I do not wish to suggest that Violet was a professional archivist or writer, or to identify her with a radicalism that she never embraced. (She did not disguise her disapproval, for instance, when Leslie Stephen’s daughters left South Kensington to settle in Bloomsbury, and she never turned her back on the aristocratic world of her birth.20) But like her more famous friend, Violet devoted herself to illuminating the life stories of ordinary and extraordinary women. Indeed, a mutual curiosity about those stories was integral to her friendship with Virginia from the outset, and, in my view, commands greater significance for feminist literary history than the compassionate nurturing that dominates accounts of Violet and Woolf’s relationship.21

  Consider Woolf’s first detailed description of Violet, a 1902 diary entry made when Violet joined the Stephen family during a holiday in the New Forest. Playfully dubbing her friend “Aunt Maria,” twenty-year-old Woolf styles Violet as a force disruptive to social and narrative expectations about women:

  Beatrice [Thynne] had left us for two or three days when Aunt Maria came. And lest anyone should supply the figure of an ancient maiden lady, with white curls & a parrot to fit this name, I think it most honest to state at once that Aunt Maria is 37 years of age—Six feet two in height & of an appearance that is all that Aunt Marias ought not to be—Whence then the name? That, as a popular writer says, is another story, to which we may come in the course of time.22

  These lines burst with early signs of The Life of Violet’s three chapters: the unconventional Violet realigns the coordinates of late Victorian femininity and merits “another story” precisely because she is “all that Aunt Marias ought not to be.” When Violet’s carriage crosses paths with a New Forest stag hunt, Woolf revels in the contrast between the unrestrained masculine physicality of the “flight of panting riders, & mad splashed horses” and the genteel appurtenances of the female traveler:

  It was the most comical sight—the rusty old fly—the conventional ark shaped box—the London-looking lady, with her little handbags & brown paper parcels—suddenly caught up in the middle of a hunting scene which might have ridden straight out of a Graphic Christmas number. But Aunt Maria appreciated the situation only her one wish was to get out & follow the hounds. When she had paid her flyman, & told him to take her box to the house, she gathered up her skirts, & ran as fast as her long legs would carry her. (SxMs-18-2-A-26.74–75)

  If the true-to-form hunt seems to have leaped from the pages of the popular Victorian periodical The Graphic, Violet herself breaks the mold, running, skirts lifted, away from the house and toward the hounds. It is a small but telling instance of why Woolf esteemed a friend who was “always talking & laughing & entering into whatever was going on with a most youthful zeal” (SxMs-18-2-A-26.77), and why she scorned as “superficial indeed” anyone who dismissed Violet as “one of those cleverish adaptable ladies of middle age who are welcome everywhere & not indispensable anywhere” (SxMs-18-2-A-26.78). Invisible and hypervisible, everywhere and nowhere: this paradoxical state of being, Woolf knew, was assumed to be the inevitable destiny of those deemed “odd women,” a painfully apt term for hollyhock-tall Violet. The Life of Violet remakes the narrative logic of biography to upend such assumptions. Bending time and space to reveal her friend’s gifts, Woolf realizes through literature freedoms greater than those afforded to Violet by history.

  Drafted in 1907 and revised in 1908, The Life of Violet reflects the peak of a creative ferment that had accelerated after the death of Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, in 1904. Few episodes in Woolf’s life have been as exhaustively studied as her move from South Kensington to Bloomsbury, and I will not rehearse her storied escape from late-Victorian mores here except to touch briefly on those elements that informed The Life of Violet. The domestic milieux Woolf created with her siblings—first at 46 Gordon Square, and then, following her brother Thoby’s death from typhoid in 1906 and her sister Vanessa’s 1907 marriage to Clive Bell, with her younger brother Adrian at 29 Fitzroy Square—thrummed with social and artistic potential. Her newfound social circles, which had not yet cohered into what we refer to as “the Bloomsbury Group,” offered sparkling intellectual energy in gatherings such as Thoby’s “Thursday Evenings,” Vanessa’s Friday Club, and the Play Reading Society she and Adrian hosted at Fitzroy Square. Woolf’s authorial aspirations acquired fresh dimensions as she traveled with family and friends (including Violet) to Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Greece, and Turkey. Each international journey, like the numerous trips she took within England, played an enduring role in her sense of literary possibility, shining through The Life of Violet, and, later, her full-length novels. Woolf expanded her linguistic repertoire, adding Spanish, Italian, and German to an already advanced knowledge of Latin and Greek, and she worked as a teacher at Morley College in London, teaching English composition and literature to working-class students. Above all, she read, feeding passions captured eloquently in a diary entry written the year before her father’s death:

  [T]he books are the things that I enjoy—on the whole—most. I feel sometimes for hours together as though the physical stuff of my brain were expanding, larger & larger, throbbing quicker & quicker with new blood --& there is no more delicious sensation than this. I read some history: it is suddenly all alive, branching forwards & backwards & connected with every kind of thing that seemed entirely remote before. I seem to feel Napoleons influence on our quiet evening in the garden for instance—I think I see for a moment how our minds are all threaded together—how any live mind today is of the very same stuff as Plato’s & Euripides. It is only a continuation & development of the same thing. It is this common mind that binds the whole world together; & all the world is mind. (PA, 179)

  It was Violet Dickinson who enabled Woolf to channel this vibrant sense of interconnectedness into a paying profession.

  Violet read many of Virginia’s writings and recognized the breadth of her talents.23 In 1904, she introduced Virginia to Margaret Lyttelton, editor of the Women’s Supplement for The Guardian (a clerical paper unrelated to today’s newspaper of the same name), who invited Virginia to contribute to the paper. The more than sixty pieces Woolf published between 1904 and 1907 in The Guardian and other newspapers and periodicals supply evidence of erudition as well as genius.24 In essays, reviews, and obituaries, Woolf reveals her command of the British literary canon across multiple genres (e.g., Shakespeare, Sydney, Wordsworth, Dickens, the Carlyles); she illuminates the merits of new novels from a transatlantic canon-in-the-making (by, e.g., Henry James, Edith Wharton, Winston Churchill, William Dean Howells); and she mixes memoir and cultural commentary in chronicles of her own travels through Spain and England. Her reverence for the essay as an art form emerges in pieces about subjects ranging from the Brontë parsonage and street musicians to women memoirists.

  It was also at this time that Woolf made her first adult forays into writing fiction. (Her juvenilia is preserved in the Hyde Park Gate News, the Stephen children’s newspaper that ended in 1895 when Julia Stephen died.) Her early stories are transparently autobiographical sketches about young ladies trapped by the imperative to marry. Those that survive are unevenly paced and tentative, and in this regard, very unlike her paid writing for newspapers and periodicals. But her mock-biography of Violet Dickinson was a breakthrough. It is the longest and only multichapter fictional work from this period, and its investigation of how to narrate a woman’s life took Woolf into new literary terrain. Indisputably, The Life of Violet lacks the technical sophistication that Woolf would bring a decade later to “The Mark on the Wall” or “Kew Gardens”; nor can it keep company with Woolf’s shimmering treatment of consciousness, memory, and time in Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse. What makes The Life of Violet significant in Woolf’s writerly evolution is its sure-footed, self-conscious critique of where the architecture of fiction demands renovation.

