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literary studies, cultural history, and study skill techniques

Late Victorian Gothic Tales

May 14, 2011 by Roy Johnson

mystery, weirdness, supernatural, and horror

For reasons much debated amongst literary historians, there was a revival of the Gothic horror story at the end of the nineteenth century. Within the space of just a few years we have Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), H.G.Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). The horror story was also a popular ingredient of the popular mass-circulation magazines which were launched around this time. Robert Luckhurst’s collection Late Victorian Gothic Tales is drawn from these sources, and it aims to show the range of stories by mixing examples from well-established authors with no less chilling takes from lesser-known writers.

Henry James believed that a horror story should not rely on the traditional trappings of midnight spookiness in ruined abbeys and graveyards for its effect. He thought that the mysterious and the macabre we all the more effective for taking place in the full light of day. His story here – Sir Edmund Orme – has a ghost who appears on the Parade at Brighton on a sunny afternoon. And true to James’s ever-inventive spirit, even though the ghost is of somebody long ago dead (as a result of a gruesome suicide) it turns out to be a force for good. It is a ghost of ‘retributive justice’ which appears to check that an injustice is not repeated.

Oscar Wilde performs the miraculous feat of making a horror story funny. His Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime offers an amusing critique of palm-reading (Cheiromancy as it was known then) which was in vogue at the turn of the century. Lord Arthur singularly fails to act out his destiny, which is to commit murder, despite sending a poisoned bon-bon to Lady Clementina and an exploding clock to the dean of Chichester.

In what he himself described as an ‘unpleasant story’, Rudyard Kipling manages to combine drunkenness, torture, and a contemporary case of a man turning into a rabid animal under the curse of a leper. This was one of his earliest Plain Tales from the Hills which made him famous as an author of Empire.

Arthur Conan Doyle follows a similar pattern in both stories that represent his contribution to the supernatural – his personal belief in which actually contributed to a decline in his literary reputation He has one story of an oblique form of sexual mutilation, and another in which an Egyptian mummy attempts to murder a series of Oxford undergraduates.

What’s clear from this collection is that Gothic horror is a formula sufficiently adaptable to work effectively in any circumstances. Ruined castles, vampires, and coffins in subterranean vaults are not the real essentials. They might help create atmospheric effects, but the basics elements of horror remain existential anxieties – such as predestination, the burden of inheritance, fighting uncontrollable forces , and the threat of death.

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Roger Luckhurst (ed), Late Victorian Gothic Tales, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.326, ISBN: 0199538875

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Laughter in the Dark

April 24, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, commentary, web links

Laughter in the Dark (1933) is often regarded as one of the most cruel of Vladimir Nabokov’s novels. He is famous for dealing with challenging subjects and using black comedy in his work. This novel tells the story of a well-intentioned family man with a weakness for young girls who is drawn into a complex web of desire, deceit, and revenge which has disastrous consequences. It is also a story told with all Nabokov’s usual subtle twists and verbal panache. It has become much discussed in recent years because it clearly prefigures the more famous Lolita he wrote more than twenty years later.

Laughter in the Dark – a note on the text

Laughter in the Dark (1933) is the sixth novel by Vladimir Nabokov. It was first serialised in the Russian language journal Sovremennye Zapiski (Contemporary Annals) in 1932. It was then published in Berlin the following year with the title Camera Obskura in the name of V. Sirin. Nabokov used this nom de plume in his early works to avoid confusion with his father, a writer and politician who was also called Vladimir Nabokov.

It was the first work by Nabokov to appear in English, published in London by John Long in a translation by Winifred Roy. Nabokov disliked this version so much that he made his own translation for its publication in America by Bobbs-Merrill in 1938.

In the Russian original, the protagonist Albert Albinus had the name Bruno Krechmar, and his rival Axel Rex was called Robert Gorn, whilst Margot was called Magda. Nabokov rarely missed an opportunity to ‘improve’ or update his texts.

Following Nabokov’s huge international success with Lolita in 1955, many of his earlier novels were re-translated and re-issued in English. It is possible that Laughter in the Dark was translated again in 1965, since in that year Nabokov renewed his copyright to the title.

Laughter in the Dark – commentary

Narrative strategies

Nabokov is famous for the inventive and playful manner in which he delivers his stories. Sometimes he teases his readers by planting clues in a game of literary hide and seek, and at others he introduces unusual variations on the conventions of story-telling. Laughter in the Dark begins with two very good examples of this inventiveness.

