Uncomfortable stories: Virginia Woolf and George Duckworth

To coincide with the CILIP Rare Books conference, Dr Michelle A. Taylor (Joanna Randall MacIver Junior Research Fellow), explores an uncomfortable story in the College Library’s collections. The items featured here are currently on display in the case in South Foyer.

Mary Bennett, Principal of St Hilda’s College from 1965-1980, was a relative of Virginia Woolf, being the daughter of Woolf’s maternal cousin, H. A. L. Fisher. She donated autographed books by Woolf to the St Hilda’s College Library and Archives. They are inscribed, rather cursorily, to Woolf’s maternal half-brother (also Bennett’s relative), George Duckworth. The brevity of these inscriptions already tells us a little about Woolf’s relationship to George, suggesting a marked lack of closeness or affection. It was only in 1976, when Woolf’s unpublished memoir writings were gathered into a posthumous collection called Moments of Being, that the full story of their complicated and perhaps even abusive relationship came to light. 

In one of these memoir writings — ‘22 Hyde Park Gate’, which Woolf first read aloud in a private gathering in 1921 — Woolf recalls George as a helpless buffoon who was only inadvertently threatening: ‘He lived in the thickest emotional haze, and as his passions increased and his desires became more vehement […] one felt like an unfortunate minnow shut up in the same tank with an unwieldy and turbulent whale’.

But the close of Woolf’s wry recollection reveals that George’s attentions to Woolf were not just oppressive in their Victorian conventionality and sentimentality: Woolf recounts, in hazy terms, how George ‘flung himself on [her] bed, and took [her] in his arms’, calling her his ‘beloved’. At best, this contact was inappropriately romantic and non-consensual, a distressing manipulation of a minor by an adult charged with her care. At worst, it was sexual abuse, akin to the abuse she suffered from her other half-brother, Gerald Duckworth, which she recalls in another posthumously published piece of memoir, ‘A Sketch of the Past’.

As Dr Lyndall Gordon, Senior Research Fellow at St Hilda’s, wrote, ‘It is impossible to know exactly what happened beyond the fact that Virginia’s experience of sexual abuse at the age of six was reinforced [by George] as a young woman’, and that she was haunted by it even in ‘her last breakdown’.

The story these inscriptions tell — as much as the story they cannot tell — presents an uncomfortable reminder of the culture of silence and shame that kept and still keeps children like the young Virginia Woolf from speaking up about their mistreatment at the hands of those they should be able to trust. 

Featured items

Leslie Stephen, Memoir from de luxe edition of the works of W.M. Thackeray  (London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1878) 

Woolf inherited her literary inclinations from her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and author of, among other books, this study of W. M. Thackeray. This copy is inscribed to his sister-in-law Mary Fisher, who was also Mary Bennett’s grandmother. (Thackeray was Leslie’s relative by marriage: Minny Thackeray, the novelist’s daughter, was Leslie’s first wife; Julia Duckworth née Jackson, Woolf’s mother, was Mary Fisher’s sister.) Leslie’s inscription to his sister-in-law shows us how even new relatives by marriage might express more warmth than Woolf did in giving George Duckworth his books. 

Virginia Woolf, The common reader (London: Hogarth Press, 1925)

Like the other books inscribed to George Duckworth by Woolf, this copy of The Common Reader (1925) is not a first printing: it is the second edition, printed in November 1925. It appears to have waited three years to be gifted to George in 1928. George’s copies of To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928) are also the third and second impressions, respectively. These dated inscriptions on later printings testify to a somewhat distant relationship: George is an afterthought to Woolf, as she is to him.                                                                                 

Virginia Woolf, Orlando (London: Hogarth Press, 1928)

In ‘22 Hyde Park Gate’, Woolf writes that George ‘had a curious inborn reverence for the British aristocracy […]. His secret dreams […] were all of a wife with diamonds, and having a coachman with a button, and having the entrée at Court’. Still, it is hard to imagine George appreciating Orlando, although it was an open secret that Orlando, an aristocrat, was based on Vita Sackville-West, daughter of the 3rd Baron Sackville.

