‘Caroline provided Virginia with a role model of an independent woman.’

Woolf Down: Virginia had close Quaker links, says Kersti Wagstaff

In Simon Webb’s review of Virginia Woolf’s biography of Roger Fry in the Friend last month, he was right to point out that Virginia Woolf was not a Quaker. But she had much closer contact with Quakerism than is often realised – in particular with something quite like Quakerism as it is now understood, in contrast to the stiflingly-respectable version of Fry’s childhood.

Virginia Woolf was born Virginia Stephen. Caroline Stephen (she of Quaker faith & practice 2.02, author of the liberal Quaker classic Quaker Strongholds) was Virginia’s aunt. At the age of twenty-two, Virginia stayed with Caroline to recuperate after a nervous breakdown, and indeed attended Meeting with her.

Another of Caroline’s nieces, Katharine Stephen, was librarian and later Principal of Newnham College, where Virginia gave the lecture that eventually became that core feminist text, A Room of One’s Own. Caroline is in fact the original of the aunt who briefly appears in that book as the ‘Aunt Mary’ who leaves a crucial small legacy, enabling the author-narrator Virginia to pursue writing and the life of the mind.

Although Virginia might refer disparagingly to Caroline as ‘the Nun’ or ‘the Quaker’, Caroline actually provided Virginia with a role model of an independent woman – one who thought and wrote. Virginia regarded Caroline’s life as having been blighted by the same stifling respectability as was present in Roger Fry’s childhood, but, at this vulnerable time in Virginia’s life, when she was just beginning to write, this was important.

Roger Fry’s family was closely connected by marriage to the Gurneys, one of whom, John Joseph Gurney (a brother of Elizabeth Fry), was the chief introducer of the evangelical theology that became influential in Victorian Quakerism. This theology mixed to varying degrees around the country with the quietism that, in truth, did need an injection of new energy. It’s difficult to know whether the oppressiveness in Roger’s childhood home was related more to Gurney’s evangelicalism or Victorian stuffiness.

But Caroline, by contrast, was a notable contributor to the spreading of the liberal Quaker message that was beginning to replace the quietist-Evangelical mix. Alison Lewis says she became the most eloquent spokesperson for her faith in her day and, according to [Rufus] Jones ‘the influence of her exposition of [the Society’s] central ideals and practices was very great both within and beyond the Society’.

She also directly influenced a generation of young Friends, from the Quaker students at Cambridge (who visited her when she resided there) to the Young Friends of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (to whom she wrote in 1907).

Friends interested in finding out more should dig out Alison M. Lewis’s article on Caroline and Virginia in Quaker Theology issue 3, Fall 2000.

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Comments

Caroline Stephen is one of my favourite ‘nover-met’ QUakers. Nelson Dawson’s painting “The Chelsea Meeting”  was made in her Chelsea home where she posted MfW regularly before she moved to Cambridge.

By Linda Murgatroyd on 29th November 2020 - 18:47

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