The first instance is a particularly daring narrative venture: he reveals the plot of his novel in advance. The opening paragraph is presented in mock fairy tale mode:

Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.

That is the plot of Laughter in the Dark summed up in two sentences. As readers we know what is going to happen. The more important issues are how it is going to happen, and how will the tale be told?

The second example of narrative inventiveness comes shortly afterwards, and in terms of story-telling strategy it is the exact opposite. He includes cleverly concealed details which do not become significant until much later in the novel. When Albinus enters the cinema where he meets Margot:

He had come in at the end of a film: a girl was receding among tumbled furniture before a masked man with a gun. There was no interest whatever in watching happenings which he could not understand since he had not yet seen their beginning.

Albinus might well have paid more attention to the film – because what he is witnessing (and what Nabokov is foretelling) is how the novel will end. This is a version of the final scene of the story when Albinus goes to shoot Margot. He is not ‘masked’ but blind – and it is she who ends by shooting him. [For those interested, the technical term for this literary device is ‘prolepsis’.]

In 1932 Nabokov was at an early stage of his development as a novelist and in particular his manipulation of narratives – though he had at that time produced the masterly novella The Eye (1930). This is a story in which a first person narrator both tells lies about himself and commits ‘suicide’ half way through the story he is relating.

Nabokov and paedophilia

Nabokov had been writing about older men yearning for and having sexual encounters with young girls ever since his earliest works. The English novelist Martin Amis (a great Nabokov enthusiast) calls this an ‘embarrassment’ in assessing Nabokov’s achievement as a writer.

In A Nursey Tale (1926) an elderly man strolls through the story with a girl whom the protagonist will choose as his erotic object. She is described as ‘a child [my emphasis] of fourteen or so in a low-cut party dress … mincing at the old poet’s side … her lips were touched up with rouge. She walked swinging her hips very, very slightly’.

In Laughter in the Dark Margot is slightly older, though it should be noted that although Albinus thinks she might be eighteen, her brother Otto confirms that she is in fact sixteen and has been virtually a prostitute up to the point when Albinus meets her.

Moreover, Nabokov later wrote a whole novella based on the same theme, The Enchanter (1939) then found fame with an entire novel devoted to the seduction, abduction, and abuse of an under-age girl in Lolita (1955). He was still including scenes of paedophilia in works as late as Ada or Ardor (1969), Transparent Things (1972), and Look at the Harlequins (1974).

In his posthumous and unfinished The Original of Laura (2009) the girl in question is twelve years old and is pursued lecherously by an ageing roué called (believe it or not) Hubert H. Hubert.

The purpose of pointing to the recurrence of this topic in his work is to emphasise that paedophilia is not an accidental subject in his novels, but a theme deeply rooted in his consciousness. Nabokov tried to sidestep any accusations of impropriety by re-naming his obsession as nympholepsy and frequently attributing its origin to the loss of an ideal love during childhood. His verbal flim-flam might have been an understandable form of self-defense in the middle of the twentieth century, but now in the twenty-first it can be seen for what it is – a loquacious and over-elaborated form of self-justification.

It is interesting that these narratives often end with the death of the paedophile. The unnamed protagonist of The Enchanter dies under the wheels of the passing truck after giving way to his impulse to molest the girl he has abducted. Humbert murders his rival and fellow paedophile Quilty, then dies in prison whilst awaiting trial. The blind Albinus sets out to shoot Margot because of her treacherous deception of him with Axel Rex, but is shot by her instead.

The relationships between Albinus, Margot, and Alex Rex are clearly a precursor to Humbert, Lolita, and Quilty in Lolita. One middle-aged man is obsessed with a young girl, but is being cruelly deceived by her engagement with a fellow paedophile.

In works such as Laughter in the Dark Nabokov was publishing under the moral constraints of the early twentieth century. Those who transgressed society’s norms must be punished. But following the turning point of Lolita, which appeared around the same time as the famous legal controversies surrounding The Naked Lunch (1959), Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1960), and Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964), Nabokov gradually lowered the age of his ‘nymphets’ in his later works until it stabilised around twelve.

This takes the question of aesthetic judgements into very murky waters. Most critics of Nabokov ignore this aspect of his work, concentrating instead on his verbal dexterity, his wit, and the gymnastic stunts he brings to the arrangement of his narratives. But the inescapable fact is that it is a subject he returned to again, again, and again.

