Julia Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson; formerly Duckworth; 7 February 1846 – 5 May 1895) was an English Pre-Raphaelite model and philanthropist. She was the wife of the biographer Leslie Stephen and mother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, members of the Bloomsbury Group.
Julia Prinsep Jackson was born in Calcutta to an Anglo-Indian family, and when she was two her mother and her two sisters moved back to England. She became the favourite model of her aunt, the celebrated photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, who made more than 50 portraits of her. Through another maternal aunt, she became a frequent visitor at Little Holland House, then home to an important literary and artistic circle, and came to the attention of a number of Pre-Raphaelite painters who portrayed her in their work.
Married to Herbert Duckworth, a barrister, in 1867 she was soon widowed with three infant children. Devastated, she turned to nursing, philanthropy and agnosticism, and found herself attracted to the writing and life of Leslie Stephen, with whom she shared a friend in Anny Thackeray, his sister-in-law.
After Leslie Stephen's wife died in 1875 he became close friends with Julia and they married in 1878. Julia and Leslie Stephen had four further children, living at 22 Hyde Park Gate, South Kensington, together with his seven-year-old mentally disabled daughter, Laura Makepeace Stephen. Many of her seven children and their descendants became notable. In addition to her family duties and modelling, she wrote a book based on her nursing experiences, Notes from Sick Rooms, in 1883.
She also wrote children's stories for her family, eventually published posthumously as Stories for Children and became involved in social justice advocacy. Julia Stephen had firm views on the role of women, namely that their work was of equal value to that of men, but in different spheres, and she opposed the suffrage movement for votes for women. The Stephens entertained many visitors at their London home and their summer residence at St Ives, Cornwall. Eventually the demands on her both at home and outside the home started to take their toll. Julia Stephen died at her home following an episode of rheumatic fever in 1895, at the age of 49, when her youngest child was only 11. The writer Virginia Woolf provides a number of insights into the domestic life of the Stephens in both her autobiographical and fictional work.
Contents
Life
Family
Julia Stephen was born in Calcutta, Bengal, then the capital of British India, on 7 February 1846, as Julia Prinsep Jackson. Her parents, Maria "Mia" Theodosia Pattle (1818–1892) and John Jackson (1804–1887), belonged to two Anglo-Indian families, although Maria's mother, Adeline Marie Pattle (née de l'Etang), was French. Her father, a Cambridge educated physician who spent 25 years (1830–1855) with the Bengal Medical Service and the East India Company, and a professor at the fledgling Calcutta Medical College, was the third son of George Jackson and Mary Howard of Bengal. While Dr Jackson came from humble origins, but had a successful career that brought him into circles of influence, the Pattles moved naturally in the upper echelons of Anglo-Bengali society. Maria Pattle was the fifth of seven sisters famed for their beauty, verve and eccentricity, and who inherited some Bengali blood through their maternal grandmother, Thérèse Josephe Blin de Grincourt. They spoke Hindustani among themselves, and were a sensation on their visits to London and Paris.
By contrast with the colourful Maria, Jackson was less overt, and tolerant of her passion for her friend, the poet Coventry Patmore. Jackson and Maria Pattle were married in Calcutta on 17 January 1837 and had six children, of whom Julia was the youngest, the third of three surviving daughters, Adeline Maria (1837–1881), Mary Louisa (1840–1916) and Julia (see Table of ancestors). They had two sons and a daughter. The Jacksons were a well educated, literary, and artistic proconsular middle-class family.
Early life (1846–1867)
Julia's two older sisters were sent to England for reasons of health in 1846 to stay with her mother's sister Sarah Monckton Pattle and her husband Henry Prinsep, who leased Little Holland House in Kensington in 1850. Julia and her mother joined them in 1848 when Julia was two. Later the family moved to Well Walk, Hampstead. Her father followed them to England, from India, in 1855, the family living in Hendon at Brent Lodge on Brent Lane, where Julia was home schooled. Julia's sisters, Mary and Adeline were married shortly after. Adeline married Henry Vaughan ("Harry") in 1856 and Mary married Herbert Fisher in 1862, leaving Julia as her mother's companion and caretaker. Her mother's long history of ill health dates from around 1856, and Julia would accompany her on her travels to find remedies. On one of these, where they visited her sister (now Mary Fisher.) in Venice in 1862, she encountered her new brother-in-law's friend, Herbert Duckworth (1833−1870), whom she would later marry. In 1866 the Jacksons moved to Saxonbury, in Frant, near Tunbridge Wells. There she would meet the agnostic biographer Leslie Stephen (1832–1904) later that year, shortly before his engagement to Minny Thackeray. Stephen eventually became her second husband. He described Saxonbury as "a good country house with a pleasant garden and two or three fields".