Letter from Virginia Woolf to Mary Fisher (later Bennett), 1st January 1935 [item in display case is a facsimile]

It’s not clear how much contact Woolf had with Mary Bennett, though this letter, written when Bennett was 22 and Woolf 53, suggests some warmth and familiarity. For most of her life, Woolf was friendly enough, too, with her cousin Herbert, Mary’s father, but in her diaries and letters she occasionally grouped him with her brother George: respectable, political, and successful, both represented a certain type of patriarchal figure she resented. In 1928, Woolf visited Oxford to speak to the women of St Hugh’s College; Fisher, who had left government to become the Warden of New College, invited her to stay. Mary would have been fifteen during this visit.

Oxford Gardens in St Hilda's Special Collections

Deputy Librarian Eleanor Kelly takes a look at Oxford Gardens in St Hilda's special collections. Visit our display case in South Foyer to see some examples in real life.

Oxford’s rich history of gardens dates back over 400 years. Oxford’s Botanic Gardens opened as the Oxford Physic Garden on 25th July 1621, for the purpose of growing medicinal herbs for teaching medical students. Herbals, such as the one on display, contain many examples of plants that would have grown in the Physic Garden, including Cowslips and Primrose. The leaves of cowslips were used in tea and preserves to procure sleep and the root of primroses were used to treat sneezing and headaches. Nearly 220 years later in 1840 the Physic Garden became known as the Botanic Gardens. Today it conserves plants from around the world and supports the University’s teaching and research.

The Oxford Botanic Gardens expanded to include the Harcourt Arboretum when the University acquired the estate of Nuneham House, near Nuneham Courtenay in 1947. Nuneham House was the seat of the Earl of Harcourt, built in the mid-1750s. Renowned English gardener, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown re-landscaped the gardens in the late 1770s to include a looped woodland circuit. In 1786, the upper section of the Carfax Conduit House (which formed part of Oxford’s early water system) was moved from the centre of Oxford into the grounds of Nuneham. The land at Nuneham House were further developed in the 1830s by Sawrey Gilpin and the arboretum was established. There are now more than 130 acres at Harcourt Arboretum.

The origins of the gardens at St Hilda’s also lie with the Botanic Gardens. Cowley House (the foundation of Hall Building) was built by Dr John Sibthorp during his time as Professor of Botany 1785-96 on a site deliberately chosen due to its proximity to the Physic Garden. It is thought that the original lilac tree in St Hilda’s gardens was from a scion obtained during Dr Sibthorp’s travels in Asia Minor. He was also responsible planting thorns, prunus and amylaucia. Cowley Grange (now South Building) was built in the 1870s and the gardens were first laid by Christ Church chemistry tutor Augustus Vernon Harcourt.

English gardener and St Hilda’s alumna Eleanor Sinclair Rodhe (SHC: 1900-1903) said of St Hilda’s gardens:

“Naturally everyone thinks their own college has the most beautiful garden, and S. Hilda’s, with its waterway and views of Merton and within sound of all the bells, is, I think, the loveliest, although the smallest of the women’s college gardens. Seen from the river, part of S. Hilda’s South garden is a miniature vision of spring – the violet, mauve, pale yellow and white of the irises, the rock-garden with violas, thrift, phlox, aubretias, rock roses, London pride and forget-me-nots, the poppies and in the background the brooms, and to the left the orchard of buttercups, sorrel and a white mist of cow-parsley.”

A small cedar tree was planted by Hall Building to commemorate the founding of the College by Dorothea Beale in 1893, and today, St Hilda’s is the only college to have three types of cedar trees in its grounds: Lebanese, Atlas and Himalayan cedars.

Featured items

• R.T. Gunther, Oxford gardens: based upon Daubeny’s popular guide to the Physick Garden of Oxford (Oxford: Parker & Son, 1912)
• John Hill, The family herbal (Bungay: Brightly & Co., 1812)
• Picturesque views of the principal seats of the nobility and gentry in England and Wales (London: Harrison & Co., 1787)
• Eleanor Sinclair Rohde, Oxford college’s gardens (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1932)
• Anne Pratt, The flowering plants of Great Britain, volumes one and three (London: Frederick Warne, 1870?)