The four Stephen brothers and sisters, children of the biographer, editor, and mountain climber Leslie Stephen, lived in Kensington and were educated in the mummified manners of Victorian society until, upon the death of their parents, as a form of repressed rebellion, they moved to the district of Bloomsberry, a decadent neighborhood full of impoverished students and divorced couples.
In that Georgian house at 46 Gordon Square, the four siblings: Thoby, Virginia, Vanessa, and Adrian, began to live untethered lives with the new friends that Thoby had collected at Trinity College of Cambridge, a group called “The Apostles” who will be remembered less for what they set aside for art and literature than for being the first explorers of the new morality: freedom of lifestyle, elitism, and seduction that are the characteristics of contemporary culture.
Thoby’s friends were uninhibited young people in their twenties—Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Saxon-Sidney Turner, Walter Lamb, and Desmond McCarthy, later joined by Duncan Grand, Roger Fry, and Leonard Woolf. Only Virginia achieved relevance in the world of letters, and to a lesser degree Vanessa as a painter, thanks to her sister. Virginia neurotic from the time of adolescence, held together that gilded group, to which had been added the writer E.M. Forster, the economist Maynard Keynes, and the philosopher Bertrand Russell.
The presence of the girls among those guys was unusual. Some were homosexuals, “but not irrevocably”, as they would say. The aura of those times is highlighted by evanescent photos in which these creatures are seen in white pleated trousers and limp hats; the women with broad dresses and sunbonnets. They all had their country houses where they appeared reclining in hammocks during the interminable summer vacations or exotic journeys with the assurance that their happiness was merited after having undermined all social conventions; but their image as innocent collectors of butterflies could not conceal their turbulent passions.
Above all, they were worshippers of beauty, including at the moment of death, an event that Thoby was the first to experience as an aesthetic performance. When they were still very young, the four brothers and sisters traveled to Venice, Florence, Brindisi, Patras, Olympia, Athens, with trunks lined with sailcloth, passengers in luxurious cabins on all the ships, and first class carriages on The Orient Express.
Thoby and Vanessa got sick during the trip; she recovered, but that charming young man died in London of typhoid fever after having returned home. He was 26 years old. To die from a young person’s malady from Greece was supremely elegant. Some time later, his sister Virginia elevated suicide to the status of literature to the extent that a student who doesn’t know that the writer waded into the River Ouse with her coat pockets filled with stones could perhaps pass the exam for literature, but not the exam for psychiatry.
The repressed passions beneath the exquisite education flowed normally among this group of self-worshippers until Vita Sackville-West stormed into the life of Virginia Woolf. This famous pair met one another at a dinner given by Clive Bell in December of 1922. Four days later, Vita invited Virginia to lunch for just the two of them.
Each woman recorded her own impressions from this encounter. Vita told her husband: “I simply adore Virginia and you too will adore her. You will be overwhelmed by her charm and her personality. It’s completely natural. She dresses quite atrociously. Seldom have I become so captivated by anyone.”
Virginia noted in her diary: “She’s not to my demanding taste: overbearing, mustached, with the colors of a parakeet and the arrogance of the aristocracy, but without the genius of an artist.”
Despite this, Vita was the most turbulent passion of Virginia, a story of lesbian love plagued with jealousy.
Vita Sackville-West was a poet, novelist, journalist, traveler, but above all exercised the care free duties of an aristocrat born in the Castle of Knole with roots going back to the 16th century, although upon her genealogical tree was also perched one Pepita, her maternal grandmother, daughter of a Spanish gypsy acrobat, married to a barbarian and later to a ballet dancer, and eventually becoming the lover of Lionel Sackville, whom she bore five children, among them the mother of Vita.
Vita married Harold Nicolson, diplomat, traveler, homosexual, who after fathering two children with her, placidly observed the procession of female lovers that paraded through the life of his spouse. There may have been as many as eighteen women with whom she had a lesbian relationship; although the most torrid was the one with Violet Tresusis, daughter of Alice Keppel, lover of Edward VII, the most literary, complicated, and unwholesome was with Virginia Woolf.
What was more attractive than De Vita’s beauty was her history at the Castle of Knole, the carefree manner with which she shattered the rules of an entrenched aristocracy.
In spite of this, she was treated as an intruder by the Bloombury clique—“an unnecessary import for our coterie” said Vanessa.
The two husbands, Leonard and Howard, contemplated with distant unease this drama between their wives, increasingly more intense and more inescapable until in December of 1925, they slept together for the first time at Long Barn, the house owned by Vita not far from the Castle of Knole.
It appears that it was Virginia’s initiative despite the more experienced of the two being Vita. From that day on, Vita never stopped fanning the embers of that fire although she pulled back from the flames at the last moment to keep the game going, until one day she abandoned Virginia.
Virginia, humiliated, wrote her novel Orlando, a biographical account of this passion, and thus revenge, jealousy, and melancholy scaled the heights of literature.
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