The double

Axel Rex and Albert Albinus mirror or ‘double’ each other throughout the novel. Albinus is a wealthy art critic, and Rex is a cartoonist whom he first contacts with a view to their producing animations of classical paintings. Rex buys Margot from the procuress Frau Levandovsky and puts her into an apartment for his own use. When Rex disappears, Albinus does exactly the same thing: his first act is to install Margot in a flat as his sexual plaything.

When Alex reappears later in the story Albinus is quite friendly towards him. The two men socialise with each other, and whilst Margot is deceiving Albinus behind his back, they even go on holiday together. In the end, they are not only sharing Margot’s sexual favours but (thanks to Axel’s unscrupulous venality) Albinus’s money.

In their final scene together both men are in a state of undress. Axel is completely naked and Albinus is wearing a dressing gown. Axel caresses Albinus with a blade of grass he had just been sucking. It is also significant that whenever Albinus fears he is being deceived or when he actually discovers her betrayal, it is Margot who he seeks to kill, not his rival Axel Rex.

What does this tell us about the novel? It is often observed that when two men desire(or share) the same woman, this tells us more about their unconscious attraction to each other than to the woman herself. This might be regarded as accidental or a coincidence – except for the fact that exactly the same senario is acted out in Lolita, written almost a quarter of a century later.

Laughter in the Dark – study resources

Laughter in the Dark – Penguin – Amazon UK

Laughter in the Dark – Penguin – Amazon US

Lolita – Penguin – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years – Biography: Vol 1

Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years – Biography: Vol 2

Zembla – the official Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

Martin Amis – The Problem with Nabokov

Laughter in the Dark – plot summary

Albert Albinus is a wealthy art critic who has the idea of animating famous paintings, and he seeks someone who might help him technically. He is married to the placid Elizabeth, but has hankerings after young girls, including Margot Peters, an usherette whom he meets in a cinema. Margot dreams of being a film star, but she works as an artists’ model. She is procured by a man called Axel Miller who keeps her in a flat for a month then disappears. She subsequently resorts to prostitution then meets Albinus.

He rapidly becomes obsessed with her. She flirts and torments him, even provocatively visiting his house to check that he is wealthy. Albinus sets Margot up in a flat. When she writes to tell him the address, his wife Elizabeth intercepts the letter then leaves home with their daughter. Albinus moves in with Margot, who is menaced by her thuggish brother Otto with demands for money.

Albinus takes Margot to the Adriatric on holiday, but when they return to Berlin she objects to being hidden from public view. They move into his old apartment where he tries to disguise the fact that they are living together. He finds her a part in a low-budget film which he finances. To alleviate her boredom they throw a party – at which another guest is Axel Rex (previously Axel Miller). Margot regards him as her first true love – but she demands that Albinus seek a divorce.

The cruel and cynical Rex is down on his luck. He befriends Albinus as a ruse to regain Margot, who at first rejects Axel’s advances because he has no money. Albinus’s daughter contracts pneumonia and when she is dying Margot tries to prevent Albinus going to see her. Rex takes advantage of his absence to seduce Margot.

After a year Albinus resolves to return to his former life – but fails to do so. At a private showing of the film Margot is revealed as hopelessly incompetent. Albinus takes her on a motoring holiday as a compensation, together with Axel, who is pretending to be a homosexual. They drive to the south of France, where Margot continues to deceive Albinus with Rex.

Albinus meets an old friend Udo Conrad who naively reveals that he has overheard Axel and Margot discussing their love affair. Albinus confronts Margot with a gun, but she denies wrongdoing. They depart immediately, leaving Rex behind. Albinus crashes the car on a mountain road and recovers in hospital to discover that he has gone blind.

Rex writes to say that he is going back to New York, but in fact he takes over Albinus’s money and secretly moves with Margot and Albinus into a Swiss chalet. Rex and Margot torment the blind Albinus by flirting with each other in his presence. They plan to take over his property assets then leave him.

Elizabeth’s brother Paul is suspicious of the large cash withdrawals that Albinus appears to be making from his bank. He goes to Switzerland where he catches Rex and reveals the deception. Albinus wants to stay and kill Margot, but Paul takes him back to Elizabeth. A few days later, learning that Margot has returned to Berlin, Albinus takes a taxi to their old apartment where he tries to shoot her. But in the struggle it is she who shoots him dead.

