which could rival any of his students at St. Andrews. The year she was 15, for example, she read 50 volumes. Ginia is devouring books almost faster than I like. He encouraged and complimented her appetite. Gracious child, how you gobble. But still, Gracious child, how you gobble. But still, those books were on loan. The library was his. An education Virginia was learning could be had by women, but the texts still belonged to men.

In time, Leslie stopped assigning individual books and simply opened his library to her. This was a remarkable thing. For a Cambridge-educated Victorian man to give his teenage daughter free reign over material like that was profoundly atypical. Even as he did it, he worried over the improper influence of certain texts, specifically the popular novel Trilby,

which presumably might make her want to take up smoking. But in the end, he honored her intellectual hunger. As biographer Quentin Bell put it, his daughter must decide for herself what she ought to read. Clearly, literature was her great passion, and literature had to be accepted with all its risks. She must learn to read with discrimination, to make unaffected judgments, never admiring because the world admires, or blaming at the orders of a critic. She must learn to express herself in as few words as possible. Such were his precepts, and such was the educational opportunity that he gave. And yet, the scope of Leslie's ambition for

his daughter suffered from a deadly lack of imagination. It's not fair to suggest that Virginia was uneducated. She had tutors and the benefit of her father's instruction, and she eventually took some classes in the ladies' department at King's College. But it was not what she would have had access to if she had been born a boy. While her brothers were sent off to boarding school and university, Virginia was kept home with her sister Vanessa to study music and dancing and graceful deportment and make nice with visiting relatives in the afternoons.

She wrote enviously to her brother Toby at Cambridge. I don't get anybody to argue with me now and feel the want. I have to delve from books, painfully and all alone. What you get every evening sitting over your fire and smoking your pipe with Strachey. No wonder my knowledge is but scant. There's nothing like talk as an educator, I'm sure. Still, I try my best with Shakespeare. Her whole life she would consider herself poorly educated, and one of her books, published in the early part of her career, is a bit of a f*** you to anyone who might agree. Called The Common Reader,

it presents a series of essays on classical topics across the history of literature, written from the perspective of a person who is neither a scholar nor a critic, but just someone with a bunch of books lying around doing her best to make sense of it all. Of course, this person happened to possess an extraordinary intellect and had been born to the man who literally wrote the book on British literature. Casting herself as common was both a humblebrag and untrue. But she was making a point, eloquently and bravely, that her opinion mattered just as much as anyone with a PhD, if not more, because an author can only achieve immortality if regular folk keep wanting to read her.

That education was still firmly the province of men was not Leslie Stevens' fault, nor did Virginia seem to blame him for it. But the inequity in her own family was a grain of sand that would irritate her soul forever. Women in the Stevens house were not denied intellectual enrichment, they were simply never expected to do much with it, except, if they were really special, to take up where their father left off. What seems now like faint praise was actually the greatest compliment Leslie could give at the time. She takes in a great deal and will really be an author in time. History will be a good thing for her to take up as I can give her some hints.

It is unlikely he could ever have dreamed of what she would do instead. The biggest turning point in Virginia Woolf's life story give her some hints. It is unlikely he could ever have dreamed of what she would do instead. The biggest turning point in Virginia Woolf's life story, and the thing that would so deeply complicate her relationship with her father, was the death of the very parent she had once so blithely claimed not to prefer. What a jumble of things I can remember if I let my mind run about my mother, of her as the creator of that crowded, merry world which spun so gaily in the center of my childhood. There it always was, the common life of the family, very merry, very stirring, crowded with people, and she was the center. It was herself. This was proved on May 5th, 1895, For after that day, there was nothing left of it.

Julia Stephen died at the age of 49 after a long bout with influenza, and her entire family was plunged into misery. Of course, the atmosphere of those three or four days before the funeral was so melodramatic, histrionic and unreal that any hallucination was possible. We lived through them in hush, in artificial light. Rooms were shut. People were creeping in and out. People were coming to the door all the time. We were all sitting in the drawing room around father's chair, sobbing. The hall reeked of flowers. The four Stephen children were now motherless, as were the three older children from Julia's first marriage, George, Gerald, and Stella Duckworth, whose father had been long dead.

