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  birds nest

  heads

  heads,

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  worship;

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  offering, here

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  how

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  sheep [no page break]

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  happy,

  healthy

  healthy,

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  rich,

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  bath,”

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  old,”

  “Babes” All

  “Babes.”

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  of

  of,

  corner;

  corner,

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  time;

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  Heathens. For

  her;

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  prophecies. [no page break]

  conceivable; by

  conceivable. By

  moon shine

  moonshine

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  name.

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  embroidery, and

  NOTES TO THE AFTERWORD

  1. Carlyle, On Heroes, 45.

  2. On the details of Violet and Virginia’s friendship, see Briggs, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life; Curtis and Briggs, Virginia Woolf’s Women; Forrester, Virginia Woolf: A Portrait; Gordon, Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life; King, Virginia Woolf; Lee, Virginia Woolf; and Rudikoff, Ancestral Houses. Also see Cook, “ ‘Women Alone Stir My Imagination,’ ” for a discussion of this friendship in the context of the obstacles facing feminist scholars in the twentieth century who sought to expand academic discourse about modern women writers.

  3. Somerset Heritage Centre, Manuscript History of the Dickinson Family, vol. 2, 1940, reference number DD/DN/5/6/3 (120); subsequent references to this source are given by reference and page number in the main text and notes.

  4. See Burden, Winging Westward.

  5. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 6, 158; subsequent references to the Letters are given as L followed by the volume number and page number (if there is one).

  6. Violet’s brooch replicates the mayor’s seal and represents Bath’s city walls and portcullis in rubies, emeralds, pearls, and enamelwork. It is displayed in a glass case alongside other historically significant items in the Mayor’s Parlour in the Guildhall of the City of Bath.

  7. See Spielmann and Layard, The Life and Work of Kate Greenaway.

  8. Woolf recalled this convalescence in “Old Bloomsbury,” a 1922 piece for the Bloomsbury Memoir Club: “I had lain in bed at the Dickinsons’ house at Welwyn thinking that the birds were singing Greek choruses and that King Edward was using the foulest possible language among Ozzie Dickinson’s azaleas” (184).

  9. These Thoughts Were Written By Anthony Harte, p. 1. Violet, apparently an amateur bookbinder, had initially sent Virginia a faultily made copy of the booklet. “Please inscribe and send me another copy of Anthony Harte, as my copy is all wrongly bound, and numbered, and the same pages are repeated,” Virginia requested, praising her friend: “I think them excellent however in spite of this drawback” (L1, postcard, January 1905, 174–75). The corrected version bears Violet’s inscription, “A Tract for The Sp[arroy]: Fr. V.D. 1905,” and is archived in the Washington State University Library.

  10. A Passionate Apprentice, 221 and 9; subsequent references to this source are hereafter given in the main text and notes as PA followed by the page number.

  11. These Thoughts Were Written By Anthony Harte resurfaced as a point of connection between Violet and Virginia in 1937. In a letter to Violet, who was recovering from a broken leg, Woolf wrote: “[Y]our heart is the purest unfractured gold. I was led to make these foolish remarks by tidying my bookcase: and out fell a very small red book, in which you wrote A Tract for the Sp: fr. V.D. 1905. Now when so much has gone down the sink, see how affectionate I must be, and admiring of your writers gift […] to have kept that and still read it after 32 years!” (L1, 184).

  12. Violet describes these doings in essays and stories archived as “Unpublished Items from the Violet Dickinson Collection, Longleat.”

  13. Captain Humphrey-Davies correspondence, collection of Auckland War Memorial Museum - Tāmaki Paenga Hira. MUS-1995-42-11.

  14. Violet wrote numerous short pieces about subjects such as London neighborhoods, encounters with strangers, her touching relationship with a family of dwarfs in Manchester Street, and new innovations in crematorium technology.

  15. Jonathan Dickinson, for whom a state park is named in Martin County, Florida, originally gave his memoir the astonishing title God’s Protecting Providence, man’s surest help and defence, in times of the greatest difficulty, and most eminent danger: evidenced in the remarkable deliverance of Robert Barrow, with divers other persons, from the devouring waves of the sea; amongst which they suffered shipwrack: and also, from the cruel, devouring jaws of the inhumane canibals of Florida [1700]. Violet’s twenty-two-page preface for this work, authored in the 1930s, includes a family tree, hand-drawn and colored maps, and portraits of William Penn and his father.

  16. These volumes include original manuscripts and artwork and were purchased at auction from Christie’s in 2022. Their present whereabouts are unknown.

  17. Emily Eden published a volume of her lithographs called Portraits of the Princes & People of India in 1844 (the original paintings now hang in the Victoria Memorial Museum in Calcutta). Her novels The Semi-Detached House (1859) and The Semi-Attached Couple (1860) were likened to Jane Austen’s. She also published Up the Country: Letters Written to Her Sister from the Upper Provinces of India (1867), an account of two years of traveling through India in the company of her brother George Eden, Baron of Auckland, then governor-general of India. In 1983, Up the Country was one of the first titles reprinted by the pioneering English feminist publisher, Virago Press, for the Virago Travellers series.