The Pattle sisters and their families (see Pattle family tree) provided important connections for Julia and her mother. As Quentin Bell, Julia's grandson, described it, they had "a certain awareness of social possibilities". Sarah Monckton Pattle (1816-1887), had married Henry Thoby Prinsep (1793–1878), an administrator with the East India Company, and their home at Little Holland House was an important intellectual centre and influence on Julia, that she would later describe to her children as "bohemian". Little Holland House, a farmhouse on the Holland estate, that served as the dower house, was then on the outskirts of London, and nicknamed the "Enchanted Palace", where Sarah Prinsep ran the equivalent of a French salon. Quentin Bell states that Julia was "largely brought up in" Little Holland House. The house was also frequented by Leslie Stephen. One of the Prinseps' sons, another of Julia's many cousins, was the artist, Valentine Cameron Prinsep (1838–1904).
Another of Maria Jackson's sisters was Virginia Pattle (1827–1910), who married (1850) Lord Charles Eastnor, later the third Earl Somers (1819–1883). Their eldest daughter (Julia's cousin) was Lady Isabella Caroline Somers-Cocks (1851–1921), the temperance leader, while the younger, Lady Adeline Marie (1852–1920) became the Duchess of Bedford. Julia and her mother were frequent guests at Eastnor Castle, the home of Lord Charles and Lady Virginia. Another maternal aunt, and also her godmother, Julia Margaret Pattle (Julia Margaret Cameron 1815–1879), was a celebrated photographer, who took many photographs of her niece, and created a photograph album for her sister, Maria in 1863 (the Mia Album).
Marriage
On 1 February 1867, at the age of 21, Julia became engaged to Herbert Duckworth, a member of the Somerset landed gentry, a graduate of Cambridge University and Lincoln's Inn (1858), and now a barrister and they were married on 4 May at Frant. Julia Margaret Cameron took a number of portraits of her during this period, which Cameron considered symbolic of transition. The marriage was a happy one, Julia later stating "no one had tasted more perfect happiness...the greatest happiness that can fall to the lot of a woman". Julia's second husband, Leslie Stephen, had known Herbert Duckworth from when they were at Cambridge together ten years earlier.
He described him as "the kind of man who might be expected to settle down as a thorough country gentleman ... simple, straight forward and manly ... a singularly modest and sweet-tempered man". Leslie Stephen felt "a touch of pain" later, in writing about the purity of their love, commenting on her letters to Herbert, he stated that she "made a complete surrender of herself in the fullest sense: she would have no reserves from her lover, and confesses her entire devotion to him". As he read through Julia's letters to Herbert after her death, Leslie had misgivings in comparing "the strength of her passion" at this stage of her life to her later marriage to himself.
The Duckworths lived at 38 Bryanston Square (see images of exterior and interiors), Marylebone, London, a townhouse belonging to the Duckworth family, and the following year, their first child was born on 5 March 1868. Two other children followed in quick succession. Their third child, Gerald Duckworth, was born six weeks after his father's premature death in September 1870, at the age of 37, from an undiagnosed internal abscess. He was said to be reaching for a fig for her, while they were visiting Julia's sister (now Adeline Vaughan) at Upton Castle, New Milford, Pembrokeshire, when it ruptured. Within twenty-four hours, he was dead.
Julia and Herbert Duckworth had three children;
George (5 March 1868 – 1934), a senior civil servant
Stella (30 May 1869 – 1897), died aged 28
Gerald (29 October 1870 – 1937), founder of Duckworth Publishing.
Relationships with family and household
Much of what is known about Julia Stephen comes from the viewpoint of her husband, Leslie Stephen, and her daughter, Virginia Woolf, although the latter had only just turned thirteen when her mother died. Woolf, who stated that "for we think back through our mothers if we are women", invoked the image of her mother repeatedly throughout her life in her diary, her letters and a number of her autobiographical essays, including Reminiscences (1908), 22 Hyde Park Gate (1921) and A Sketch of the Past (1940), frequently evoking her memories with the words "I see her ...". She also alludes to her childhood in her fictional writing. In To The Lighthouse (1927) the artist, Lily Briscoe, attempts to paint Mrs Ramsay, a complex character based on Julia Stephen, and repeatedly comments on the fact that she was "astonishingly beautiful". Her depiction of the life of the Ramsays in the Hebrides is an only thinly disguised account of the Stephens in Cornwall and the Godrevy Lighthouse they would visit there. But Woolf's understanding of her mother and family evolved considerably between 1907 and 1940, in which the somewhat distant, yet revered figure becomes more nuanced and filled in. While Vanessa was slightly older at fifteen when her mother died, her recollections are provided in her daughter, Angelica Garnett's memoir.