It was, as Virginia put it, the greatest disaster that could happen. Just 13, Virginia, in her own words, went mad, Just 13, Virginia, in her own words, went mad, suffering the first of the serious depressions that would ultimately lead to her suicide 46 years later. But Leslie seemed to take it almost personally that he had been widowed for a second time. His first marriage to a daughter of William MacPiece Thackeray had also ended in death. Now his suffering eclipsed all concern for his children. As Virginia was being led in to kiss her dead mother goodbye, she remembered, My father staggered from the bedroom as we came.

I stretched out my arms to stop him, but he brushed past me, crying out something I could not catch. Distraught. Everyone was grieving, but Leslie did it like a diva. With little apparent awareness that his late wife's seven children were suffering their own monumental devastation, he made it all about him, sulking and sobbing and wondering aloud how fate could do this to him

and wishing he were dead. Father used to sit, sun can gloom. If he could, we got to talk, and that was part of our duty. It was about the past. It was about the old days. And when he talked, he ended with a groan. He was getting deaf, and his groans were louder than he knew. Indoors, he would walk up and down the room, gesticulating, crying that he had never told mother how he loved her. Often one would break in upon a scene of this kind, and he would open his arms and call one to him.

We were his only hope, his only comfort, he would say. But the problem in the Stephen household was not purely emotional. The main job of a woman in Victorian society was to take care of the men, and so the death of a wife created a logistical issue. Who would run Leslie's life now that his wife was gone? What woman would take her place? Leslie's spinster sister? No. The nun, as the family called her, was not an option. She had already cared for Leslie once after his first wife died, and he couldn't take her weepy earnestness. Might Leslie's eldest daughter, Laura, be a candidate?

Laura was Leslie's only child from his marriage to Harriet Thackeray. Incapacitated by a disorder diagnosed at the time as idiocy and now suspected to have been autism, Laura lived in a place called the Earlswood Asylum and was incapable even of self-care. That left Virginia, who was not only too young but also unstable, and Vanessa, who was 15.

Luckily for the Stevens, their 26-year-old half-sister had inherited not only their mother's beauty but her extraordinary capacity for service. Stella Duckworth was ideally positioned, and ready to accept it as her duty, to take on her mother's role at the center of the Stephen family's life. Selflessly, she stepped in to run the house, manage the help, balance the accounts, and mother her half-siblings. But her greatest labor would be tending to the vast emotional needs of the bereaved widower. There was nothing sexual about the relationship between Stella and Leslie, but the way he leaned on her and what he asked of her was inappropriate at best, and at worst, rather monstrous. Julia Stephen had spoiled her husband,

and now her daughter Stella was about to pay the price. To quote Quentin Bell, Julia lived chiefly for her husband. Everyone needed her, but he needed her most. He had to be fortified and protected from the world. He was, as he said himself, a skinless man, so nothing was to touch him save her soothing and healing hand. The perception, among those who knew the family well, was that Leslie had essentially worked and worried his second wife to death. Now that she was gone, his demands were only intensified by grief, and they were finding a

new target, the daughter of the woman who had been run ragged by them in the first place. But Leslie had no sense of that, or anything beyond his own pain. He cried on Stella's shoulder. He asked her to absolve him of not having been the perfect husband to her mother. He relied on her to manage the constant stream of visitors. She was to be a kind of social secretary slash hostess for an entire community in mourning. Her own suffering, as a young woman who has just lost her mother went entirely unacknowledged. She grew whiter and whiter in her unbroken black dress.

