Book Review: Virginia Woolf's Apprenticeship
Virginia Woolf’s Apprenticeship: Becoming an Essayist by Beth Rigel Daugherty (Edinburgh University Press, 2022)
Review by Mitchell Alcrim, Cambridge, Mass.
The first of two books about Virginia Woolf’s essays, Beth Rigel Daugherty’s Virginia Woolf’s Apprenticeship: Becoming an Essayist is the first full-length study of Woolf’s education. In this volume, Daugherty aims to show how Virginia Stephen ‘spent her apprenticeship as a common reader learning,’ and how these early experiences would ‘transform her into Virginia Woolf, a common reader teaching’ .The second book will explore how the mature essays ‘welcome readers and students into the literary conversation as well as how they function as an educational laboratory for teachers’. (Daugherty, xx)
The book is organised into three parts. The first is a study of Virginia Stephen’s education at home, the second is a discussion of her experiences teaching at Morley College, while the third is an analysis of her apprenticeship years as a professional writer for periodicals and newspapers. Alongside her study of Woolf, Daugherty offers a wealth of contextual information about the education of women and the working classes, rich histories of Morley College, the British Museum Reading Room, and the London Library, and much else. Additionally, each section concludes with a presentation of both tangible and intangible ‘outcomes’ of what has been explored in each chapter. Daugherty’s work is surely a boon to future Woolf scholars – throughout the book she presents a wealth of fascinating evidence and argument.
Virginia Stephen was primarily educated at home at 22 Hyde Park Gate by her parents, Leslie and Julia Stephen. Provided access to her writer father’s extensive library, Stephen had a distinct advantage over many young women of her era and class. Leslie encouraged his daughter to reflect on what she was reading, frequently asking her leading questions which helped her to develop a critical approach which would serve her well in later years as a critic and essayist. (26) However, Daugherty points out that while given the liberty to read what she liked, the books available in her father’s collection introduced her to a largely male world of letters and contained very few works by women. (30-1) Meanwhile, the lessons learned at Julia Stephen’s tea-table encouraged restraint, unselfishness, and service to others as the supreme feminine virtues. (29) Interestingly, Woolf would look back on those tea-table lessons with mixed feelings; she blamed them for the ‘sidelong approach’ of some of her Times Literary Supplement pieces while at the same time acknowledging that they taught her the talent of slipping in things otherwise unsayable (114) – one may consider the humorous tone adopted in Woolf’s 1928 novel, Orlando, which happily escaped the censorship suffered by works such as Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (also 1928). Daugherty skillfully sets Stephen’s personal educational experiences in context, demonstrating how her parents’ differing approaches reflect contemporary debates about women’s education: the nonconformist stance which essentially stated that women’s education should be the same as men’s, and the separatist view that promoted a different sort of education for women, one that would prepare them to be better wives, mothers, and companions, dedicated to a life of service. (16-17) This contextual approach is consistently employed throughout the book and is of inestimable value to scholars, providing a fuller, more complex picture to the reader.
Stephen’s elder brother, Thoby, and the author, Anne Thackeray Ritchie (known to the Stephen children as ‘Aunt Anny’; sister of Leslie Stephen’s first wife, Minny Thackeray), in some measure brought the outside world into the isolated, confined space of 22 Hyde Park Gate. Thoby returned from his various schools (attending first Evelyns, then Clifton, and finally Trinity College, Cambridge) to regale his younger sister with stories of his classmates, tales she heard with relish. He introduced her to the Greeks (35) and, perhaps most crucially, showed her the importance of conversation, argument, and judicious questioning in assessing her reading; as a result, Virginia became a far more active reader and learned the importance of intellectual debate to the formulation of critical judgement. (41) This questioning attitude, bolstered by lively discussion with friends, would be at the very heart of the Bloomsbury ethos: as Woolf would later write in ‘Old Bloomsbury’: ‘Everything was on trial’. (Woolf, Moments of Being, 47) As Daugherty points out, Thoby’s stories about his schooling made her aware both of her exclusion and the advantages of that exclusion. (42) While lacking the social interaction and opportunity for intellectual discussion which Thoby’s formal schooling afforded him, (114) Virginia perceived that Thoby’s accounts of his schooling also revealed a darker side to male education. (42) Daugherty argues that as early as 1906 Virginia Stephen questioned the value of the education of men and boys in her essay ‘The Effect of Oxbridge on Young Men’. Later, in ‘A Sketch of the Past’ Woolf would go on to critique the ‘patriarchal machine’ which stamped males into ‘something unnatural’ – a subject which would appear time and again in her essays and letters. (38)
Anne Thackeray Richie expanded Stephen’s world in other ways. Providing her with a living example of a professional woman writer, she revealed a different type of female community from the one encountered through her mother’s teaching; rather than dedicating themselves to the service of others, these women comprised a vibrant network of literary practitioners. (45) A prolific novelist herself, Ritchie also wrote essays and biographical pieces on other women writers and artists – as Daugherty shows, many of these women would become subjects of Woolf’s own essays, including Jane Austen, Julia Margaret Cameron, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. (44) Consequently, Ritchie introduced a female literary tradition to Stephen, a concern central to Woolf’s 1929 landmark work A Room of One’s Own. Daugherty also indicates that Woolf’s later predilection for ‘scene-making’ and her use of a delightful mélange of ‘anecdote, quotation and dialogue to enliven biographical fact’ (44) suggest she took seriously the lessons offered by the older woman.
