The Life of Violet, page 12
35. Founded in 1841, Punch, or the London Charivari was a popular illustrated humorous weekly magazine. The magazine’s satirical cartoons often made fun of British colonial life abroad.
36. See Gregory Irvine, Japonisme and the Rise of the Modern Art Movement, and Ayako Ono, Japonisme in Britain.
37. For example, Woolf received an invitation to a lecture by the Japanese art scholar Laurence Binyon in 1905, and her encounters with East Asian arts more broadly multiplied when the critic and artist Roger Fry entered her life. Fry’s two postimpressionist exhibitions in 1910 and 1911, followed by the art objects produced in the Omega Workshops (1913–18) and his writings on form, occasioned Woolf’s several reflections on how to adopt or adapt various aesthetic sensibilities from around the world into her writing. See Urmila Seshagiri, Race and the Modernist Imagination.
38. In a lengthy diary entry for Christmas 1904 that anticipates the The Life of Violet, Woolf describes the scenery of the New Forest as though it were a “floating world” in a Japanese woodblock:
The sunset makes all the air as though of melted amethyst; yellow flakes dissolve from the solid body of amethyst which is the west. Against this, standing as though in an ocean of fine air, the bare trees are deep black lines, as though drawn in Indian ink which has dried dull and indelible. The small branches & twigs make a fringe of infinitely delicate lines, each one distinctly cut against the sky.… The trees have green velvet jackets of moss. This the brightest colour in the landscape. A peach bloom of silver & plum colour covers the trees at a little distance. Also a pale green lichen, seaweed like in its shape, covers the bark. The trees very often spread their branches into a symmetrical fan shape as though they had been clipped by a landscape gardener. A river in summer is as though made of plates of translucent glass, the top one of which slides. (PA, 215)
39. Bell and Marler, Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, 57.
40. See Hussey, Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism, 51–80.
41. Bell and Marler, Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, 59.
42. This self-recriminatory line refers to another piece of life writing: Woolf’s anonymous contribution to Frederick Maitland’s biography of her father, Leslie Stephen, which was published in 1906.
43. As one example, here is a sentence from the 1907 draft:
For the Sacred Monster made you laugh merely to look at her; so that you must be a happy person to begin with which is a virtue; and she so ordered your house and family and servants and love affairs and money and garden and morals, that if you did as she bid you you were bound to prosper in this world, and become a Mayor; and in the next still brighter honours awaited you.
In the revised 1908 typescript, Woolf alters five punctuation marks to give the sentence greater fluidity. She replaces the institutional- or official-sounding word “honours” with “crowns,” a more flexible word with literal, figurative, historical, and fanciful associations:
For the Sacred Monster made you laugh merely to look at her, so that you must be a happy person to begin with, which is a virtue, and she so ordered your house and family and servants and love affairs and money and garden and morals, that if you did as she bid you, you were bound to prosper in this world, and become a Mayor, and in the next still brighter crowns awaited you.
44. It is unclear when Woolf gave the 1907 typescript to Violet.
45. Lehmann, Thrown to the Woolfs, 150–51.
46. Auden, “A Consciousness of Reality,” 113.
47. See Maschler, Publisher, and Lehmann, Thrown to the Woolfs.
48. The Longleat House entry for Woolf’s stories has “Friendship’s Gallery” with an apostrophe, which is how Violet bound and titled it, but it is not the title as Woolf has it on p. 1 of the story by that name. Both of Violet’s penciled notes on the typescript (“1907” and “Typed by Virginia”) are erroneous, as this item was professionally typed in 1908.
49. Nor has The Life of Violet been included in other collections of Woolf’s short stories, such as Kew Gardens and Other Short Fiction (ed. Bryony Randall [Oxford University Press, 2022]) or the Selected Short Stories (ed. Sandra Kemp [Penguin, 2003/2019]).
50. See Clarke, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 6.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Auden, W. H. “A Consciousness of Reality.” The New Yorker. March 6, 1954, 111–16.
Banfield, Ann. The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Bell, Vanessa, and Regina Marler. Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell. London: Moyer Bell, 1998.
Briggs, Julia. Reading Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
________. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. New York: Harcourt, 2005.
Burden, Joy. Winging Westward: From Eton Dungeon to Millfield Desk. Bath: Robert Wall Books, 1974.
Carlyle, Thomas. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. London: James Frazer, 1841.
Clarke, Stuart. Headnote and annotations. Woolf, Virginia, “Friendships Gallery.” [1907]. In The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 6: 1933–1941, 515–49. London: Hogarth Press, 1979.
Cook, Blanche Wiesen. “ ‘Women Alone Stir My Imagination’: Lesbianism and the Cultural Tradition.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 4, no. 4 (1979): 718–39.
Corbett, Mary Jean. Behind the Times: Virginia Woolf in Late-Victorian Contexts. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, April 2020.
Curtis, Vanessa, and Julia Briggs. Virginia Woolf’s Women. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.
D’Anethan, Eleanora Mary. Fourteen Years of Diplomatic Life in Japan: Leaves from the Diary of Baroness Albert d’Anethan. London: Stanley Paul, 1912.
Dickinson, Violet. [See Archival Sources below.]
Eden, Emily. Miss Eden’s Letters Edited by Her Great-Niece Violet Dickinson. London: Macmillan, 1919.