She would sit at her table with the black-edged notepaper before her, writing, answering letters of sympathy. There was a photograph of mother in front of her and sometimes she would cry as she wrote. As the summer wore on, visitors came. They were admitted to the back drawing room where father sat like the queen in Shakespeare. Here I and sorrow sit. With the Virginia Creeper hanging a curtain of green over the window, so that the room was like a green cave. But as time went by, Stella was actually able to bring life back to their world. There was a soothing continuity. She resembled their mother, both physically and temperamentally.

And she was still young and capable of joy. After so much disaster and sorrow and darkness, Virginia wrote, It was Stella who lifted the canopy again. A little light crept in. Stella was beautiful and prone to devotion, and therefore had a lot of suitors. She rejected them all, believing she was obligated to honor her mother's legacy and set aside her own life to remain in service to her stepfather and his children. But eventually, she fell in love with a man named Jack Hills, and, after a few proposals over a number of years, they were engaged. This caused

a variety of feelings among the Stevens, but as Leslie later said, he would have been a brute to have complained. He did, however, insist that the newlyweds move into his house, as if Jack might be perfectly happy for his new bride to continue caring for Leslie like a wife, but that was ultimately renegotiated. Virginia was not thrilled about the engagement, and the wedding put her in such a foul mood she broke an umbrella in half. Clearly, she was feeling the loss of her second mother, but at least this time, the loss was not complete. Stella was not leaving, only moving across the street, and she was happier than Virginia had ever thought possible. But when the newlyweds returned from their honeymoon,

Stella was not well. Diagnosed with peritonitis, and soon after that with pregnancy, her health was faltering. For a while, she seemed to be recovering, but ultimately did not. Three months after the wedding, and two years after Julia's death,

Stella was dead too. This tragedy compounded the last, but the loss this time was slightly less devastating. Virginia, who had seemed headed for another nervous collapse, became highly brittle but did not break. And Leslie, while deeply saddened, did not carry on as before. But he did find himself facing a familiar problem once again. Who would take care of him now? Virginia, at 15, was still too young. But Vanessa, at 18, could finally be put in charge of the household. This marked the beginning of a new and very difficult era in the relationship between Virginia and her father.

It was during the seven years between Stella's death in 1897 and his death in 1904 that Nessa and I were fully exposed without protection to the full blast of that strange character. There was no longer any buffer between these two teenage girls and their 65-year-old father, that skinless man,

as he called himself. Virginia and Vanessa were now on the front lines against his insecurity, his unfounded financial panic, his sense of alienation, his hearing loss, his unruly distemper. Virginia wrote later that it was like being shut up in a cage with a wild beast. He moaned about everything all the time and loudly. What a bore you are. Why has everyone forgotten me? Why will my whiskers not grow? Every Wednesday, Virginia had to watch Vanessa ask for money to pay the household bills.

We ate our lunch in the anticipation of torture. The books were presented directly after lunch. He put on his glasses, then he read the figures. Then down came his fist on the account book. His veins filled, his face flushed. Then there was an inarticulate roar. Then he shouted, I am ruined!

Then he beat his breast. Then he went through an extraordinary dramatization of self-pity, horror, anger. Vanessa stood by his side, silent. He belabored her with reproaches, abuses. Have you no pity for me? There you stand, like a block of stone. And so on. She stood absolutely silent.

With a deep groan, he picked up his pen, and with ostentatiously trembling hands, he wrote out the check. Everything pained him greatly. And for the first time in his life, no one seemed to care. For where Julia had coddled her husband as only a loving wife can, and Stella had suffered him patiently in the style of a martyr, Vanessa was patently uninterested. An ambitious and promising painter, she had her own things going on. Besides, she had already watched two women she dearly loved get fed into the wood chipper of her father's narcissism, and neither had come out alive. She had no intention of following them. He tried to explain to her what she was doing wrong. When he was sad, she should be sad.

When he was angry, she should weep. But Vanessa would not do any of that, and it made Leslie irate. He was an addict, completely dependent on female sympathy. Now, suddenly, after a lifetime of full and unlimited access to it, first from his mother and sister, then his first wife, then his second, and finally his stepdaughter, he had been cut off.

