‘It’s not another passion story, but a series of annunciations, epiphanies or Pentecosts.’ Photo: Virginia Woolf
Woolf at the door? Jonathan Wooding investigates the author’s Quaker links
‘Perhaps Woolf did write about Q. Meeting, after all.’
Let’s start with Mrs Ramsay, the principal character in Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse: ‘All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.’
One might think this were an evocation of centring down in a Meeting for Worship, and it may be that Woolf (1882-1941) had been contemplating such a ‘description’ ever since going to Quaker Meeting in 1904. In a letter dated 30 October, 1904, to her friend Violet Dickinson, she writes: ‘Would Mrs Lyttelton like a description of a Q. Meeting from my gifted pen, d’you think. I don’t know if I shall have time, but it might be amusing.’ Mrs Lyttelton was the editor of the women’s supplement of The Guardian, a London weekly newspaper for clerical readers (1846-1951). Woolf did begin her writing career there, but she did not write about that ‘Q. Meeting’. The awkward ironic shrug – ‘it might be amusing’ – is, I think, a sophisticated young woman’s need to play down a rather-embarrassing interest in, of all things, religious piety.
Virginia had written just the week before to say, ‘I went to Meeting on Sunday, but as this is a devilish long letter, I won’t say any more.’ She is staying, having suffered mental collapse after her father’s death, with her father’s sister, Caroline Stephen (1834-1909), author of Quaker Strongholds (1890). Virginia is fascinated with her aunt, an independent and eccentric, philanthropic, unmarried woman (like Violet), and a successful writer, too. According to Hermione Lee’s 1996 biography, Virginia Woolf, Violet Dickinson is also from ‘a respectable, establishment Quaker background’. If this is how the young Virginia perceived Quakers, I can see where her ambivalence towards her aunt – often referred to as just ‘The Quaker’ – might come from. Quakers are non-conformist, not establishment! When were Quakers respectable? And yet, it is perhaps still true today that Quakers can leave the unfortunate impression both of being part of a propertied and eminent class, and, contrarily, a member of a quaint and harmless band of misfits – neither particularly attractive to me nor to the free-thinking Virginia. It must be said, of course, that this isn’t either an indication of her aunt Caroline’s understanding of ‘the very principles upon which the Society of Friends is built’ (Quaker Strongholds).
Caroline Stephen becomes all-important in Virginia’s recovery from illness, but also in overcoming her grief – both parents gone – and in discovering a vocation distinct from simply being her eminent father’s daughter. In a letter to Violet on 2 July 1906, Virginia writes of Caroline with both admiration and mockery: ‘I never saw anyone float through life as complacently and even gracefully as she does now, and the young Quakers and Quakeresses flourish beneath her shower.’ We know, don’t we, that Caroline Stephen did write about ‘Q. Meeting’ – her testimony becomes the first authored quotation in Quaker faith & practice (2.02): ‘On one never-to-be-forgotten Sunday morning, I found myself one of a small company of silent worshippers…’ Virginia would have read this in Quaker Strongholds, in an introduction which spoke to the condition of the agnostic and religiously unhoused of the day: ‘in this day of shaking of all that can be shaken, and of restless inquiry after spiritual good… any important revival of religion must be the result of a fresh recognition and acceptance of the very principles upon which the Society of Friends is built.’
But, in Virginia’s father’s household, religion was surely passé and derisory, merely for silly womenfolk and charlatans. Yet the materialism and atheism of her father, author of An Agnostic’s Apology, was chauvinist and egocentric and derisory in itself. Foolish to be religious? Well, yes, that’s always, apparently, been the case, but what about this strong, independent, flourishing self that may come with it too? Virginia is fascinated by her aunt’s evident and acclaimed religiosity, but isn’t this rather infra dig for an upper-middle class establishment (and emancipated) young woman? Especially as her father is, yes, Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), ‘the Godless Victorian’, who, having been ordained in 1859, had lost his faith after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). Virginia already knows all about loss of faith, anti-clericalism, atheism and heresy, and when she attends ‘a divinely beautiful service in Kings Chapel’, she of course has to insist, ‘I don’t believe a word of it and never shall.’ Even so, she accepts grudgingly that ‘the language and the sentiment of it all are dignified and grand above words.’
To the Lighthouse features a kind of portrait of Woolf’s father, too, in the fictional Mr Ramsay. Ramsay seems, as David Bradshaw points out in his introduction to a recent edition, ‘stymied by his feeling of being intellectually marooned near the middle of a figurative alphabet’ (in the novel, Ramsay uses the alphabet as a metaphor for knowledge). Could this marooning happen near the letter ‘Q’ by any chance? Well, the novel has this: ‘He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q… But after Q? What comes next?… he stuck at Q.’ It’s of course only a fancy, but is Virginia the dutiful daughter unconsciously telling herself, or even mischievously informing her deceased father, that there is nowhere else to get to? Q for Quakerism’s quite sufficient, for now. Let’s remember that Woolf goes on to write an essay on – of all things – pacifism. It’s called ‘Three Guineas’, and is about the creation of an institution that sounds remarkably like her aunt’s Quakerism: ‘a new religion based it might well be upon the New Testament, but, it might well be, very different from the religion now erected upon that basis’. And perhaps Woolf did write about Q. Meeting, after all. Forty years ago, I was introduced to her 1931 novel The Waves. It has no plot to speak of, nor any conventional characters or dramatic scenes – not even any conversation. Its nine poetic sequences are each set in a specific place and time, in the lives of the six protagonists. It resembles nothing so much as the inside story of nine linked, silent Meetings. The six protagonists simultaneously register the intersection of time with mystical time. One could say it deals with deep friendship in the things which are eternal. Its style expresses, I want to say, a profoundly-Quakerly aspiration to meet people where they are, in their condition. Each silent consciousness is rendered as a blaze of words – a choir of soliloquising voices, each soloist taking the baton of immediate consciousness, keeping the flame alive, then passing it on. This band of fellow travellers is an alliance in the adventure of being, attentive to their soulmates and to the mystical blending of moments. It’s not another passion story, but a series of annunciations, epiphanies or Pentecosts. Its languages are impossible, and yet everything is understood. A ‘Q. Meeting’. Nothing comes next.
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