Recollections of Virginia Woolf By Her Contemporaries by Noble Joan Russell; Forster E.M.; Duncan Grant

Author:Noble, Joan Russell; Forster, E.M.; Duncan, Grant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers
Published: 2016-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

ALIX STRACHEY

(Mrs James Strachey)

I did not know Virginia Woolf well. We were not close personal friends, but I met her many times. She was so much part of the Bloomsbury scene when I was living in Bloomsbury – indeed, one felt she was the centre of it – that hardly a day went by in which I did not meet her, or hear her talked about by my friends and by almost everyone I met.

I saw her first of all at one of Ka Cox’s parties. At this time, 1916, I was sharing a flat with my brother, Philip, near Mecklenburgh Square in Bloomsbury. We had both just come down from Cambridge. Ka had rooms in one of the Inns, I think it was Lincoln’s Inn, and Philip took me to one of her evenings. Ka was a great hostess; she had many friends and by mixing them all together at her parties she helped to bridge the gap between the extremely highbrow Bloomsbury Group and the other perhaps more friendly people whom I knew.

I enjoyed myself enormously on this particular evening. It was the first time since moving to London that I had come across liberal conversation on all sorts of subjects. I met James Strachey, whom I came to know well and whom, a few years later, I married. I also met Carrington again, then an ex-Slade School student and an old friend of mine. James and Carrington already knew Virginia well and it was through them, at Ka’s party, that I first met and talked to her.

Virginia had then just recovered from a serious mental breakdown. I had been told that she had put on a lot of weight owing to the effects of her illness and to the medical treatment she had received afterwards. I was surprised to hear this, as I found it difficult to picture her as anything other than thin. When I saw her at Ka’s she was still a little plump but had already begun to lose weight. Perhaps the plumpness became her, because she was what I can only call absolutely exquisite.

She was like somebody belonging to another world and I was entranced by her. She had huge eyes which at the same time seemed hollow, almost as though set deep in a cavern. Her nose was aquiline, her eyebrows delicate and arched. They gave the impression that she was surprised at what she saw going on around her – in fact, at being there at all. She had a lovely musical voice, but even this did not alter the effect of not quite belonging to the world.

Some of her friends say that she moved rather clumsily, but I never had this impression. I would say that she was particularly graceful. Not in a worldly sense, because she did not have the manner of someone used to worldly society, but she moved easily and quickly. She seemed tall, probably taller than she was, because her clothes were long and elegant. They

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