“It is quite clear to me,” he said, though he had been asleep all night, “that at a certain hour, may be two, or three, or even later, earlier perhaps, I will not be precise, that you are all of you shaken by irresistible laughter, so that your eyes are screwed into as many creases as the eyes of dormice - this is the will of the goddesses - have you laughed?”

  But none had laughed.

  “Very likely,” he said, “you were not conscious of it; the deeper laughter is the less a man knows he is laughing; so that you may well have laughed so hard that you felt as grave as corpses - but tell me - were there any Owls abroad?”

  “Not one was seen Sir.”

  “How should it have been seen,” asked the old gentleman angrily, “the very proof that there was an owl is that no one saw it. Either my friends your eyes were shut with laughter or which is perhaps more likely, closed by the passage of an Owl’s wing between you and the moon, at which moment the goddesses changed their offerings.”

  “Truth was never more true,” said the people. “But why did they do it? Gods keep their offerings, or eat their offerings, none have been known to exchange them.”

  “Precisely so,” said the old gentleman, “but it is quite clear that these goddesses come from a land where everything is up side down. I thought so directly I saw them. So that, if you wish to give them anything of yours, you must take something of theirs, just as when they are idle they work, when they are sad they are happy, when they die they live, and so on, and thus if you wish to worship and not to defile, the sect of the one will always worship at the shrine of the other. That my friends is the meaning of the exchange of offerings.”

  The worship might be going on to this day, but that the worshippers became so mixed, their rites so extravagant, their behaviour so odd, some gave all their money to hospitals and lived on the charity of their friends, others gave up their own businesses and managed those of other people, one took another’s wife, and lent him his own, one jumped into a river alive and came out dead, that the shrines were closed by public order, and no worship was permitted save a silent one. The time had not come the worshippers said, or perhaps the old gentleman had been mistaken.

  Now one morning all the sleepers in Tokio were woken by such a howling that they thought that their neighbours donkey had once more trod upon a snakex, but when they ran into the streets all was ashen pale as though the sun had not yet risen, and nothing was to be seen. A dreadful quaking beset their bones, and they moaned and chattered like evil spirits shut out from the graves and now and then a howling rolled down the streets like cold clouds of incense. Before one such blast they fled to the hill top, and looking fearfully into the bay beneath saw a vast wave, with a curved back and silver ripples on it, rise from the floor of the sea to the summit; only it was no wave, but a monster. Out of his nostrils came two columns of steam, frizzling the air all round them, and his eyes were red caverns. Now they had just made up their minds to be devoured, when the two Princesses came down to the sea shore and bewitched the monster by making passes with certain magic wands called “Umbrellas”. He turned livid, and his skin peeled off him in dry scales, and his eyes grew white like those of a stranded cod fish; a great gash opened in his back, from which a swarm of ant-like spirits came pouring, obedient to the summons of their mistresses. They gave one look at the town and at the hill, laughed and waved their arms once more; at that moment the sun burst forth like a rushing yellow globe, and the Princesses spread their tails and leapt onto the monsters back, and could be seen standing on the ridge of his nose, prodding it with pointed spears so that he gulped and took to the water again, heading out to sea. The slime of his tail lay glistening on the waves. That was the last that was ever seen of the Sacred Princesses, but if you are a good child and go to sleep, perhaps one day they will come again.

  Indeed the child had been asleep these two hours—that was part of the virtue of the story, and the mother also had put the last stitch in her embroidery, and was ready to sleep too.

  x The Oriental Grebe Podicipes Oristatus.

  x Follow me. Follow me.

  xx Feed me. Feed me.

  xxx Corresponding to the English ‘Caw, Caw’.

  x House of the Homeless or Wandering People, corresponding to our ‘Hotel’.

  x Interpreter.

  x Hospital.

  x A Japanese proverb.