  18. Woolf wrote to Violet praising Miss Eden’s Letters as “one of the best collections for ever so long,” a sentiment echoed in her Times Literary Supplement review “Real Letters”: “The judgment of Miss Dickinson’s selections and the unusual excellence of her materials give the book what we so seldom find in biographies—construction and artistic purpose” (122).

  19. See L6, 89.

  20. On Violet’s objection to Bloomsbury, see L1, 283–87. Violet’s biographer tells us that “in old age more peppery and more deaf,” Violet spent her last years “in comfort in her Wood till she finally withered away.” Somerset Heritage Centre, “Mary Violet Dickinson; 9th Generation,” Manuscript History of the Dickinson Family, vol. 2, 1940 (DD/DN/5/6/3 [123]).

  21. See, e.g., Hermione Lee in Virginia Woolf: “Violet enabled [Virginia] to behave freely, childishly, like a daughter or a favourite pet or a sweetheart. She was devoted, interested, and without aggression. She provided a space in which Virginia could curl up or hurl herself about, and be as egotistical and demanding as her dying father” (169).

  22. Early Writings by Virginia Stephen (ca. 1902), in Monks House Papers: Papers of Virginia Woolf and Related Papers of Leonard Woolf, University of Sussex Library, reference number SxMs-18-2-A-26.74. Subsequent references to this source are given by reference and page number in the main text and notes.

  23. For example, Virginia sent Violet a comic biography of her paternal aunt, Caroline Emilia Stephen (this work, unfortunately, has been lost) that drew Violet’s admiration. Vanessa wrote to her sister that Violet was “simply full of your praises” and “thinks your writing most wonderful”: “She said she had sat and howled over the life of Caroline Emilia. […] She thought you would undoubtedly be a great writer one day. Your things are so well thought out—fresh and original and interesting. Is that enough for you? She really thinks you a genius.” Bell and Marler, Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, Dec. 7, 1904, 27.

  24. Between 1904 and 1907, Woolf’s signed and unsigned writings appeared in The Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, National Review, Academy and Literature, and Speaker. See Andrew McNeillie, introduction to The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1 (London: Hogarth Press, 1986), ix–xviii.

  25. Rudikoff, 89. Rudikoff’s Ancestral Houses offers biographical details about the women who inspired the characters in The Life of Violet. See also Kathryn Simpson, “Friends and Lovers,” in The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf, on Woolf’s lifelong friendships with women.

  26. To take one example: In 1907, Woolf wrote a particularly acid letter to Lady Nelly about her Aunt Caroline and others in her circle who insisted that she prioritize marriage, suggesting that she would avenge herself through her writing: “[Y]ou dont have to contend with obscene old women, and young women too with beaks dripping gore, who advise you to marry. That is my daily penance, and has been these six months. ‘I think you should keep a maid Virginia—to do your hair—it makes such a difference—Men notice these things—not of course’- and so on and so on. Well, one of these days they shall have their paragraph—That is a terrible threat!” (296)

  27. Letter to Emma Vaughan, August 23, 1901.

  28. Woolf, “The Value of Laughter,” in Essays, vol. 1, 58–60.

  29. On the contest between philosophies of idealism and realism in Woolf’s novels, see Ann Banfield, The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism.

  30. Woolf, Three Guineas, 16, 130, and 125.

  31. This delegation’s voyage was also recorded in a woman’s journal: Alice Roosevelt (1884–1980), the famously boundary-breaking daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt, kept an elaborate diary-album of her experiences as a leading member of the 1905 Taft Mission’s visits to Japan, the Philippines, China, and Korea. She would write about the trip in her 1933 autobiography, Crowded Hours (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons).

  32. Violet pasted in, for example, business cards from diplomats, furriers, hoteliers, and interpreters; the ground plan of a Nagasaki hospital; a twelve-course dinner menu from the SS Bremen that carried the group from Colombo to Suez.

  33. Violet’s album, p. 13, 1905. Berg Collection, NYPL.

  34. Violet did not keep a complete record of everyone she met on the trip, but among her notable traveling companions were Sir Michael Hicks Beach, Earl of St. Aldwyn, and his family (Sir Michael’s daughter Susan had been the model for Britannia on coins struck by King Edward VII); Harold George Parlett, translator and scholar of Japanese Buddhism; and Sir Claude Maxwell MacDonald, first British ambassador to Japan, and his wife, Lady Ethel MacDonald.

  At a dinner held at the British legation in Tokyo, Violet met Ito Hirobumi, Prime Minister of Japan and Viscount K. Tanaka, Japanese Minister of the Imperial Household. The evening is recounted in the memoirs of yet another woman diarist, Eleanora Mary, Baroness Albert d’Anethan, poet, novelist, memoirist, and sister of H. Rider Haggard. In Fourteen Years of Diplomatic Life in Japan (1912), Baroness d’Anethan describes her first impressions of Violet. “September 23, 1905: A dinner took place at the British Legation to meet Sir Michael and Lady Hicks-Beech [sic] and their two tall daughters. Lord and Lady Robert Cecil were also there. He is the late Lord Salisbury’s second son. I sat between Marquis Ito and Viscount Tanaka. A[lbert] took in to dinner a Miss Dickinson, a friend of Lady Robert Cecil’s. She stands 6 feet 3½ inches in her shoes, and when a little Japanese tailor measured her for a gown, she quaintly suggested the use of a ladder. She seems a very nice girl” (454–55).