As the youngest daughter, and last to marry, Julia was her mother's favourite daughter, in part due to her constant care of her mother who had many needs, and little time for maternal affection. With the premature death in 1881 of Maria Jackson's eldest daughter Adeline at 44, followed by that of her husband in 1887, she became increasingly hypochondriacal and an increasing demand on Julia's resources necessitated her making frequent visits to Sussex as well as caring for her mother in her Hyde Park Gate Home, where she died on 2 April 1892. By contrast, Leslie Stephen observed that her father was an unobtrusive presence and "somehow he did not seem to count".
Leslie Stephen writes about Julia "the noblest woman present" in tones of reverence in his Mausoleum Book, written for the children after her death. In that he was reminded of what was written about the Carlyles, and like Thomas Carlyle embarked on memorialising his wife. It was evident that he (and he was not alone in this) regarded her as a "beloved angel" and a saint, indeed as an agnostic, he had already sanctified her prior to their marriage, informing her that she replaced the Blessed Virgin. He describes her appearance as one in which her "beauty was of a kind which seems to imply—as most certainly did accompany—equal beauty of soul, refinement nobility, and tenderness of character". It is evident that she lived a life devoted both to her family and to the needs of others. Woolf drew a sharp distinction between her mother's work and "the mischievous philanthropy which other women practise so complacently and often with such disastrous results". She describes her degree of sympathy, engagement, judgement and decisiveness, and her sense of both irony and the absurd. She recalls trying to recapture "the clear round voice, or the sight of the beautiful figure, so upright and distinct, in its long shabby cloak, with the head held at a certain angle, so that the eye looked straight out at you". Julia's many domestic duties included sharing the education of the children with her husband. The girls were educated to a degree at home, while the boys were sent to private boys' boarding schools (known as public schools in the UK) and then university, as was the custom of the time. There was a small classroom off the back of the drawing room, with its many windows, which they found perfect for quiet writing and painting. Julia taught the children Latin, French and History, while Leslie taught them mathematics. They also received piano lessons.
Death
On 5 May 1895, Julia died at her home, of heart failure brought on by influenza at the age of 49. She left her husband with four young children aged 11 to 15 (her children by her first marriage being adults, although Stella, then 26, took over her mother's duties till she was married two years later). Julia was buried on 8 May at Highgate Cemetery, where her husband, daughter Stella and son Thoby were also later interred. Julia's wealth at her death is listed as £5483 17s 1d.
Work
Artist's model
Julia Stephen is best known for being a model, not only of Pre-Raphaelite painters, but also her photographer aunt, Julia Margaret Cameron. She was Julia Margaret Cameron's favourite and most trusted and mutable model, (see Gallery II) documenting her moods and meditations. Cameron was fascinated to a degree of obsession by Julia, with over 50 portraits, more than any other subject. Julia's legacy is the image Cameron portrayed in her earlier days, the fragile ethereal figure with large soulful eyes and long wild hair. Most of Cameron's photographs of Julia were taken between 1864 and 1875, including a series of profiles in the spring of 1867, two of which were during her period of engagement (plates 310–311), in which Cameron portrayed Julia's cool puritan beauty as a metaphor for the symbolic place of marriage, that Cameron called "the real nobility I prize above all things". Here Cameron frames the bust with emphatic side lighting that accentuates the tautness in the swanlike neck and the strength in the head, indicating heroism and stateliness as befits a girl on the verge of matrimony. By placing the subject facing into the light, the photographer illuminates her and suggests a forthcoming enlightenment.
Cameron frequently used a soft focus such as Julia Duckworth 1867 (plate 311) here. One of these portraits she titled My Favorite Picture of all my works. In this her eyes, are downcast and averted from the lens, a more sentimental effect than the dramatic frontal view of My niece Julia full face shown here. In this portrait, the subject appears to stare assertively at the photographer, as if saying: "I am, like you, my own woman." These are in sharp contrast to the series taken during her long widowhood and mourning for her first husband (1870–1878), with its gaunt pallid facial features. Again, Cameron draws on another Victorian symbol, this time the tragic heroine whose beauty is consumed in grief.