  AFTERWORD

  “MISS VIOLET DICKINSON grew to be as tall as the tallest hollyhock in the garden before she was eight.” Whimsical in its simplicity, this pronouncement stages a familiar dilemma. Low-growing, sweet-scented violets represent modesty and virtue; over-tall, brilliant-hued hollyhocks signify female ambition. Virtue or ambition: what is the measure of a woman? Miss Violet Dickinson refuses the choice. Against the mandate that “if you are not to be a Maypole of Derision you must see to it that you shine forth as a Beacon of Godliness,” Violet—like the real-life woman who inspired these stories—finds happiness in a “cottage of one’s own” with the resonantly Shakespearean name of Burnham Wood. “This was the beginning of revolution,” the narrator says of a house whose very name conjures what is seemingly impossible: a movable forest (or “Magic Garden”) that vanquishes tyranny by summoning heroic courage to new ground. The narrator’s words speak, simultaneously, to this moment in Virginia Woolf’s artistic maturation. The Life of Violet is the most complete and complex of Woolf’s early unpublished fictions, a daring mock-biography about a heroine who upsets, redirects, converts, and imagines anew the architectures connecting past to present. These madcap adventures envision worlds shaped by friendship among women. They also launch Woolf’s challenges to Thomas Carlyle’s formidable thesis that “The History of the world is but the Biography of great men.”1 The Life of Violet—published here for the first time in its finished state—establishes Woolf’s career-spanning conviction that to reinvent literary form is to reconceive women’s lives.

  FIG. 3. Violet’s cottage, Burnham Wood, in Welwyn, Hertfordshire. Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library. “Burnham Wood, Welwyn—Herts,” The New York Public Library Digital Collections, 1859–1939.

  The Life of Violet’s feminist velocity originates not with Virginia Woolf’s literary aspirations but with Violet Dickinson herself. Nigel Nicolson’s preface to volume 1 of The Letters of Virginia Woolf introduces Violet in terms that have, regrettably, come to define her. This friend with whom Virginia shared seemingly every thought during her twenties, Nicolson tells us, was “gawky, even graceless, but everybody who knew her in the literary and fashionable world which she frequented, adored her.… More than half the letters in this volume were written to her, and but for them she might be quite forgotten” (xviii). Channeling Nicolson’s sentiments, scholars tend to regard Violet as a minor character in the story of Woolf’s career, an early intimate who would be supplanted by Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962) and Ethel Smyth (1858–1944).2 But the publication of The Life of Violet occasions a welcome reframing of its title character’s remarkable eighty-three years. As Woolf knew, and took pains to underscore in the interconnected stories collected here, “the life of Miss Violet Dickinson is one of the most singular as well as the most prolific and least notorious that was lived in our age.”

  Mary Violet Dickinson burst into the world on April 24, 1865, weighing almost ten pounds and, according to her mother’s diary, “very fat and happy.”3 She was the only daughter and the third of four children born to Emily Dulcibella Eden (1833–93) and Edmund Henry Dickinson (1821–97). On her father’s side, she descended from a Somerset family made wealthy by the transatlantic slave trade and sugar plantations in Jamaica; on her mother’s, a distinguished baronetcy whose members were bishops, parliamentarians, and powerful administrators of Britain’s overseas domains.4 Violet’s unusual proportions distinguished her from infancy onward and, in part, emboldened her resistance to the conventions of nineteenth-century aristocratic girlhood. A posthumous biographical sketch of Violet authored by one of her Dickinson relatives offers the droll suggestion that “being planted on clay soil at Berkley in Somersetshire accounted for her abnormal development in height” (DD/DN/5/6/3 [120]) and reports that this ninth-generation Dickinson daughter hated dolls and casual conversation. Violet grew into an adolescent who stymied the traditional rites of passage for young ladies: “Her education was undertaken by a succession of 8 old or inexperienced young governesses producing feeble results … [H]er scattered mind gained strange information and experience from her friends and books, for three months spent in London every spring for needed polish in the way of classes and dancing” (DD/DN/5/6/3 [122]). If Violet’s full height of six feet two eventually rendered her unmarriageable (as Woolf quipped in 1937, “Am I right in saying that to be 6 ft tall in the Age of Q. Victoria was equivalent to having an illegitimate child?”),5 her enjoyment of “strange information and experience” nevertheless fostered a vibrant adult life. Friendship itself became her career.

