Who's Afraid of Leonard Woolf?: A Case for the Sanity of Virginia Woolf

Rating:
Summary: Demonizing Leonard
Review: As Irene Coats, the author of Who's Afraid of Leonard Woolf, states, Quentin Bell's authorized biography of Virginia Woolf presents Leonard Woolf as Virginia's loving, attentive, self-sacrificing husband. However, even as I read and enjoyed Bell's book, I came away feeling that there was something sinister about Leonard, as if he had some hidden agenda. Therefore, when I came across Coats' book, I was extremely intrigued, but having read it I am instead extremely disappointed.

Rather than presenting, or at least attempting to present, a balanced, lucid, objective case that Leonard was not the saint he appeared, her book is an unremitting demonizing of Leonard Woolf. Coats has presented the known events and existing letters by interpreting all as proof of Leonard's malicious intent and devious manipulation. I find this an extremist viewpoint that works against good biographical writing.

In addition, the book comes with the most appalling index: a name index where each name is followed by lines and lines AND LINES of undifferentiated locators making it totally useless to the reader. This is definitely an example of no index being better than a bad one.

Rating:
Summary: There IS a good source for learning more about Leonard!
Review: I am a graduate student who has spent the last four months learning everything I can for a class project about Leonard -- which is QUITE A LOT. Two books in particular have fairly good, reasonably balanced accounts of Leonard Woolf: Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee and A Marriage of True Minds by George Spater and Ian Parsons. Please read those carefully researched, scholarly, interesting, and vivid books to find out more about both Virginia Woolf's illnesses and Leonard Woolf's responses/contributions/whatever to her health. The relationship between the two was complex and deserves to be written about intelligently and carefully.

Rating:
Summary: Who's Afraid of Irene Coates?
Review: I have always thought that Edward Albee's offhand use of Virginia Woolf's name in the title of his play singlehandedly revived Virginia's reputation. Mrs. Coates provides not even a footnote to justify her wild accusations against Leonard Woolf. Neverthelesss, there is such a black hole of information about Leonard, the book is worth a look.

Leonard is a member of the Souls at Cambridge who comes home with Virginia's brother Thoby to enrich after dinner converstation at a London address that would become known as Bloomsbury.

Mrs. Coates says Leonard attached himself like a barnicle to the Stephens sisters, Vanessa and Virginia, in order to further his own interests. Leonard fails at writing novels, fails at running for Commons, fails at writing great books about politics, fails at making love and producing a child with Virginia, fails at running the Hogarth Press.

In addition, Mrs. Coates would have us believe Leonard denied Virginia the use of her own inheritance and the money she earned as an author. Leonard used the money for his own comforts, says Mrs. Coates, and the car was "Leonard's, not Virginia's."

Leonard propagandized that Virginia was a schizophrenic invalid; colluded with Eminent Victorians author Lytton Strachey and Virginia's sister 'Nessa Bell to keep the author of Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse a misfit in need of special handling within the Bloomsbury Group and Society.

Leonard aggressively competed with Virginia. When he saw she was becoming more successful than he, Mrs. Coates says, Leonard attempted to stop Virginia from writing Literature. Mrs. Coates' most outrageous claim: that with his own ambitions thwarted, Leonard spent the thirties trying to drive his wife to suicide.

Mrs. Coates has almost no evidence for these assertions. Nevertheless, this book is food for thought. Leonard Woolf's role in Bloomsbury and Virginia's life is not well understood.

Maybe this book will provoke a real Boswell to take another look at the Bloomsbury Enigma Leonard Woolf.

Mike Rice

[e-mail].

Rating:
Summary: Virginia Woolf, Gothic heroine?
Review: Over the years, many readers have been cynical about the despair and rage expressed in Virginia Woolf's feminist works, such as "A Room of One's Own". After all, wasn't Virginia a wealthy upper middle-class woman who never worked a day in her life? Wasn't she petted and cared for by an adoring husband? Didn't she have a beautiful home (which is now a tourist spot?)and a circle of stimulating and enlightened intellectual friends? "What the heck did she have to complain about?", those overloaded with children and dreary jobs have often wondered bitterly.