The withdrawal only made him more tyrannical. It's not that rage was a surprise to Virginia or anyone else in the family. They were well acquainted with his outbursts. Even as a child, he would work himself into such violent rages that nobody, nobody could control him. But the rage had usually been aimed at someone else.

It was family lore that he had once thrown a flowerpot at his mother, occasionally yelled at the cook when she spent too much money, and was known to jump impatiently out of a vehicle when it got stuck in traffic. In short, for Leslie Steven, rage was a thing to be cultivated, at least in him. It was the convention that men of genius were naturally uncontrolled. A man of genius meant a man who had fits of positive inspiration. Ah, but... I can remember my father saying of Stevenson, he was a man of genius. Those who had genius in the Victorian sense were like the prophets,

different, another breed. They dressed differently, wore long hair, great black hats, capes and cloaks. They were invariably ill to live with. But it never struck my father, I believe, that there was any harm in being ill to live with. I think he said unconsciously as he worked himself up into one of those violent outbursts, It never struck my father, I believe, that there was any harm in being ill to live with. I think he said unconsciously as he worked himself up into one of those violent outbursts, This is a sign of my genius.

He took it for granted that his wife or sister would accept his apology, that he was exempt because of his genius from the laws of good society. But was he a man of genius? No. That was not, alas, quite the case. And he knew it. He once confided in Virginia that he had only a good, second-class mind. His despondency over this fact, Virginia believed, fueled his bad behavior and made it even harder for her to bear, considering he knew he had none of the exceptionalism that might excuse it. At the same time, rage was another thing he and Virginia had in common.

Like her father, Virginia was known for her temper as a child. Unlike him, hers had not been indulged. Her siblings amused themselves by making young Virginia go purple with rage. Even as an adult, there's a note of contrition as she records her moods in her diary. To bed, furious and tantrumical. I growl at everything. The effect of nerves, doubtless. I've been in a dreadful temper

all day long. Poor creature. But rather than signaling the presence of genius, her fits were seen as a sign of trouble. This was not purely the fault of Victorian double standards and misogyny. Virginia's mental state was, in fact, more

delicate than her father's. He may have been difficult to live with, but she was self-destructive, heard voices, and could be incapacitated by depression. Her fidgets, as she called them, were not just unpleasant but alarming, since no one knew if a more dangerous phase was imminent. If Leslie acted out, he expected the women in his family to soothe him. But if Virginia could not control her behavior, she was forbidden by her doctor to write or read or even try to think until she could calm her agitation. She noted this discrepancy, saying of her father, He had a godlike yet childlike standing in the family. He had an extraordinarily privileged position.

The irony, of course, is that Virginia did possess the genius her father longed to find evidence of in himself. But like education and money, a hot temper was something else that could not be hers. The irascible, unruly genius was another thing only men were allowed to be. Something else that belonged to men? Women's bodies. Virginia reported later in life having been molested by her half-brother George and possibly also by her other half-brother Gerald. molested by her half-brother George, and possibly also by her other half-brother, Gerald.

The first instance was when she was quite young. I still shiver with shame at the memory of my half-brother standing me on a ledge, aged about six or so, and exploring my private parts. But there was also a prolonged period of interference for about eight or nine years after Julia Stephen died. 28-year-old George was demonstrative and loving to his teenage sisters during the day, going so far as to fondle Virginia in front of her Greek tutor, prompting that woman to refer to him as, you nasty creature. But George was also put in charge of introducing his sisters into society, which meant evenings out and weekends away that gave him even more

access to them at night. It's unclear exactly how often and for how long Virginia and Vanessa had to suffer their brothers' assaults, but what is known is that there was no way for them to complain about it. George and Gerald were family and well-regarded in society, and performed the function of guardians after their mother and then Stella were gone. Virginia and Vanessa depended on these brothers for financial support, not to mention there was no societal precedent for speaking up about sexual abuse or incest. It was just another way Virginia suffered for her gender. And, it may be assumed, another complicating factor in her feelings toward her father, who had not only failed to protect her and her sister, but in fact had placed them both in