  Woolf’s mouthpiece for this critique is The Life of Violet’s narrator—unnamed, male, lower- or working-class, living “in a garret with one dirty charwoman who brings me Lloyds Weekly and a bunch of kippered herrings tied by the tails”—who, to my ear, is one of the most engaging and underappreciated voices she created. This narrator alternately subverts and agonizes over the problems of genre that Woolf would solve in the 1920s and 1930s. Beset with anxieties about rules, limits, and the proprieties of class, he promises that “we shall move in good society” as we follow Violet’s antics. He assures us that he is “a sincere historian” and that “this Biography is no novel but a sober chronicle.” Leaving out a great many things, The Life of Violet’s narrator insists on his trustworthiness (“we are writing no novel but the essence of truth”) as he cites limitations on his time and withholds details that it would be “neither polite nor possible” to supply. The source of his originality is his relationship to the very language that is his medium. Introducing himself as a man forced to speak in an adopted language, the narrator claims that he would impart more information to us “if I had the freedom of my mother tongue, as I have it not, for a reason to be told in the appendix.” However, both his actual mother tongue and the cause for its suppression remain mysterious, because (a brilliant comic touch!) the putative appendix is “missing.” After delivering the first two stories in what we infer is borrowed or secondary English, the narrator performs a ventriloquist feat in “A Story to Make You Sleep.” Foregrounding the artistic dangers of crossing between languages, he speaks in the voice of a Japanese mother addressing her child. “Mine of course is but the English version,” he apologizes for his rendition of “a story fast becoming a myth,” acknowledging that “all the delicate rose pinks and silvers are rubbed off it, as a schoolboy’s thumb will obliterate the wing of a Peach Blossom Moth.” Here are transformations, approximations, rebirths: Japanese prose translated into (non-native) English, a story elevated from the domestic to the mythic, a man’s voice vanishing into the voice of a woman thinking back through her mother (“I can but tell you what my mother told me and her mother told her”). What are a story’s—and before that, a person’s—points of origin? How little we know “man-woman-or Violet kind,” the narrator observes, his plurilingual voice enacting the classic Woolfian principle that literature, like selfhood, is immanently protean.

  To be sure, it is tempting to read The Life of Violet primarily as a cloud-light roman à clef. Woolf troubles herself very little to disguise the titled, wealthy friends who inspired her characters: Lady Bath and two of her daughters, Lady Beatrice Thynne and Lady Katherine Thynne Cromer; Lady Eleanor (Nelly) Cecil; Mrs. Kitty Lushington Maxse; Mrs. Ella Sieveking Crum. These women had entered Virginia’s life while she was still living at 22 Hyde Park Gate and caring for her widowed father. She met them largely through her association with Violet Dickinson and moved cautiously in their world; they offered Virginia, the daughter of an educated professional who was neither a landowner nor a titled member of the gentry, what Sonya Rudikoff calls “aristocracy for beginners.”25 Most of these women did not have children—Beatrice Thynne, like Violet, never married—and they were, as Hermione Lee observes, “all unusual.” Fascinated by her new friends’ ease and majesty, Virginia wrote about them in language that anticipates The Life of Violet. A 1903 tableau titled “An Afternoon with the Pagans” describes Katie Thynne as “a divine Giantess” with “superb limbs” who pulls a pump handle in her garden until her sister Beatrice shrieks comically, “Well Katie—you have had a brilliant idea … its the drains” (PA, 185). A letter written in 1907 characterizes Violet, Lady Nelly, and Kitty Maxse as “beings moving in a higher world, with voices like the ripple of Arcadian streams” (L1, 297), and another, written after a fallow social period, confesses, “I am pining for my garden of beautiful women” (L1, 311).

  FIG. 4. Frances Isabella Catherine Vesey, Lady Bath, 1870s. Photographed by Alexander Bassano. Albumen. The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A, acquired with the generous assistance of the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Art Fund.

  Nevertheless, Woolf came to associate these women with a conventionality that tinted her affection with skepticism. They represented for her the insularity of the peerage and of a femininity predicated upon artifice; moreover, she had long disdained any social architecture designed to foster marriages between desirable parties.26 (As she announced in an oft-quoted letter to her cousin Emma Vaughan, “I am going to found a colony where there shall be no marrying—unless you happen to fall in love with a symphony of Beethoven—no human element at all, except what comes through Art—nothing but ideal peace and endless meditation” [L1, 41–42].)27 The Life of Violet makes hay of aristocratic lives built around inheritance and continuity, its drawing-room and country-house antics earning Woolf a place in the Wilde-Waugh-Wodehouse canon. But parody and caricature, however amusing, reveal themselves to be insufficiently literary for Woolf’s aims. Each chapter in The Life of Violet diverts attention away from correspondences between characters and their real-life counterparts, suggesting that laughter itself transforms narrative more powerfully than the exaggerated gestures of caricature. To put this differently: Woolf views laughter not only as a desired effect of her stories but as each plot line’s climactic force.