Social activism and philanthropy
In addition to her tireless contributions to running the Stephen household, and attending to the needs of her relatives, she worked to support friends and supplicants. She had a strong sense of social justice, travelling around London by bus, nursing the sick in hospitals and workhouses. She would later write about her nursing experience in her Notes from Sick Rooms (1883). This is a discussion of good nursing practices, demonstrating fine attention to detail. A notable passage is her description of the misery caused by bread crumbs in the bed. In addition to dispensing practical nursing advice, she undertook social advocacy on the part of the sick and poor. She published a letter of protest on behalf of the inmates at St George's Union Workhouse in Fulham "for giving in to the temperance movement and cutting off the half-pint of beer". This ration allocated to the pauper women there had been removed at the insistence of the temperance campaigners (Pall Mall Gazette, 4 October 1879). This was an institution she visited regularly. She also wrote an impassioned defence of agnostic women (Agnostic Women, 8 September 1880), arguing against claims that agnosticism was incompatible with spirituality and philanthropy (see Quotations). She also drew on her experience of ministering to the sick and dying in making these arguments.
At home, Virginia Woolf describes how Julia used one side of the drawing room for dispensing advice and consolation, the "angel in the house".
Views
Julia held firm views on the role of women in society. She was not a feminist, and has been described as an antifeminist, lending her name to the anti-suffrage movement in 1889. The novelist Mary Ward (1851–1920) and the Oxford Liberal set collected the names of the most prominent intellectual aristocracy, including Julia's friend Octavia Hill (1838–1912), and nearly a hundred other women to sign a petition "An Appeal Against Female Suffrage" in Nineteenth Century in June of that year. This earned her a rebuke from George Meredith, writing facetiously "for it would be to accuse you of the fatuousness of a Liberal Unionist to charge the true Mrs Leslie with this irrational obstructiveness", pretending that the signature must belong to another woman of the same name. Rather, Julia Stephen believed that women had their own role and their own role models. She referred her daughters to Florence Nightingale (1820–1910), Octavia Hill and Mary Ward as models. Her views on the role of women in society are firmly laid out in her Agnostic Women, namely that while men and women may operate in separate spheres, their work is of equal value. However, Julia's views on women and feminism need to be evaluated within the historical and cultural context in which she lived, being thoroughly an upper middle class Victorian woman. In her particular case the "separate spheres" were reversed from the post-industrial convention of the time, Leslie Stephen working from home while she worked outside of the home. Julia and her husband's views on this were very much in keeping with the predominant ethos of the time, agreeing with "the vast majority of their contemporaries— that men and women played different roles in life, roles conditioned by their physiology as well as their education". Despite this separation within the spheres of public and private life, she advocated for professionalism and competence by women within these, a viewpoint becoming more common in her time, and exemplified by her nursing activities.
Nor did her views preclude friendship with passionate advocates for women's rights and suffrage, such as the actress Elizabeth Robins. Robins recalls that her Madonna like face was somewhat misleading "she was a mixture of the Madonna and a woman of the world" and that when she came up with something more worldly, it was "so unexpected from that Madonna face, one thought it vicious". Julia Stephen was, in most respects, a conventional Victorian lady. She defended the hierarchical system of the live-in servants, the need to keep a constant watch over them, and believed a "strong bond" existed between the mistress of the house and those who serve. It was this conventionality that Woolf consciously separated herself from, in terms of a model of womanhood, with the Victorian expectations of social conformity, that Woolf described as "a machine into which our rebellious bodies were inserted".
