Virginia Woolf, between the lines

BURLINGTON, Mass. — Virginia Woolf has been dead for nearly 80 years, but she continues to be a looming presence in modern culture.

An opera based on her gender-bending novel, “Orlando,” recently debuted in Vienna, and last year's movie “Vita and Virginia” dramatized her relationship with Vita Sackville-West.

Biographer Gillian Gill maintains that Woolf (1882-1941) remains a touchstone for many reasons.

In novels such as “To the Lighthouse” and “Mrs. Dalloway,” she illuminates the inner consciousness of her characters in groundbreaking ways.

Woolf's essay “A Room of One's Own,” in which she argues that a woman writer “must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” has provided a foundation for third-wave feminism.

Further, her style, what Gill calls “light, easy, knowledgeable but not pedantic,” remains accessible to today's readers.

Gill, 77, has written biographies of Florence Nightingale, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Agatha Christie and Mary Baker Eddy. She spent five years researching and writing her new biography, “Virginia Woolf and the Women Who Shaped Her World,” published in December by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

A British native, she holds a doctorate in modern French literature from Cambridge and has taught at Wellesley College and Northeastern, Harvard and Yale universities.

She came to Virginia Woolf in a roundabout way, after considering writing a book about mothers and daughters or famous literary sisters. In Woolf's life, she found both subjects.

Gill's biography focuses in part on the sometimes strained relationship between the Stephen sisters — Virginia Stephen Woolf, who struggled with mental illness for most of her life despite her literary success, and her older sister Vanessa Stephen Bell, a painter whose unconventional lifestyle masked a sometimes cold personality.

By Gill's account, the sexual abuse the sisters suffered at the hands of their half-brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth, and the flirtation between Virginia and Clive Bell, Vanessa's husband, drove a permanent wedge between the sisters.

It is Vanessa, in particular, who comes across as cruel.

“I didn't want to do Vanessa,” Gill said, noting that Bell remains more popular in her home country than her writer sister.

“I'm sort of aware that Vanessa is beloved by many people. Do I want to offend this potential group? But the more I got into her, what she wrote … the less I liked her.”

But Gill's editor said she could not avoid this story line. And the more she examined the record, she saw why Vanessa might have bullied Virginia.

“Her husband is flirting quite outrageously in front of her very eyes with her sister,” she said. “What kind of betrayal must that have been? The weird thing about that is that they don't write about it.”

Gill has not so much uncovered new evidence about the family dynamic as she has looked at the existing texts in a new way. An enormous amount has been written about the Stephen household, including major biographies of both sisters, and the family left behind many letters and diaries.

Because of this, Gill felt less need to do archival research than she did for her biography of Florence Nightingale. Instead, she examined the evidence as much for what was missing as what was there.

Why, for example, was so little said about the women's half-sisters, Laura Makepeace Stephen and Stella Duckworth? Laura, the only surviving child of Leslie Stephen's first marriage, suffered from some sort of developmental and emotional disorder and was eventually committed.

Gill suspects that if George Duckworth was visiting Virginia and Vanessa in their bedrooms at night, he had ample opportunity to do the same to his stepsister, Laura. Gerald, whom Virginia said also touched her inappropriately, had similar access.

When Laura Stephen died in an institution, lawyers had difficulty finding her kin.

“They forgot her. They put her away,” Gill said.

Stella, one of Julia Duckworth Stephen's three children from her first marriage, was a sort of family drudge whom her mother relied on to run the household while she was away. She finally married Jack Hills, but died shortly afterward of a burst appendix.

“What is there about Stella?” Gill asked rhetorically. “We have so little from her hand. … Then I find her avatars playing out in Virginia Woolf's fiction, and I'm so happy with Woolf for doing that.”

Gill spends less time on Vita Sackville-West, whose affair with Virginia has been well documented. It was one more story line than the book could handle, and by that time her editor was clamoring for the manuscript.

If Virginia's husband, Leonard Woolf, brought order to her life, Vita provided the spark of sexual desire that acted as Virginia's muse, Gill said. “Without Vita coming into her life, we wouldn't have the great works.”

Gill's fieldwork in Britain included walks through Bloomsbury, the London neighborhood where Virginia, Vanessa and their brothers' Cambridge friends formed a literary salon at 46 Gordon Square. She also visited Sussex, where Virginia and Leonard lived at Monk's House off and on from 1919 until her suicide in 1941.

These trips and her intensive reading of Woolf's novels, letters, and diaries, in addition to texts left by her sister and friends, led Gill back where she had started — to the relationships between women, whether mothers and daughters, grandmothers and daughters, or sisters.

“I got very emotional at the end of the book,” she said. “This could be the last book that I write … and I've said things that I wanted to say.”

When asked to sum up Woolf's legacy, Gill spoke of both her writing and her character.

“The fact that from the age of 13 she was afflicted by this major mood disorder that brought her to suicide … and yet managed to produce all of this material, managed to survive, wasn't a victim of her illness,” Gill said. “And because of her personal heroism, I think, we look at her writings and see what an amazing achievement they were.”

Betty J. Cotter teaches writing at the University of Rhode Island and English at Three Rivers Community College in Norwich, Connecticut.