  Violet’s social ties flourished within and without the aristocratic and political circles of her birth. At thirty-four, she served as mayoress of Bath during her brother Robert Dickinson’s term as mayor from 1899 to 1900, accompanying him for public appearances wearing an extravagant, custom-made, jeweled brooch still displayed in the Bath Guildhall.6 She was a very close friend of the writer Kate Greenaway, a prolific author and illustrator of Victorian children’s literature whose biography highlighted Violet’s influence. (“It strikes me that you are really something of a celebrity” [L1, 205], Woolf would write to Violet on reading The Life of Kate Greenaway in 1905.7) Violet was also an intimate of the family of John Thynne, 4th Marquess of Bath, and grew especially close to his daughters, Beatrice and Katherine Thynne, spending nearly every Christmas at Longleat House in Wiltshire and bequeathing many of her papers to the family’s estate upon her death in 1948. From 1902 on, Violet welcomed guests to Burnham Wood, the cottage she built in Welwyn, Hertfordshire, and shared with her brother Oswald, with whom she also shared a London home in Manchester Street. Among the friends who frequented these residences was the writer and suffragist Lady Eleanor (“Nelly”) Cecil and her husband, the future Nobel laureate Lord Robert Cecil, whom Violet accompanied on a dazzling round-the-world cruise in 1905. We will return to this voyage (and the elaborate album Violet created to commemorate it) for its foundational role in The Life of Violet’s third chapter, “A Story to Make You Sleep.”

  Violet was as generous a caregiver as she was a hostess. It is well known that Virginia Woolf convalesced at Burnham Wood following a breakdown in the spring of 1904 and that Violet nursed her back to health.8 It is less well known that Violet’s support extended beyond the sickroom and into literary domains: she wrote a pseudonymous eighteen-page “tract” titled These Thoughts Were Written By Anthony Harte and sent it to Virginia, who was in London chafing under the strict eye of the Stephen family physician, Dr. George Savage. Violet’s booklet, handsewn and bound between plain red covers, its individual sections separated by the small printer’s motif of a violet, adopts a convincingly high-flown seventeenth-century idiom to address “them upon whom the burden of sicknesse has fallen” and urges those so afflicted to “eschew dwelling upon their pain, weariness and miserie.”9 Woolf was impressed with Violet’s skilled creation of a fictional voice—“Anthony Harte is her own writing!” she exclaims in her diary—and seized on one particular metaphor that expressed something of Violet Dickinson’s own philosophy of human relations: “As an atom of dust doth cause a loud sneeze in the nostril, so at times doth a tiny kindnesse bring forth a glow of happinesse in the lonelie heart.”10 “I like the great sneeze!” Woolf wrote to Violet, praising the tract’s persuasive directives about hope and health and promising that “my weary nights which aren’t really weary, will be sweetened and made profitable” (L1, 175).11

  Indeed, Violet “sweetened and made profitable” an assortment of different and differently troubled lives over the years, forming connections that her familial biographer describes as mutually beneficial: “In middle age … [r]ich and poor, Saints and Sinners could be found among her friends; unfailing in prosperity and in affliction they rallied to her aid” (DD/DN/5/6/3 [123]). From 1917 to 1920, Violet made weekly visits to the Farmfield Reformatory for Inebriate Women, where inmates would tell her about lives marked by addiction, crime, suicide attempts, and other traumas. Violet danced and sang with these women; she played games and ran races; one Christmas, she watched them put on a dramatic play about a courtroom trial. She gave encouraging weekly addresses to the reformatory’s nurses and staff, likening them, in her final speech in 1920, to English water lilies enriched rather than harmed by the mud that surrounds them.12 After Farmfield closed, Violet’s cheery disposition brightened patients’ days in the Policeman’s Hospital; she also made “visits to the London Hospital for many years” (DD/DN/5/6/3 [123]). Woolf may have composed The Life of Violet a decade prior to her friend’s postwar doings, but she correctly intuited how Violet’s “half thoughts born in the Somersetshire school room, growing by fits and London drawing rooms, hospitals and streets fixed on other people and started eddies in their blood, which drove them to all kinds of unforeseen experiences.”