Publications and other writings
Julia Stephen's literary canon consists of a book, a collection of children's stories and a number of unpublished essays. The first was a small volume, entitled Notes from Sick Rooms, published by her husband's publisher, Smith, Elder & Co. in October 1883, an account of her nursing experience together with a detailed manual of instruction. It was republished in 1980 and later published in conjunction with Virginia Woolf's On Being Ill (1926) in 2012. The second is a collection of stories she told to her children, entitled Stories for Children and written between 1880 and 1884. Her stories tended to promote the value of family life and the importance of being kind to animals. Sometimes, such as in Cat's Meat, they reflect the tensions in Julia's own life. She emerges from these writings as decisive, conservative, and pragmatic, with a wit that some considered almost shocking. Although she was unsuccessful in getting these published in her lifetime, they were eventually published, together with Notes from Sick Rooms and a collection of her essays, which had been in the possession of Quentin Bell, in 1993. She also wrote the biographical entry for Julia Margaret Cameron in the Dictionary of National Biography of which her husband was the first editor (1885–1891), one of the very few biographies of women to be found in this work, and an omission which drew the critical exclamation of Woolf "it is much to be regretted that no lives of maids ... are to be found in the Dictionary of National Biography". Among her essays was Agnostic women defending her philanthropy as an agnostic (see Social activism and Views), and two other essays addressing the management of households, and in particular servants.
Legacy
Julia Stephen was the mother of Bloomsbury. She has been described as an austerely beautiful muse of the Pre-Raphaelites, and her physical image comes down to us through countless paintings and photographs. George Watt's portrait of Julia (1875), originally hung in Leslie Stephen's study at Hyde Park Gate, later it was in Duncan Grant's studio at 22 Fitzroy Square for some time, and then at Vanessa Bell's Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex, where it still hangs. The family owned a number of the Julia Margaret Cameron portraits of Julia Stephen. After Leslie Stephen's death in 1904, 22 Hyde Park Gate was sold and the children moved to 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, where they hung 5 of these on the right hand side of the entrance hall. Later, when her granddaughter Angelica Garnett moved into the Charleston Farmhouse in 1987, she hung them in the passageway. Other images come from the photographs of family and friends. These images formed an important link with their prematurely dead mother, for her children. Writing to her sister in 1908, Vanessa Bell refers to her wish to "gaze at the most beautiful of Aunt Julia's photographs incessantly". Otherwise, her image has been described as "elusive", for we know her largely through the construction of others, principally Leslie Stephen and Virginia Woolf, each with their own filters. As Lowe observes, Julia Stephen has been variously constructed as "Madonna", "Nurse", "Wife", "Mother" and "Phantom".
Quentin Bell considers her importance measured not so much in herself as in her influence on others. This was also the position taken by Leslie Stephen at the time of her death. Many of her children, and their descendants in turn, became notable. She played a part in the development of English thought and letters at the close of the nineteenth century. Julia Stephen conformed to the Victorian male image of the ideal woman, virtuous, beautiful, capable and accommodating, symbolised in Burne-Jones' Annunciation. Her conception of life was something she conveyed to her children with great effect. Baron Annan goes so far as to point out resemblances in literary style between her writing in Notes for Sickrooms, and that of Virginia Woolf. Although Julia's daughters rejected their Victorian heritage, their mother's influence appears in Woolf's low chignon hairstyle and wearing her mother's dress in Vogue in May 1926 (see image). Vanessa Bell too, would appear in one of her mother's dresses, such as the portrait of her by Duncan Grant (see image). Woolf also wrote with her mother's pen.
Throughout her life, Julia Stephen was a prodigious letter writer, and according to Leslie Stephen, during her mother's lifetime, they "never passed a day apart without exchanging letters", often several. After her death, The Julia Prinsep Stephen Nursing Association Fund was established to commemorate the life of a woman, Leslie Stephen described as one whose "frank kindly ways made her many friends among the poor".
Virginia Woolf
The intense scrutiny of Virginia Woolf's literary output (see Bibliography) has inevitably led to speculation as to her mother's influence, including psychoanalytic studies of mother and daughter. Woolf states that "my first memory, and in fact it is the most important of all my memories" is of her mother. Her memories of her mother are memories of an obsession and she suffered her first major breakdown on her mother's death in 1895, the loss having a profound lifelong effect. In many ways, her mother's profound influence on Virginia Woolf is conveyed in the latter's recollections, "there she is; beautiful, emphatic ... closer than any of the living are, lighting our random lives as with a burning torch, infinitely noble and delightful to her children". Woolf described her mother as an "invisible presence" in her life, and Rosenman argues that the mother-daughter relationships is a constant in Woolf's writing. She describes how Woolf's modernism needs to be viewed in relationship to her ambivalence towards her Victorian mother, the centre of the former's female identity, and her voyage to her own sense of autonomy. To Woolf, "Saint Julia" was both a martyr whose perfectionism was intimidating and a source of deprivation, by her absences real and virtual and premature death. Julia's influence and memory pervades Woolf's life and work, "she has haunted me", she wrote.