Contrary to the commonly held idea that Woolf was entirely uneducated, a notion often propagated by Woolf herself, Virginia Stephen attended King’s College Ladies’ Department (1897-1901) as a non-matriculated student, a registration status which, Daugherty suggests, may have influenced her casting herself as an ‘amateur writing for other amateurs’ in her non-fiction work. (65) An examination of the implications and meaning of Stephen’s status while a student at King’s leads Daugherty to assert that as ‘a non-matriculated student … [she was] allowed to range through several subjects, pursue breadth rather than depth, learn what she wanted to and not be tested’, (68) a freedom similar to the one experienced during her visits to the British Museum Reading Room and the London Library. Daugherty questions, though, whether the decision to be a non-matriculated student was actually Stephen’s own and whether she would have grasped the implications of such a status. Given her later resentment at not being given the same opportunities as her brothers, Daugherty concludes that she probably did not. (68) In this section Daugherty builds on the pioneering work of Anna Snaith and Christine Kenyon Jones who first uncovered details about the classes Virginia Stephen attended at King’s. (2) She reconstructs Stephen’s class schedule along with the names of the associated tutors and includes it as Appendix 1. (311-19)
While Virginia Stephen’s fragmented homeschooling taught her the hard lesson that ‘gender hobbles; inhibits; stifles; thwarts’ (114), her years teaching at Morley College (1905-07), an institution which provided a secondary education to working-class adults, showed her how class could also be an obstacle to education. Daugherty does much to dispel the received opinion of Woolf as snobby elitist who had little regard for the working classes by highlighting her ability to connect with students, a gift which would emerge to great effect in her mature essays. For example, Daugherty informs us that upon completion of Stephen’s very first term as a teacher, her students requested that she teach a course on English history. (141) Learning almost immediately that students were ‘readier to talk than listen’ she began to abandon the lecture format, preferring to integrate conversation and discussion. (149) As she continued to interact with students, she came to recognise the limitations that their class had set for them and wrote that in one of her students she sees ‘the germ of a literary lady’ and noted of another that ‘Burke could have been a writer under different circumstances.’ (150) Material circumstances do matter, and one may think here of the central argument of A Room of One’s Own. Though separated by class, Stephen came to identify with her students’ struggles to piece together a coherent education just as she was forced to do. Daugherty makes a powerful case that Stephen’s teaching methods and her concern for context shaped the formation of the pedagogical voice of her mature essays. As she writes:
Her students’ desire to learn, make connections and be included, taught Virginia Stephen that within classroom space, barriers could be momentarily crossed and relationships formed; Virginia Woolf realised classroom space could become the essay’s ‘room’. (150-1)
The final section of the book concerns Virginia Stephen’s apprenticeship writing for periodicals and newspapers. Here, we learn much about the various periodicals and their historical context as well as their particular, often opposing, cultural and political points of view. Stephen learned to write for different audiences, which in turn contributed to the creation of her concept of ‘the common reader’ and her unique talent for reaching out to readers in her essays. (243) Daugherty shows us how Stephen learned from the various editors for whom she worked, including Bruce Richmond of the Times Literary Supplement. Writing for these publications she developed a writer’s discipline as well as the ability to meet editorial demands without sacrificing her own voice. (243) Reviewing over 50 works of popular fiction sharpened her emerging aesthetic principles and allowed her to imagine ‘how her future fiction might differ from what she was reading’. (269) Not surprisingly, we find her demonstrating a marked preference for writers who test their own limits or who resist the conventional boundaries of literary genre. (265-9)
The book contains 5 appendices, including a carefully compiled list of Virginia Stephen’s library, transcriptions of two of her lectures, a chronological list of her reviews and essays, as well as the King’s College class schedule. These are accompanied by an extensive bibliography and a meticulous index. Each page of the main text offers an abundance of information, and one can only admire the dedication and hard work that went into this monumental account of Virginia Stephen’s education and apprenticeship. Daugherty’s intellectual rigor is astonishing – and the ten pages of acknowledgements in which she names and thanks all the individuals who either directly or indirectly contributed to her project attest to her honesty and integrity as well.
Beth Rigel Daugherty’s book owes its genesis to a profoundly personal response to reading Woolf’s essays as a graduate student. How did Woolf make her feel so welcome in her world? (xxii) She went on to ask herself:
Why, when background, class and education should have made me feel excluded … did I feel included instead? (305)
Daugherty makes us feel included, too. We feel as though we are on this journey of discovery together, and it is a testament to her skill as researcher and writer that the abundance of information never overwhelms. The result is an invaluable resource for scholars – not only for Woolf specialists, but also for anyone interested in the broader historical context of women’s education or working-class education in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We look forward to the next volume of Beth Rigel Daugherty’s superlative study of Virginia Woolf’s essay canon.
Works Cited
Beth Rigel Daugherty, Virginia Woolf’s Apprenticeship: Becoming an Essayist (Edinburgh University Press, 2022)
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being (Pimlico, 2002)