  A minor anecdote from Violet’s later years illustrates the still-visible effects of a generosity that extended beyond England’s shores. In 1943, Violet learned that the Orientalist scholar, collector, and captain George Humphreys-Davies was building a collection of Asian arts for the Auckland Museum in New Zealand. The city of Auckland had been named for Violet’s great-uncle and governor-general of India, George Eden, 1st Earl of Auckland, and Violet, excited about adding a new dimension to this familial connection, initiated a correspondence with Humphreys-Davies. To enrich the museum’s holdings of Asian fine and decorative arts, she donated Chinese, Japanese, Persian, and Indian art objects—including a beautiful comb once belonging to the powerful Chinese dowager empress Cixi (1835–1908)—that she had inherited, collected on her travels, or acquired as gifts over her lifetime.13 Like the mayoress’s brooch displayed in the Bath Guildhall, objects from Violet’s bequest can be seen in the Auckland Museum today, each one embodying its own artisanal genealogy and the interconnected histories of trade routes, imperial authority, and diplomatic gift exchange.

  We know these facts about Violet Dickinson’s life because—as we have already seen with These Thoughts Were Written By Anthony Harte—she herself was a writer. Violet’s assorted and still-unpublished autobiographical writings include an elegant tribute to Burnham Wood and several essays, vignettes, and stories (among them her “Memoir of the Stephen Family,” the work I was seeking when I discovered The Life of Violet).14 A dedicated documentarian of family history, Violet wrote and illustrated a lively preface for an edition of Jonathan Dickinson’s God’s Protecting Providence (1699), her paternal Quaker ancestor’s widely read account of shipwreck and captivity on the Florida coast while sailing from Jamaica to Philadelphia.15 Her contributions fill the pages of the Manuscript History of the Dickinson Family, a multiauthored record of ten generations over three centuries. She edited and compiled ten volumes of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history of her maternal Eden family, a massive undertaking that involved transcribing letters, diaries, and autobiographies as well as collecting original artwork.16 This latter project extended the work Violet had done to produce Miss Eden’s Letters (1919), an edited collection of correspondence by her great-aunt Emily Eden (1797–1869), a highly regarded painter, travel writer, and novelist.17 Published by Macmillan, praised by Lytton Strachey, and reviewed generously in the Times Literary Supplement by Woolf, Miss Eden’s Letters is a vital contribution to the history of women’s arts and letters in England, exemplifying Woolf’s claim a decade later in A Room of One’s Own that “we think back through our mothers if we are women” (75).18 Indeed, an 1834 letter by Emily Eden uncannily anticipates Woolf’s thesis in A Room of One’s Own that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (4): “I wish I could write like Mrs. Hannah More,” Violet’s great-aunt opined, applauding her eighteenth-century playwright-philanthropist predecessor, “and have money enough to build myself a Barley Wood, and resolution to go and live there” (Miss Eden’s Letters, 243).

  Violet’s dedication to preserving genealogical and biographical records remained robust until the end of her life. In 1936, she returned hundreds of Woolf’s letters, a gesture that startled Woolf and that scholars have read as Violet’s plea to rekindle a friendship that had diminished two decades earlier.19 But Woolf was only one among many correspondents whose letters Violet returned. After making typed copies of letters she had received over five decades from more than 140 friends and acquaintances—including Lady Margot Asquith, George Bernard Shaw, Constance Lytton, and Janet Case—Violet returned the originals to their senders or their families. Her meticulously labeled copies, neatly bound in two large volumes and interspersed with photographs and drawings of their authors, reveal multiple aspects of a life that extended well beyond the social boundaries of Somerset aristocracy. Little wonder, then, that Woolf exhorted her friend to “scribble me your memoirs.… How you could describe the Duckworths, the Stephens, let alone the Thynnes, and the ancient nobility of England!” (L1, 158).