Cousin Virginia

Abstract

When I was asked about my memories of Bloomsbury, I got out my mother’s tattered old scrapbook. I found faded photographs of Leslie Stephen and Julia standing out in the snow at Davos, where they were staying with my grandfather John Addington Symonds,1 enjoying the early days of ‘winter sports’. There were photographs also of Leslie Stephen seated in his arm chair in the Hyde Park study and a very lovely one of Julia looking out of the same window as she pulled aside the curtain to let the light fall full on her face. Julia was my father’s aunt and Leslie Stephen a long-standing friend of John Addington Symonds. My mother, Madge Symonds, his daughter, first met my father, William Vaughan, in the gloomy house in Hyde Park Gate and also at St Ives.2 Madge was the early great love of Virginia, who described her as Sally Beaton in Mrs Dalloway. So I grew up with a background of a pre-Bloomsbury world. As a child, I can remember the excitement of the arrival of Virginia and Cordelia3 in a painted horse-drawn caravan to stay with us in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Why a caravan and where they were going remains obscure.KeywordsPernicious AnaemiaWinter SportDrink CocoaNational BiographyPlanatory StyleThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.