Well, according to Coates, the answer is - quite a bit. Coates gives us an entirely new view of Virginia's life and marriage, one which seems straight out of a Victorian Gothic novel by Wilkie Collins or Sheridan LeFanu. Virginia is seen as the heroine entrapped by a cruel husband, who presents to the outside world the face of kindness and care, while viciously tyrannizing and silencing his wife, who can appeal for help only in carefully coded letters and diaries. Coates presents Virginia Stephens as an isolated and sheltered young girl, manipulated cleverly into marriage to an ambitious and greedy man. Leonard Woolf gained access to her social set as a college friend of her adored brother, who died young. Woolf is here portrayed as a man willing to stop at nothing to get ahead, a Jew who abandoned and rejected his own religion and family to strive for upward mobility in the English middle class. His marriage to Virginia was pushed by her sister Vanessa, who wanted her younger sibling off her hands, and by Leonard's friends, who wanted him to marry a rich wife as a way of remaining in England, rather than return to a civil service job in Ceylon. Virginia allowed her initial resistance to be worn down, with disastrous results - having married the rich Gentile wife he wanted, Leonard then despised and exploited her. (But he might not have been happy with any woman - most of his Cambridge friends were gay, and while Leonard considered himself heterosexual, he obviously shared many of their views on women - Coates quotes a letter to Lytton Strachey in which Woolf describes male sexuality as "noble" and female as "vile".) Their early married life was a disaster, and Coates goes so far as to suggest that Virginia's first suicide attempt was, in fact, attempted murder. Her husband insisted she see a doctor of his choosing, who told her that she was too disturbed to become a mother (Leonard detested children). He then left her distraught, with an open box of sleeping pills beside her, and gave himself the alibi of a visit to her sister Vanessa. As he had hoped, she took an overdose, and was saved only through the unexpected visit of a woman friend, who promptly summoned help from a medical student living in the building. The long-term result was the total destruction of Virginia's independent existence. Leonard refused to let her see her family physician (who considered her perfectly healthy and capable of motherhood) only allowing her to consult his tame specialists. To have had her certified as a lunatic would have deprived Leonard of money or of a divorce, so he chose to have her declared incompetent - giving him, as her guardian, total control of her money, and preventing her from applying for a divorce, while he could still divorce her. He now had what he wanted, total control, and any protests against her sexual and financial exploitation could be seen as the ravings of a madwoman. And sadly, there is no suggestion anywhere in the book that Virginia ever tried to seek outside legal, medical, or spiritual advice.

Virginia's only escape came through writing, and through her one love affair, with Vita Sackville-West, a strong, independent woman. Vita balanced not only an "open" marriage, but a whirl of children, travel, gardens, and dogs. Through her relationship with Vita, Virginia realized bitterly how constricted her own life had become. Their homes had been bought with her money, but chosen and organized by Leonard - she hated their country house, which he had remodeled to his own taste, giving himself a huge studio, while she was relegated to a hut in the garden. Her money had paid for their business, the Hogarth Press, which gave Leonard editorial control of all her books, and for a car, which she wasn't allowed to drive. In the Woolf family, even the gardens and dogs belonged to Leonard - when Vita gave her a spaniel puppy, Leonard promptly annexed it as his own. It was this bitterness and rage that finally burned through in "A Room of One's Own", which was first given as a lecture, with Vita at her side.

But the affair did not last - they remained friends, but Vita sought other lovers - and Virginia was once more trapped without support, and her husband's increasing hostility and disrespect. She was offered speaking engagements and American lecture tours, but Leonard insisted she turn them all down. He was furiously jealous of the increased sales of her work. As WWII began, daily life grew harder and harder - Leonard interfered with the servants, forcing Virginia to do the cooking and cleaning herself, and refusing to let her visit friends. Finally, in despair, she killed herself - or did she? Coates thinks that Leonard deliberately drove her to it - at the very least knowing that she was suicidal and not helping her - and at the worst, she hints that he may actually have killed her. If so, he got away with it, and his punishment was this - to always be known as "Virginia's husband".

This is sure to be a controversial book. But is it accurate? This reviewer, who is not particularly expert on - or enthusiastic about - Bloomsbury, finds it to ring psychologically true. The ambitious poor man who marries a rich wife and then despises her is all too familiar. The legal position of both women and the mentally ill was such at the time that the trap set for Virginia was almost inescapable. And this account well explains the bitterness and despair in her works, in a way that pictures of her as a cosseted and loved wife fail to do.

Rating:
Summary: Virginia Woolf, Gothic heroine?
Review: Over the years, many readers have been cynical about the despair and rage expressed in Virginia Woolf's feminist works, such as "A Room of One's Own". After all, wasn't Virginia a wealthy upper middle-class woman who never worked a day in her life? Wasn't she petted and cared for by an adoring husband? Didn't she have a beautiful home (which is now a tourist spot?)and a circle of stimulating and enlightened intellectual friends? "What the heck did she have to complain about?", those overloaded with children and dreary jobs have often wondered bitterly.