George's care. Cognitive dissonance is impossible to avoid in human relationships, because everyone is a mixture of qualities. You love your friend, but she can be bossy. You love your mom, but she can't stop treating you like you're five. You love your mom, but she can't stop treating you like you're five. You love your partner, but he always leaves the milk on the counter and it drives you crazy. But for Virginia, in her fragile mental state, dissonance was dangerous, and her relationships contained an extraordinary amount of it. The months leading up to Stella's death, before the tyrant father had been fully unleashed, were actually a period of intense bonding for Virginia and Leslie. He had begun mentoring her in earnest, giving her tutorial sessions which she said formed the core of her extensive grounding in English literature.

This was the period when she read those 50 books, many of which he assigned. He had identified her promise and deemed her worthy, alone among her siblings, to be his professional successor. He was helping her build a foundation for her life's work. But then Stella died and Vanessa became the focus of Leslie's corrosive rages, and Virginia's adoration of her father got shot through with something else. This is where the hatred came in. To attack Vanessa was to attack Virginia, too. She so closely identified with her sister, she said it was impossible to describe herself without describing Vanessa as well.

She said they formed a nucleus against the world of many men in their home. Men who got to go to school and study the Greeks and write checks and be geniuses and rage about the house and touch whoever they wanted and depend on women to do everything for them until they died young and unrecognized and used up. Virginia was a woman. Their father was a man. He was not her ally. He was her adversary. His needs and wants would always supersede hers. On top of this, Leslie's famous rage was only famous in the family, and he only ever unleashed it on women. Every man who

knew him thought him the example of what a man should be, except for Henry James, who found him taciturn and dreary. Why then had he no shame in thus indulging his rage before women? Partly, of course, because woman was then the slave. But that does not explain the histrionic element in these displays, the breastfeeding, the groaning, the self-dramatization. His dependence on women helps to explain that. He needed always some woman to act before, to sympathize with him, to console him, because he was conscious of his failure as a philosopher. That failure gnawed at him, but his creed, the attitude adopted by him in his public relations, made him hide the need he had for praise. Thus to men, he appeared

entirely self-deprecating, modest, and ridiculously humble in his opinion of himself. To us, he was exacting, greedy, unabashed in his demand for praise. He said to me after one of these rages, You must think me... I think the word he used was... Foolish. I was silent. I did not think him foolish. I thought him brutal.

And that brutality was reserved for her kind alone. Virginia's father was, she finally realized, an existential threat. So when he died of cancer at the age of 71, two years after being knighted by the newly crowned King Edward, Virginia experienced such intense dissonance, she almost didn't survive it. She mourned her father deeply. She missed him, felt guilty for hating him, had pity for his flaws, and yet thought it was a mercy that he was gone.

His life would have entirely ended mine. And what would have happened? No writing. No books. Inconceivable. His life had to end in order for hers to begin. In fact, it was almost immediately after his death that she began to conceive of her first novel. But the truth of this was too painful. A few months after Leslie died, Virginia stopped making sense and was sent

for recovery to a quiet house in the country where she threw herself out a window. She survived the fall, but would spend the rest of her life wrestling with a man who was no longer there. Biochemistry is clearly to blame here. There was a history of mental illness, particularly in the women on Leslie's side of the family, and it is thought now that Virginia suffered from manic depression or bipolar disorder. But also, Virginia's highly sensitive nerves had been frayed by all the trauma she endured in her young life. She was temperamentally ill-equipped to handle dissonance, yet she was blessed, or maybe cursed, with a fullness of sight and feeling that made denial impossible. She could not just close off her heart to her father,

as Vanessa had done. She could not choose hatred over love. She was stuck with both. Virginia would outlive her father by nearly four decades, but she would spend much of that time trying to figure out how she felt about him. She was indebted to him for so many things, her life, for starters, her literary vocabulary, and perhaps a certain kind of ideological space. Some historians have said it was Leslie Stevens' own renunciation of God in his work that made possible all the reinvention of his daughter's modernist era. But she could not stop fighting him until she exercised him onto the page.

