"MY AFTERNOON is gone in the way to me most detestable and upsetting of all." Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary on the day of her final sitting for a professional photographer. It was 1939 and her career was at its height. The resulting photograph shows her with her coarse grey hair tamed into a low bun, and dressed in peculiar Victorian costume, posing with a book in one hand, a cigarette holder in the other. Behind her are the distinctive decorative wall panels, painted for her house at Tavistock Square by her sister Vanessa Bell and the painter Duncan Grant. The reluctant portraits capture her enduring reputation as the éminence grise of literary London. Distinguished, thoughtful and a little eccentric, she looks every inch the successful Bohemian.
"Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision", a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, charts the life of one of the 20th century’s foremost writers through a mix of photographs such as these, portraits, archival material and artworks. The exhibition ably demonstrates how material possessions and physical appearances can offer a rich visual supplement to a well-thumbed biography. Pictures of Woolf, alongside contemporary objects and imagery—paintings that she owned or knew well, first-edition books, draft designs of pamphlets, book jackets, posters, family photographs, letters, sketches and so on—build a comprehensive portrait of a complex character, and provide a compelling reminder of her continued appeal.
Woolf herself often wrote of the significance of personal possessions—"the shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves"—and how objects can "enforce memories of our own experience." Part of her reluctance to be photographed came from her awareness of how revealing and distracting appearances could be. "I must be as private, secret, as anonymous and submerged as possible in order to write", she once said. It was perplexing and irritating to her that personal appearance could occupy her thoughts to the extent that it did. Dissecting "frock consciousness" in her writing, she frequently noticed how clothes could represent a strangely significant convergence of social and individual identity. "Looking the part, like playing the part," she wrote in the 1928 novel "Orlando: A Biography", "helps to create, define and reinforce our identity."
A wall of early photographs immediately reveals the distinguished intellectual elite that she was born into in 1882, many taken by the pioneering photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, who was her great aunt. Virginia’s father, Leslie Stephen, was founding editor of the "Dictionary of National Biography" and an eminent scholar, and her mother’s family had a close association with the Pre-Raphaelites. Among her parents’ friends was the novelist Henry James, who caused the young Virginia great embarrassment when he expressed his interest in the fact that she was beginning to write, as "the descendent", he stammered, "of a century of quill pens and ink pots."
Woolf became the natural epicentre of the next generation of this intellectual aristocracy. Her name is synonymous with the Bloomsbury group, the colourful cohort of artists, academics, writers and thinkers that evolved from weekly salons hosted at the Stephen family home in the early 1900s. Selections of their output—books, sketches, designs, paintings, letters—shown alongside Woolf’s novels, convey some of their intellectual camaraderie and interwoven ideas. Of particular interest are works by her sister Vanessa Bell, who was herself integral to the Bloomsbury group and a renowned artist in her own right. Vanessa’s likenesses of Virginia, whom she had painted and drawn since childhood, show a progression towards abstraction that runs in parallel with her sister’s developments in prose, which were also gradually dispensing with obvious detail in pursuit of the visions and nebulous movements of the mind.
Woolf’s novels and essays gave great consideration to the notion of the self, and she recognised that "we do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others." This was written in direct reference to her mental illness, which was a powerful presence throughout her life, first descending in 1896 following the death of her mother, and later driving her to suicide in 1941. Its destructive influence is made clear in this exhibition, from the first anxious letters that record its arrival, to the final words that Woolf wrote to her sister and husband Leonard: "I have fought against it, but I can’t any longer." Her walking stick, found by her husband on the banks of the river where she drowned, is also on view.
While the many portraits that were made of her over her lifetime provide a memorable impression of society and culture of the time, it is Woolf’s satisfying analyses and sharp observations—quoted liberally here—that leap from the walls most brilliantly, and provide the closest understanding of her own character and of those around her. Woolf knew that "painting and writing have much to tell each other, they have much in common." The art critic Roger Fry justified her presence in a portrait gallery long ago. “You’re the only one now Henry James has gone," he told her in 1918, "who uses language as a medium of art, who makes the very textures of the words have a meaning and a quality really almost apart from what you are talking about.”
Shortly before those final photographs were taken, Woolf had been compelled to write an autobiographical memoir, asking herself "Who was I then?" It was an appropriate time to reflect on her foundations. Not long after, a bomb blew the house apart. Pictures show the rooms where Woolf wrote so many books, essays and letters, sliced in two; fireplaces exposed, murals half destroyed, furniture in splinters. Her diaries, kept continuously over a lifetime and filling over thirty notebooks, were among the few possessions that could be salvaged. A way of living might have been destroyed, but in the end it was her own words, on her own life, that proved to be most enduring.
