Virginia Stephen at the Dr Williams’s Library

Abstract

This article considers the implications of Virginia Stephen’s membership of the foremost library of Protestant nonconformity in London—the Dr Williams’s Library. Drawing on research in the library’s archives, the author focuses on the original record of Stephen’s membership in the 1905 ‘Index of Readers’. While paying close attention to the semantic specificities of the record itself, this article also positions Stephen’s individual record in the wider context of the community of readers this index documents. The article explores the degree to which Stephen’s encounter with the predominantly female and scholarly, but also distinctly lower-middle-class and professional readership of the Dr Williams’s Library may have influenced the concerns of her 1909 short story ‘Memoirs of a Novelist’ and her first novel, The Voyage Out.

Keywords:

• Virginia Woolf
• The Voyage Out
• ‘Memoirs of a Novelist’
• Dr Williams’s Library
• class
• gender

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the Trustees of Dr Williams’s Library for granting me permission to cite the records held in the ‘Index of Readers’.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹In a November 1904 letter, Stephen protests to Violet Dickinson: ‘I dont in the least want Mrs L’s candid criticism; I want her cheque!’ (Woolf 1975: 154).

²Andrew McNeillie describes the Guardian as a ‘pretty dull clerical newspaper’ (Woolf 1986: xii).

³This is not to say that Stephen’s suspicion of voluntarism is not politically significant in and of itself. This early experience of paid and unpaid work must have informed her thinking in her polemics on women and work in A Room of One’s Own, where she states that ‘Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for’, and Three Guineas, where she records the story of Sophia Jex-Blake, who is offered ‘a tutorship with the pay of five shillings an hour’ but is forced to refuse it by her father (Woolf 1992a: 59, 189).

⁴Melba Cuddy-Keane has noted this parallel (Cuddy-Keane 2003: 82). For more on Stephen’s early career as a reviewer, see Dubino (1997) and Daugherty (2010). For further discussion of this work at Morley College and an illuminating account of Stephen’s approach to teaching, see Daugherty (1995). For more on Stephen’s interactions with Miss Williams in particular, see Jones (2015: 17–64).

⁵Fourteen of the twenty-nine women members to join in May 1905 describe themselves as teachers, schoolmistresses or tutors.

⁶Thirteen of the twenty-nine women applying for membership in May 1905 cite historical reading or study as the reason for their application.

⁷The members’ addresses recorded in the index are illuminating in this regard. The majority of women members lived in either London suburbs such as Clapham, Brondesbury and West Ealing or else less affluent quarters of central London—for example, Notting Hill, Holloway Road and Caledonian Road. Miss Florence Maud English gives her address as the XXth Century Club in Stanley Gardens, Notting Hill, which was a residential club established especially for women working as teachers or in clerical roles in London (Record 7887).

⁸There are references to Melymbrosia, an early version of The Voyage Out, in Woolf’s letters as early as 1907 (Woolf 1975: 315).