  FIG. 5. Kitty Maxse, 1922. Sepia photograph by W&D Downey, London. Mary Evans Picture Library.

  FIG. 6. Lady Beatrice Thynne, 1923. Photographed by Alexander Bassano. Half-plate glass negative. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

  FIG. 7. Eleanor (née Lambton), Viscountess Cecil of Chelwood, as Valentina Visconti (XV Century), 1897. Alfred Ellis Walker & Boutall. Photogravure. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

  Woolf’s 1905 essay “The Value of Laughter” furnishes a language for understanding how The Life of Violet distances itself from parody and incorporates what Woolf calls “the comic spirit” into each chapter. This spirit, Woolf argues, “concerns itself with oddities and eccentricities and deviation from the recognised pattern”; it compels us to laugh and “preserves our sense of proportion.”28 Thus, it is not only narrative commentary that strips away pretense but the bodily phenomenon of the characters’ own laughter. In “Friendships Gallery,” unexpected laughter twice changes the course of young Violet Dickinson’s fortunes, first when she and the Peer laugh at her gold cross during the ball, quashing any potential romantic entanglement, and next when her visage and jokes make Lady.… … laugh: “[H]er Ladyship’s sense of humour was tickled, and she was grateful to any one who made her laugh; ‘I like sneezing and I like laughing,’ she used to say, ‘but it must be natural.’ ” In “The Magic Garden,” Violet embarks on building her cottage after piercing the proprieties of Hatfield House with anecdotes about the revolutionary figure of their gardener (“obeying some native instinct that was certainly not polite, gave such a picture drawn in coloured detail of the Cookson family, that no one could help laughing; no one had been heard to laugh so loud for twenty or thirty or forty years”). And laughter suffuses “A Story to Make You Sleep,” starting with the otherworldly pair of goddess-giantess-princess-monsters who appear in Japan, one who “made you laugh merely to look at her” and the other who “laughs oftener than she prophecies”:

  Whether they had tails nobody could say; they had great brown hoofs, and they made a noise as they walked, not like our speech, but like the noise that clappers made shaken by boys in the rice fields to scare crows, and now and then there was a scale of bells, beginning high and running all the way down, as an opossum with an ivory tail comes down stairs. They had large eyes, like eggs, filled with fire to the brim, great teeth, much fur like hair, which had built a kind of birds nest on the top of their heads, where strange fruits grew and glossy leaves. They did not walk as we do, one foot before the other, but gave long springs, now this side and now that, like a puma cat.

  These are “oddities and eccentricities and deviation from the recognised pattern” indeed—and on confronting the spectacle of these two creatures, “instead of feeling a cold shudder in the marrow bones and exorcising it with prayers our ancestors could do nothing but laugh.” Undoing and remaking women’s bodies and language, Woolf fuses elements of the animal, the human, the cosmic, and the divine in hybrid creatures untethered by the rules restraining her readers. And if the chimerical female figures in “A Story to Make You Sleep” look back to ancient mythologies, their extraordinary aspect also portends the laughter-centered, multigenre twentieth-century experiments of Leonora Carrington, Edward Gorey, and Salman Rushdie.

  The Life of Violet marks a literary turning point, weaving together the passions and commitments we associate with Woolf’s later works. Its mock-heroic mode, as Karin Westman observes, is “the complex root-system from which Orlando [1928] grows.” Its casual statement “the very proof that there was an owl is that no one saw it” alludes to debates about reality and perception that play a central role in To the Lighthouse.29 It also offers a glimpse of the egalitarian societies Woolf would promote in A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938); and we can recognize in Violet the first of the “daughters of educated men” who might have claimed membership in Three Guineas’s “Society of Outsiders,” an imaginary collective of Englishwomen committed to attaining “justice and equality and liberty for all men and women.”30 The governess-educated aristocratic daughter—a stock Victorian trope—becomes a renegade who renders the canon of male-authored English literature inseparable from the biographies of ordinary women: