On a grey, drizzly day in July, Virginia Woolf stares blankly over Tavistock Square in central London. The bronze bust of the author silently observes the square’s gardens, perched on a moss-streaked stone plinth. Today, decaying bouquets of yellow roses and sweet Williams are laid on the ground before her; a foxglove taken from a nearby flowerbed is draped over her shoulder. The bust is a copy of Stephen Tomlin’s 1931 plaster study, now found at Charleston, East Sussex. Woolf hated sitting for it, writing to Dorothy Bussy, “the man I hate most in the world, your nephew Tomlin, has me by the hair: I waste afternoon after afternoon perched in his rat-ridden and draught-ridden studio… My fingers tremble with rage. Day after day thrown into the pit, and all for a woman’s face.” Tomlin had to abandon the full sculpture.
A plaque on the plinth reads, “Virginia Woolf lived in a house formerly on the south side of Tavistock Square from 1924 to 1939 where most of her greatest novels were written and published.” Now, a few feet away, there is also a wooden post bearing a QR code. Scan the code on your phone, and you’ll be directed to a page on the Camden People’s Museum website that contains information about Woolf. It describes her as “best known for her innovative writing” and her “feminism”, and “considered by many to be one of the most important modern authors of her time”. There’s a short biography, in which she is addressed in friendly terms as “Virginia”. And, under a section headed “Virginia, Jewishness and race”, is an apologetic paragraph that explains that, in Woolf’s “diaries and letters” readers can find “challenging, offensive comments and descriptions of race, class and ability which we would find unacceptable today”.
It mentions Woolf’s marriage to the Jewish writer Leonard Woolf, her “established anti-Semitic ideas about Jewish people”, and her involvement in the 1910 Dreadnought hoax, a practical joke intended to embarrass the Royal Navy in which Woolf and other pacifists infiltrated the ship “dressed up as ‘Abyssinian Royals’ wearing theatrical costumes and ‘blackface’”. The information has been added as part of the “RePresenting Bloomsbury” project, which seeks to “investigate and present information about all statues and memorials in the borough that commemorate individuals… This will include any discriminatory ideas or behaviours.” Scroll further and you’ll find comments from “community voices”, including an anonymous Year 3 student – seven or eight years old – who says: “It’s not nice that she didn’t like Jewish people. That’s not OK and we wouldn’t like that at our school, but she wasn’t bad all the time.”
This has caused some outcry in the British press. The Telegraph published a news story, and a comment piece from the author’s great-niece Emma Woolf headlined “The wokerati have ruined a statue of my great-aunt Virginia Woolf”. Emma Woolf writes that her “initial reaction was disbelief. Now it just feels hurtful and disrespectful.” Those who oppose the QR code feel the web page, in devoting a third of the author’s biography to a handful of objectionable comments made in private writings over a lifetime, have mischaracterised a progressive feminist author who chose to marry into a Jewish family as a narrow-minded bigot.
Virginia Woolf was a titan of literature, with a fearsome and often withering intellect. Though her work is known for its fluidity and its aliveness on the page, and despite all the vulnerability she put into her personal writings, when I think of her I still imagine someone imposing and stony-faced, statuesque. Maybe that’s partly the result of all the monuments to her, the serious portraits and photographs. Her reputation casts a long shadow. It hardly seems possible to “disrespect” her.
This is, of course, an oversimplification – so too are depictions of her as a rabid anti-Semite. But it’s also true that Woolf wrote many things in her private documents that make for painful reading a century or so later – from callously accurate observations of friends to straightforward snobbery and grim bigotry. Leaf through the five-volume edition of her diaries, published last summer, and it doesn’t take long to find a jarring line. The fourth entry in the collection, dated Monday 4 January 1915, begins with this infamous description of her sister-in-law: “I do not like the Jewish voice; I do not like the Jewish laugh: otherwise I think… there is something to be said for Flora Woolf.” In a furious letter to her friend Ethel Smyth, she complains again about a visit from her in-laws: “Nine Jews, all of whom, with the single exception of Leonard, might well have been drowned without the world wagging one ounce the worse”, a verdict she admits is “ill-natured”. Throughout the diaries, there are several comments – uncomfortably generalising if not directly anti-Semitic – about the “Jews and Jewesses” in her orbit.
But as support in Germany for Hitler grows, she seems to identify as Jewish by association, and experiences a mounting sense of dread over the fate of all Jews in Europe as well as that of her own family. November 1938: “Jews persecuted, only just over the Channel. Here we feel a faint heat under us, like potatoes frying.” May 1940: “this morning we discussed suicide if Hitler lands. Jews beaten up. What point in waiting? Better shut the garage doors.” As Emma Woolf notes, both Leonard and Virginia Woolf were named in Hitler’s “Black Book”, the SS’s 1940 list of British residents that would be arrested after a Nazi invasion of the UK. Imagining her terror at this prospect, it’s a little stomach-churning to think of the child’s summary: “It’s not nice that she didn’t like Jewish people. We wouldn’t like that at our school.”
The question of offence is often personal. To borrow the Camden People’s Museum’s phrase, my own most “challenging” moment with Woolf came when reading this extract from her diary, which again comes very early – the ninth entry – in the complete volumes. It was written on 9 January 1915, after Leonard and Virginia walked along the river from Richmond to Kingston.
“On the towpath we met & had to pass a long line of imbeciles. The first was a very tall young man, just queer enough to look twice at, but no more; the second shuffled, & looked aside; & then one realised that every one in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with no forehead, or no chin, & an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed.”
I first read this passage as a university student: it sent a jolt through me then, and still does. Woolf employs a hyperbolic cruelty in her merciless assessment of the disabled people she encounters – piling up demeaning, caricaturing adjectives and dehumanising language, magnifying every visible physical difference – juxtaposed with a casual recommendation of mass murder: “They should certainly be killed.” (She moves on briskly to the cost of a pineapple bought at Kingston market.)
Here are all the hallmarks of the Nazi eugenicist propaganda that depicted the disabled as subhuman, “life unworthy of life”, and enabled the murder of more than 300,000 disabled adults and children. As Woolf’s word “certainly” suggests, this attitude was not exceptional or even uncommon. Two years earlier, the British government passed the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913, which allowed a “Board of Control” to forcibly institutionalise “Feeble-minded and other Mentally Defective Persons”. In 1903, George Bernard Shaw insisted that “the only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man”. In 1908, DH Lawrence was fantasising in a letter of how he would “build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly [and then I’d] bring them all in, the sick, the halt and the maimed: I would lead them gently, and they would smile me a weary thanks.” A few years after Woolf, HG Wells would argue in print that without eugenics, war and unhappiness would be inevitable, thanks to “ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens”. Eugenics was celebrated on the left by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the founders of the Fabian Society and this magazine, who according to the author Adrian Wooldridge “supported eugenic planning just as fervently as town planning”. By July 1931, the New Statesman was insisting that, “The legitimate claims of eugenics are not inherently incompatible with the outlook of the collectivist movement.”
The “imbeciles” passage is one of several quotations Woolf’s biographer Hermione Lee uses to open her essay “Woolf and Offence”, along with a line from The Years about a “greasy” Jew and Woolf’s private assertion that “the lower classes are detestable”. “Are you offended?” Lee asks. “I am.” Written in the early 1990s in response to “an old attack on Virginia Woolf as an unacceptable purveyor of hate speech”, Lee’s essay could easily have been written today in response to the statue wars. She argues that such nausea-inducing attitudes, expressed clearly by Woolf in her private writings and “less directly but discernibly in her published work”, would “today certainly qualify as hate speech”. She notes the irony that “on the same campuses where censorious codes of permissible speech” would not tolerate this language, “A Room of One’s Own or Three Guineas are being taught as pioneering texts in Women’s Studies programmes”.
Lee wonders: “Perhaps there is really not much else to be done about the offence of Virginia Woolf: allow that there are ‘less attractive’ attitudes and make the best of them. But with the quotations I began with still sticking in my throat, I feel the need to swallow her whole, not spit out the bits of her which I may find distasteful.” She suggests that “there might be a more interesting way to take on the charge of offensiveness, without having to resort to idealised interpretations of Woolf as a decolonising revolutionary. I should like to be less bashful and apologetic on her behalf, and to claim for offence an essential, even a desirable role in her work and life. I want to praise her for her malice, and to see it as a vital aspect of her energy and style.”
Woolf wrote the “imbeciles” entry just 37 days before her diary abruptly stopped. By late February 1915 she had suffered a mental breakdown, and was placed under the constant surveillance of professional nurses. It was thought that her sanity might never return. She did not write again for two years.
Lee, in her biography, offers a psychoanalytic reading of Woolf’s violent reaction to mentally disabled people – including her own half-sister Laura, who Woolf described as “a vacant-eyed girl whose idiocy was becoming daily more serious, who would hardly read… who was tongue-tied and stammered and yet had to appear at table with the rest of us”. Lee understands it as a defensive “fearful opposition”, a staunch refusal to identify. “Virginia Woolf frequently describes herself as ‘mad’; but not as ‘unintelligible’. She is not an ‘idiot’ or an ‘imbecile’; she is not put away.” It’s true that fears of becoming “unintelligible” haunt Woolf’s suicide note, written before her death in 1941, as she felt another breakdown approaching. Its most pained moment comes in the aside: “You see I can’t even write this properly.”
Perhaps Woolf’s cruel and offensive language is a symptom of her own fears about her mental vulnerability. Perhaps it reflects the disturbing popularity of eugenicist rhetoric in her time – as inhuman as it seems to us today. Perhaps it is a repercussion of her “energy and style”. Perhaps it reveals the pitfalls of a ruthlessly intellectual value system that prizes genius, bookish intelligence and literary flair over all else. Perhaps it exposes her as a bigot. Perhaps we cannot reconcile such fragments with her expansive, empathetic, innovative body of work. Perhaps all the above can be true, in ways that cannot be easily summarised or understood through a scannable code propped up next to a statue.
More than 100 years after Woolf wrote that notorious diary entry, she can be found on the very same stretch of towpath in Richmond. It’s a monument that takes a markedly different approach. Here is a bronze, life-sized statue of Woolf sitting on a bench, turned to the empty space beside her, her arm outstretched along the bench’s back, as if waiting to put her arm around someone yet to sit down. This is a warmer and more welcoming Woolf than the one I have in my mind, who I imagine preferred to do her people-watching from a slight distance. Here, she looks cheerful, inclusive, photo-ready. Tourists and walkers sit beside her and take selfies. Woolf sits silently, and smiles.
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This article appears in the 25 Jul 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special 2024