Laughter in the Dark – main characters

Albert Albinus	a wealthy German art critic
Elizabeth	his placid wife
Axel Rex	an unscupulous cartoonist and gambler
Margot Peters	a lower-class teenage waif
Otto Peters	her thuggish brother
Paul Hochenwart	Elizabeth’s loyal brother
Dorianna Karenina	a fashionable Berlin actress

More on Vladimir Nabokov
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Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories

Leonard Woolf Autobiography – Vol I

July 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

politics, life, and literature – 1880 to 1969

Leonard Woolf is probably best known as the husband of Virginia Woolf, but in fact he had a remarkable life and set of achievements quite apart from his wife. He was a political activist and one of the founders of the League of Nations (which became the United Nations); he was a novelist and a journalist; and throughout the whole of his adult life he was a professional publisher, in charge of the very successful Hogarth Press, which he founded and ran successfully for fifty years.

The first volume of his autobiography deals with his childhood in a prosperous upper middle-class Jewish family and his early memories of growing up in late Victorian London, then his intellectual flowering when he went to Cambridge. The are some wonderful character sketches of his contemporaries, who became luminaries of the Bloomsbury Group, including Saxon Sydney Turner, Lytton Strachey, and Clive Bell.

You also get full details of all the property leases and house buyings of this group as it established its regular system of one place in town and another in the countryside. Some of his more inspired passages are his tirades against mysticism, religious belief, and any surrender to irrationalism. He has a seductively convincing underpinning to his philosophic position that Nothing matters, which he interprets in a non-passive manner – no doubt his own brand of G.E.Moore’s ethics, which he absorbed at Cambridge along with the rest of the Apostles.

Occasionally he’s quite humorous, and he is certainly a humane, rational, and honest man; yet he seems slightly naive in claiming that money is not really important – a claim contradicted by his obsessive habit of listing every penny he spent and earned throughout his fife. But these are minor human inconsistencies.

The next part (a whole volume in its original publication) deals with a part of his life of which most literary enthusiasts know nothing – his work as a colonial administrator in Ceylon. These pages include scenes you would not normally associate with this pillar of Bloomsbury: supervising floggings and executions; eliminating outbreaks of rinderpest; trekking through jungles; and issuing certificates for celebrity big game hunters.

He comes across as a thoroughly decent, intelligent, hard-working man, with a particularly sharp eye for the underdog and a love of animals which makes him an animal liberationist before his time. His experiences in Ceylon made him increasingly anti-imperialist, so he quit the service in 1911 and married Virginia Woolf instead.

He lived an astonishingly rich and varied life post 1912 (covered in Volume II) engagement with the co-operative movement, a gradual shift to the Left in political terms, and friendships with all the leading literary and political figures of the day – H.G.Wells, G.B.Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Ramsay MacDonald, and T.S.Eliot. There are also sustained portraits of Ottoline Morrell, Isobel Colefax, Sigmund Freud (whose complete works he published) and Ramsay MacDonald. He also provides an impassioned account of the political dark years of the 1930s.

Politically, he was a left-wing realist. He served on endless committees, fighting for causes in which he believed. Yet he realised that the people amongst whom he worked, and the mechanisms they pursued, were deadly boring. Unlike many fellow travellers of the inter-war years, he was also well aware that the communists (in Soviet terms) killed more people than they helped or saved.

He’s very revealing on the mechanics of running a small independent publishing company, and he presents the profits and balance sheets of the Hogarth Press with the very conscious aim of revealing what most other writers talk about but never confess – how much they make from their writing.

As an autobiography, it’s long overdue for a reissue, but in the meantime, the two volume Oxford Paperbacks edition offers the full text with good indexes. Leonard Woolf went up in my estimation as a result of reading this memoir, and I am looking forward now to both his collected leters, and in particular to the letters he exchanged on almost a daily basis with his ‘lover’ Trekkie Parsons.

See volume two of this autobiography

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Leonard Woolf, An Autobiography: 1880-1911 v. 1, Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1980, pp.320, ISBN: 0192812890

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Leonard Woolf Autobiography – Vol II

July 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

politics, life, and literature 1911-1969

The first volume of his autobiography dealt with his childhood in a prosperous upper middle-class Jewish family and his early memories of growing up in late Victorian London, then his intellectual flowering when he went to Cambridge. The are some wonderful character sketches of his contemporaries, who became luminaries of the Bloomsbury Group, including Saxon Sydney Turner, Lytton Strachey, and Clive Bell.

This second volume covers his astonishingly rich and varied life post 1912 – engagement with the co-operative movement, a gradual shift to the Left in political terms, and friendships with all the leading literary and political figures of the day – H.G.Wells, G.B.Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Ramsay MacDonald, and T.S.Eliot. There are also sustained portraits of Ottoline Morrell, Isobel Colefax, Sigmund Freud (whose complete works he published) and Ramsay MacDonald. He also provides an impassioned account of the political dark years of the 1930s.

In the last part of his memoir, written when he was eighty-five, it has to be said that he rambles quite a lot, and goes over ground he has already covered earlier. But this does help to reinforce the tremendous variety in his life. He felt that all his political efforts amounted to nothing, and that the Hogarth Press had been successful because it had been kept small scale and independent. He’s probably a bit too hard on himself politically, and anybody with a CV half as long could hold their head up high.

However, this is not a memoir full of gossip or personal revelation. You would never know from this that his wife fell in love with another woman, or that he had a largely sexless relationship with her. Nor would you ever guess that for the last thirty years of his life he shared the wife of his business associate on a weekend-weekday basis.

See volume one of this autobiography

Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Leonard Woolf, An Autobiography: 1911-1969 v. 2, Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1980, pp.536, ISBN: 0192812904

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Leonard Woolf biography

September 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

lifeline, literature, publishing, politics

Leonard Sidney Woolf was born in London in 1880, the third of ten children of Solomon Rees Sydney and Marie (de Jongh) Woolf. When his father died in 1892, Woolf was sent to board at the Arlington House School, a preparatory school near Brighton. From 1894 to 1899 he studied on a scholarship as a day student at St. Paul’s, a London public school noted for its classical studies. In 1899 he won a classical scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge.

At Cambridge, Woolf became part of a youthful group of intellectuals who were elected to an elite group called ‘The Apostles’. The members of this group included Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Thoby Stephen, John Maynard Keynes and E.M. Forster, who were students, and Bertrand Russell, who was a Fellow. These people eventually formed the core of the Bloomsbury Group.

In 1902 Woolf earned his B.A. degree but stayed on at Cambridge for a fifth year to study for the civil service examination. He left Trinity College in October 1904 to become a cadet in the Ceylon Civil Service. His professional progress was rapid. In August 1908 he was appointed an assistant government agent in the Southern Province, assigned to administer the District of Hambantota.

As part of the Bloomsbury Group, Woolf met Virginia Stephen, Thoby’s sister, and twice proposed marriage to her. He was twice refused. Woolf returned to England in May 1911 for a year’s leave, expecting to return to Ceylon later. In July, however, he proposed to Virginia yet again, and this time she accepted him.

Partly because he chose to marry Virginia and partly because of a growing distaste for colonialism, Woolf resigned from the Ceylon Civil Service early in 1912 (as George Orwell was to do over a decade later). It was at this time that the Bloomsbury Group began to gain momentum as an intellectual and artistic force, and Leonard Woolf was at the centre of it.

In 1913 Woolf published his first novel, The Village and the Jungle, based on his experiences in the colonial service. This was followed by The Wise Virgins in 1914.

Like most other members of the Bloomsbury Group, Woolf was a pacifist and an opponent of Britain’s involvement in the First World War. However, he was spared becoming a conscientious objector, because he was rejected by the military as unfit for duty.

With the outbreak of the war, Woolf turned his attention to politics and sociology. He joined the Labour Party and the Fabian Society and became a regular contributor to New Statesman. In 1916 he wrote International Government which outlined future possibilities for a international agency to enforce peace in the world. The book was incorporated by the British government in its proposals for a League of Nations at Geneva. Woolf was later active in the League of Nations Society and the League of Nations Union.

During the war years Woolf spent a lot of his time caring for his wife Virginia, who was then suffering extreme manic-depression. To provide her with a relaxing hobby they bought a small hand printing press in 1917 and set up the Hogarth Press – named after their home in Richmond. Their first project was a pamphlet containing a story by each of them, printed and bound by themselves.

Other small books followed, written by their friends including T.S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield and E.M. Forster. Many of the book jackets were designed by Virginia’s sister, the designer and painter Vanessa Bell. Within ten years, the Hogarth Press was a full-scale publishing house and included on its list such seminal works as Eliot’s The Waste Land, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and Freud’s Collected Papers, which were translated into English by Julian Strachey, Lytton Strachey’s brother. Leonard Woolf remained the main director of the publishing house from its beginning in 1917 until his death in 1969.

After the war, Leonard Woolf occupied himself more and more with political work. He became editor in 1919 of International Review, and edited the international section of Contemporary Review from 1920 through 1922. He was literary editor of Nation Athenaeum from 1923 to 1930 and joint editor of Political Quarterly from 1931-1959. Woolf also served during the period between the wars as secretary of the Labour Party’s advisory committees on international and colonial questions.

Leonard looked after his wife Virginia through all her periods of depression, right up to the point of her suicide in 1941. They remain a couple who typify the Bloomsbury Group through their personal lives and their prodigious creative output. What is less well known about Leonard Woolf however, is that the latter part of his life was no less radical at a personal level. Love Letters reveals the whole story of this extraordinary episode.

During the Second World War he began an affair with a painter and book illustrator Trekkie Parsons, who was married to a publisher – at that time on active military service. Leonard was 61, Trekkie 39. He wanted her to get a divorce and marry him, but instead she persuaded him to move into the house next door to her in London and she spent the weekends with him at Monk’s House in Rodmell.

When her husband came back from the war, their lives not surprisingly became more complex. She spent the weekends with her husband and the week with Leonard. She took holidays with the two men separately, and acted as hostess for them both. This arrangement worked smoothly for the next twenty-five years.

When Trekkie and Leonard were not together they talked through the post. Trekkie sealed up their correspondence, and it was only opened after her death. Linked by excerpts from her diary, the letters shine with details of daily life: of gardens and glow-worms, books and plays; of Leonard’s publishing and politics; of Trekkie’s struggle to balance her professional and personal life. This remarkable exchange of letters tells the story of two contrasting personalities, their love for one another and their unusual and creative domestic arrangement.

Among Woolf’s most important writings are After the Deluge (1931-51), a multi-volume modern political and social history, and his five-volume autobiography, Sowing (1960), Growing (1961), Beginning Again (1964), Downhill All The Way (1967) and The Journey Not The Arrival Matters (1969). He died August 14, 1969.

Bloomsbury Group – web links

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

More on Leonard Woolf
Twentieth century literature
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Leslie Stephen biography

September 21, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Leslie Stephen (1832-1904) has every right to be considered the father of the Bloomsbury Group, since it was his sons and daughters who eventually formed the network of friends and lovers which came to be given that name. But he was equally distinguished in his own right – as an author, critic, and a mountaineer. He is perhaps best known as the editor and principal author of the Dictionary of National Biography. Born in Kensington, London, he was raised in a family which belonged to the Clapham sect of evangelical Christian social reformers. He was educated at Eton College, then at Trinity Hall, Cambridge where he remained for several years as a fellow and a tutor of his college.

He became an Anglican clergyman, but in 1865 renounced his religious beliefs and left the church. In 1869 he married Harriet Thackeray, the daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray. They had a daughter Laura (1870-1945) who developed a form of incurable brain disease and was institutionalised for the majority of her life. When his wife died rather suddenly in 1875 he married Julia Prinsep Jackson, the widow of Herbert Duckworth. She brought with her two sons, George and Gerald, the latter of whom went on to found the Duckworth publishing company.

Settling at Hyde Park Gate in Kensington, London, he made his living as a journalist, editing the Cornhill Magazine which published the work of Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James. He also contributed to the Saturday Review. Macmillan, and other periodicals. In his spare time he became a famous mountaineer, and was the first person to climb a number of Alpine peaks. He was one of the first presidents of the Alpine Club and wrote The Playground of Europe which became a mountaineering classic.

With his second wife he had four children – two sons, Thoby and Adrian, and two daughters, Vanessa and Virginia who became Vanessa Bell the painter, and Virginia Woolf the writer. He was the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and he wrote The Science of Ethics which was widely adopted as a standard textbook on the subject.

When his second wife died in 1895, his daughter Vanessa took over the running of the Stephen household. He established what both his daughters describe as an emotionally demanding regime – but it has to be said that as a free-thinker, he also gave them free reign to pursue their artistic ambitions. In fact it is often observed that although Virginia, like other women of her time, did not go to university, she nevertheless received a first-class education at home, merely by being given free access to her father’s library.

When Leslie Stephen died in 1904 all four of the Stephen children lost no time in setting up home independently in what they saw as a more liberal and tolerant atmosphere. They even decorated their new premises in Gordon Square Bloomsbury in lighter colours, as a reaction to the dark tones of the Victorian period they were leaving. However, the politically liberal, free-thinking (non-religious) intellectual atmosphere their father left them as an inheritance was to form the basis of what they had created within a few years as founding members of the Bloomsbury Group.