Well, according to Coates, the answer is - quite a bit. Coates gives us an entirely new view of Virginia's life and marriage, one which seems straight out of a Victorian Gothic novel by Wilkie Collins or Sheridan LeFanu. Virginia is seen as the heroine entrapped by a cruel husband, who presents to the outside world the face of kindness and care, while viciously tyrannizing and silencing his wife, who can appeal for help only in carefully coded letters and diaries. Coates presents Virginia Stephens as an isolated and sheltered young girl, manipulated cleverly into marriage to an ambitious and greedy man. Leonard Woolf gained access to her social set as a college friend of her adored brother, who died young. Woolf is here portrayed as a man willing to stop at nothing to get ahead, a Jew who abandoned and rejected his own religion and family to strive for upward mobility in the English middle class. His marriage to Virginia was pushed by her sister Vanessa, who wanted her younger sibling off her hands, and by Leonard's friends, who wanted him to marry a rich wife as a way of remaining in England, rather than return to a civil service job in Ceylon. Virginia allowed her initial resistance to be worn down, with disastrous results - having married the rich Gentile wife he wanted, Leonard then despised and exploited her. (But he might not have been happy with any woman - most of his Cambridge friends were gay, and while Leonard considered himself heterosexual, he obviously shared many of their views on women - Coates quotes a letter to Lytton Strachey in which Woolf describes male sexuality as "noble" and female as "vile".) Their early married life was a disaster, and Coates goes so far as to suggest that Virginia's first suicide attempt was, in fact, attempted murder. Her husband insisted she see a doctor of his choosing, who told her that she was too disturbed to become a mother (Leonard detested children). He then left her distraught, with an open box of sleeping pills beside her, and gave himself the alibi of a visit to her sister Vanessa. As he had hoped, she took an overdose, and was saved only through the unexpected visit of a woman friend, who promptly summoned help from a medical student living in the building. The long-term result was the total destruction of Virginia's independent existence. Leonard refused to let her see her family physician (who considered her perfectly healthy and capable of motherhood) only allowing her to consult his tame specialists. To have had her certified as a lunatic would have deprived Leonard of money or of a divorce, so he chose to have her declared incompetent - giving him, as her guardian, total control of her money, and preventing her from applying for a divorce, while he could still divorce her. He now had what he wanted, total control, and any protests against her sexual and financial exploitation could be seen as the ravings of a madwoman. And sadly, there is no suggestion anywhere in the book that Virginia ever tried to seek outside legal, medical, or spiritual advice.

Virginia's only escape came through writing, and through her one love affair, with Vita Sackville-West, a strong, independent woman. Vita balanced not only an "open" marriage, but a whirl of children, travel, gardens, and dogs. Through her relationship with Vita, Virginia realized bitterly how constricted her own life had become. Their homes had been bought with her money, but chosen and organized by Leonard - she hated their country house, which he had remodeled to his own taste, giving himself a huge studio, while she was relegated to a hut in the garden. Her money had paid for their business, the Hogarth Press, which gave Leonard editorial control of all her books, and for a car, which she wasn't allowed to drive. In the Woolf family, even the gardens and dogs belonged to Leonard - when Vita gave her a spaniel puppy, Leonard promptly annexed it as his own. It was this bitterness and rage that finally burned through in "A Room of One's Own", which was first given as a lecture, with Vita at her side.

But the affair did not last - they remained friends, but Vita sought other lovers - and Virginia was once more trapped without support, and her husband's increasing hostility and disrespect. She was offered speaking engagements and American lecture tours, but Leonard insisted she turn them all down. He was furiously jealous of the increased sales of her work. As WWII began, daily life grew harder and harder - Leonard interfered with the servants, forcing Virginia to do the cooking and cleaning herself, and refusing to let her visit friends. Finally, in despair, she killed herself - or did she? Coates thinks that Leonard deliberately drove her to it - at the very least knowing that she was suicidal and not helping her - and at the worst, she hints that he may actually have killed her. If so, he got away with it, and his punishment was this - to always be known as "Virginia's husband".

This is sure to be a controversial book. But is it accurate? This reviewer, who is not particularly expert on - or enthusiastic about - Bloomsbury, finds it to ring psychologically true. The ambitious poor man who marries a rich wife and then despises her is all too familiar. The legal position of both women and the mentally ill was such at the time that the trap set for Virginia was almost inescapable. And this account well explains the bitterness and despair in her works, in a way that pictures of her as a cosseted and loved wife fail to do.