Until I wrote it out, I would find my lips moving. I would be arguing with him, raging against him, saying to myself all that I never said to him. But rage alternated with love. It was only the other day when I read Freud for the first time that I discovered that this violently disturbing conflict of love and hate is a common feeling and is called ambivalence. Ambivalence may be common, but Virginia's might have killed her. As she was planning to the

lighthouse, she wrote, The center is father's character, sitting in a boat, reciting, We perished each alone, while he crushes a dying mackerel. It cannot be insignificant that the woman who ended her life by walking into a river with stones in her pocket saw her father as a man in a boat singing a line from a sea shanty about death by drowning. Consider also this passage from the same book. Had there been an axe handy or a poker, any weapon that would have gashed a hole in father's breast and killed him there and then, James would have seized it. Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr. Ramsey excited in his children's breasts by mere presence, standing, as now, lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of

one, grinning sarcastically, not only with the pleasure of disillusioning his son and casting ridicule upon his wife, who was 10,000 times better in every way than he was, James thought, but also with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgment. What he said was true. It was always true. He was incapable of untruth, never tampered with a fact, never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure of convenience

of any mortal being, least of all his own children, who, sprung from his loins, should be aware from childhood that life is difficult, facts uncompromising, and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail barks founder in darkness. Here Mr. Ramsey would straighten his back and narrow his little blue eyes upon the horizon, one that needs, above all, courage, truth, and the power to endure. Those little blue eyes were Leslie Stevens, as was the posture, the egotism, and the lethal confusion he caused in the hearts of those who loved him. He was a sweet father who introduced his daughter to her calling, and he was the tyrant who threatened to destroy her with his own narcissistic demands. He was both the reason she was able to write her iconic argument for women's independence,

and the reason she had to. He was at once both the villain and the hero of her story. Wolfe famously asked, Who shall measure the heat and violence of a poet's heart when caught entangled in a woman's body? In the end, the heat and the violence were both too much for her to bear. Special thanks to Jamila Jamil and Luke Millington-Drake for giving voice to Virginia Woolf and Sir Leslie Stephen. I'd also like to thank my significant other for keeping his complaints about his whiskers to himself.

In tomorrow's follow-up episode, I'll be speaking with author, parent, and former Stanford dean, Julie Lithcott Hames, about whether or not Sir Leslie Stephen actually got some things right. Significant Others is written and read by me, Liza Powell O'Brien. I'm not a historian, and I'm greatly indebted to the work of those who are. In some cases, I use diaries or newspapers or court records as sources. But most often, I draw from biographies and autobiographies and articles, which represent countless hours of work by people who are far more knowledgeable than I. than I. Sources for each episode are listed in the show notes. If you hear something interesting and you want to know more, please consider ordering these books from your independent bookseller. And if you are a historian or someone who knows something about the people I'm talking about, and you'd like to take issue with an impression I've made or a conclusion I've drawn,

I welcome the dialogue. Finally, if you have an episode suggestion, let us know at significantpod at gmail.com. History is filled with characters, and we tend to focus only on a few of them. Significant Others is produced by Jen Samples. Our executive producers are Joanna Solitaroff, Adam Sachs, and Jeff Ross. Engineering and mixing by Eduardo Perez and Joanna Samuel. Music and scoring by Eduardo Perez and Hannes Brown, with additional help from Emily Prill. Research and fact-checking by Ella Morton. Special thanks to Lisa Berm. Talent booking by Paula Davis and Gina Batista.