Forrester, Viviane. Virginia Woolf: A Portrait. Translated by Jody Gladding. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
Gordon, Lyndall. Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984.
Hawkes, Ellen. Introduction to “Friendships Gallery.” Twentieth Century Literature 25 (1979): 270–73.
________. “Woolf’s ‘Magical Garden of Women.’ ” In New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf, edited by Jane Marcus. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981.
Hussey, Mark. Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism. London: Bloomsbury, 2021.
Irvine, Gregory. Japonisme and the Rise of the Modern Art Movement: The Arts of the Meiji Period. London: Thames & Hudson, 2013.
King, James. Virginia Woolf. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995.
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage, 1997.
Lehmann, John. Thrown to the Woolfs: Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978.
Lilienfeld, Jane. “ ‘The Gift of a China Inkpot’: Violet Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, and the Love of Women in Writing.” In Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings, edited by Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer, 37–56. New York: New York University Press, 1997.
Maschler, Tom. Publisher. London: Macmillan, 2007.
McNeillie, Andrew. Introduction to The Essays of Virginia Woolf: Volume One. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.
Ono, Ayako. Japonisme in Britain: Whistler, Menpes, Henry, Hornel and Nineteenth-Century Japan. London: Routledge, 2003.
Rudikoff, Sonya. Ancestral Houses: Virginia Woolf and the Aristocracy. Palo Alto Society for Promotion of Science & Scholarship, 1999.
Seshagiri, Urmila. Race and the Modernist Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010.
Simpson, Kathryn. “Friends and Lovers.” In The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne E. Fernald, 27–43. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.
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Archival Sources
Captain Humphrey-Davies correspondence, collection of Auckland War Memorial Museum - Tāmaki Paenga Hira. MUS-1995-42-11.
Berg Collection, NYPL. Dickinson, Violet. Album of autographs, photographs, etc., recording world tour, 1905. 36 cm. 1 v. with compiler’s holograph notes.
Berg Collection, NYPL. Friendships [G]allery. Typescript with ms. corrections in the author’s and unidentified hands. “Written by Virginia Stephen and typed by her in 1907” is penciled in on p. [1] by Violet Dickinson. Bound. Includes her “A Story to Make You Sleep” [36–52], n.d., 52 pages, typescripts (emended).
Longleat House. Woolf, Virginia, 1882–1941. “Friendship’s Gallery” [Longleat typescript]. Friendship’s Gallery [Chapter I], The Magic Garden [Chapter II], A Story to Make You Sleep [Chapter III]. f f.47. Unpublished carbon typescript, 1907. Inscription: Marked by Violet Dickinson in pencil “1907” and “Typed by Virginia.”
Somerset Heritage Centre. “Mary Violet Dickinson; 9th Generation.” Manuscript History of the Dickinson Family, vol. 2, 1940. DD/DN/5/6/3 (pp. 116–27).
________. Typescript manuscript of God’s Protecting Providence by Jonathan Dickinson, with a preface by his kinswoman Violet Dickinson, ca. 1930s. DD/DN/5/5/3 (1–17).
University of Sussex Library. Early Writings by Virginia Woolf, in Monks House Papers: Papers of Virginia Woolf and Related Papers of Leonard Woolf. Reference no. SxMs18-2-A-26 (pp. 73–78). Diary entry 1902.
Unpublished items from the Violet Dickinson Collection, Longleat.
Washington State University. Harte, Anthony. These Thoughts Were Written By Anthony Harte. S. l.: s. n., 1905. VW—presentee. Violet Dickinson—inscriber.
INDEX
Not included: Violet Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, works by Virginia Woolf
Baring, Evelyn, Lord Cromer, 2, 65
Bell, Clive, 71
Bell, Vanessa, 70–71
Bloomsbury, xi, 48, 50–51
Burnham Wood, 41, 42, 45
Carlyle, Thomas, 41
Cecil, Eleanor, 1, 44, 56, 59, 64–65, 67, 70
Cecil, Robert, 1, 44, 64–65
Clarke, Stuart, 76
Crum, Ella, 2, 54, 70
Crum, Walter, 1, 70
Dickinson, Edmund, 43
Dickinson, Jonathan, 47
Dickinson, Oswald, 44
Dickinson, Robert, 44
Eden, Emily Dulcibella, 43
Eden, Emily, 47
Eden, George, 1st Earl of Auckland, 46
Emperor Mutsuhito, 64
Greenaway, Kate, 44
Hatfield House, 60
Hawkes, Ellen, 76
Humphrey-Davies, George, 46
Lehmann, John, 75
Longleat House, xi, xiii–xiv, 44, 74
Lyttelton, Margaret, 52
Maschler, Tom, 75–76
Maxse, Kitty, 2, 54, 56, 57
Nicolson, Nigel, 42–43
Queen Victoria, 44
Roosevelt, Theodore, 64
Savage, George, 45
Strachey, Lytton, 47
Taft, William Howard, 64
Thynne, Beatrice, 1, 44, 49, 54, 56, 58
Thynne, John, 4th Marquess of Bath, 44
Thynne, Katherine, 2, 44, 54, 56, 66
Vaughan, Emma, 56
Vesey, Frances, Lady Bath, 1, 55
Woolf, Leonard, 75–76
Virginia Woolf, The Life of Violet
