Rathbone and Daughter: feminism and the father at the fin-de-siècle

Abstract

For Virginia Woolf, looking back from a distance of forty years, it seemed as if the Victorian age and the rule of the father had gone hand in hand. Walking back in memory through her childhood home at 22 Hyde Park Gate, she noticed that ‘the great patriarchal society of the Victorian age was in full swing in our drawing room’. There were her brothers and half-brothers, welleducated and possessed of their ‘thousand a year’, competing for the prizes that would place them in the universities, the Cabinet or the diplomatic corps. Then she and Vanessa appeared, called into the circle to applaud and admire, or to wave to the male relations as they disappeared out the door. And presiding over both the domestic scene and the ‘patriarchal machine’ was her father, Leslie Stephen. One could scarcely imagine a more perfect epitome of the Victorian liberal intellectual than Stephen the Cambridge don, public moralist, and founder of that monument to Victorian intellectual self-esteem, the Dictionary of National Biography. Yet Sir Leslie, his daughter remembered, preached self-restraint in public while venting his private rages at home, lauded the virtues of manly independence but kept Vanessa chronically short of cash, resolutely built up the great cultural institutions of the age but equally resolutely barred the ‘daughters of educated men’ from their doors.2 Small wonder Woolf concluded, as she wrote in Three Guineas, that ‘the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected’; ‘the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the Small wonder she equated the moment of her escape from the family home with the birth of modernism and the end of the Victorian age. So neat is this formulation, and so acute is Woolf‘s psychological insight, that it is tempting to do as she herself did, and read her story as a parable for her time. But here we are confronted with a problem, for if Woolf s analytic linkage between Victorian domesticity and public patriarchy was amply demonstrated in her own girlhood home, other