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.
Married for only three years, Julia was devastated by her husband's death, lying on his grave at his family home of Orchardleigh, near Frome, Somerset. She stated that she was no longer "inclined to optimism", but rather taking on a "melancholy view of life", indeed, to her "life seemed a shipwreck...The world was clothed in drab shrouded in a crape-veil", but kept herself going for the sake of her children. She related this to Leslie Stephen later "I was only 24 when it all seemed a shipwreck, and I knew that I had to live on and on ... And so I got deadened". At the same time, her grief imbued her with a sense of stoicism and awareness of suffering and she made a decision to reject religion, and it appeared, the possibility of happiness. Leslie Stephen observed that "a cloud rested even upon her maternal affections ...it seemed to me at the time that she had accepted sorrow as her lifelong partner", and that "she was like a person reviving from drowning" and sometimes felt as if "she must let herself sink".
It was then that she took up nursing the sick and dying to make herself useful, and began studying the agnostic writing of Leslie Stephen. As Leslie Stephen described it "She became a kind of sister of mercy. Whenever there was trouble, death or illness in her family, the first thing was to send for Julia, whether to comfort survivors or to nurse the patients". After her husband's death, she joined her parents who had moved to Freshwater, Isle of Wight. It was also a period when she spent extensive visits to her aunt, Julia Margaret Cameron's home in Freshwater, who took many photographs of her (see Gallery II). She also resisted her aunt's efforts to persuade her to remarry.
Julia had become aware of Leslie Stephen through both his writings on agnosticism, and through a mutual friend, Anne Thackeray (Anny, 1837–1919), the writer and daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray (see Stephen family tree). Stephen had married Anny's younger sister Minny (Harriet Marian) Thackeray (1840–1875) in 1867, the same year as Julia's marriage, but she died in childbirth in 1875, leaving him with a handicapped daughter, Laura Makepeace Stephen (7 December 1870 – 1945). After Harriet's death, Stephen lived with Anny and he became closer to Julia, who helped them move to 11 Hyde Park Gate (when the house numbers were changed in 1884, it became number 20) in South Kensington in June 1876, next door to her at number 13 (later 22). This was a highly respectable part of London, and Leslie Stephen himself had been born at number 14 (later 42). It was hoped that Julia's children would provide some companionship for Laura, who was becoming increasingly difficult to manage, and in 1877 he made Julia one of Laura's guardians. Leslie Stephen and Julia Duckworth had developed a close friendship, as she added him to her list of those who needed caring for, and had visited Leslie and Minny the night of her death. Each was busy mourning, and saw the friendship as just that. In that friendship, they were able to share their ideals of sorrow, duty and spiritual convalescence. Leslie Stephen, a former Cambridge Don and man of letters, "knew everyone" in the literary and artistic scene, and came from a respectable upper-middle-class family of lawyers, country gentlemen and clergy.
In January 1877, Leslie Stephen decided he was in love with Julia, writing "There was a music running through me... delicious and inspiring. Julia was that strange solemn music to which my whole nature seemed to be set". He proposed to her on 5 February; however, Anny also became engaged to her cousin at the same time, to his displeasure, although Julia intervened on Anny's behalf. Julia declined Leslie's offer of marriage and they agreed to remain friends, although developing an intense correspondence. At the time she entertained thoughts of committing herself to a life of chastity and the happiness she envisaged could be found in a convent. When Anny Thackeray married on 2 August 1877, Julia would soon change her mind, and it was a proposal to install a German housekeeper, Fräulein Klappert, that brought the matter to a head, for both realised this would separate them. Woolf would later speculate that "perhaps there was pity in her love" in addition to "devout admiration for his mind".
On 5 January 1878, Julia Duckworth and Leslie Stephen became engaged, and on 26 March they were married at Kensington Church, although she spent much of the period in between nursing her uncle, Henry Prinsep, at Watts's house in Freshwater, till he died on 11 February. Julia was 32 and Leslie was 46. After spending several weeks visiting her sister, Virginia, at Eastnor Castle, Leslie and his seven-year-old daughter Laura moved next door to Julia's house at 13 (22) Hyde Park Gate (see image), and live out her life, and that of the family till her husband's death in 1904. Meanwhile, she continued her modelling career, Burne-Jones's Annunciation being completed in 1879, and their first child, Vanessa, was born shortly after on 30 May. Julia, having presented her husband with a child, and now having five children to care for, had decided to limit her family to this. However, despite the fact that the couple took "precautions", "contraception was a very imperfect art in the nineteenth century", and three more children were born over the next four years. Angelica Garnett describes Adrian, the last, as "an unwanted child [who] was spoiled, over protected and inhibited".
It was a happy marriage, as Leslie Stephen describes it, a "deep strong current of calm inward happiness". Of their children, he wrote "our own children were to her a pure delight. To see her with a baby on her breast was a revelation, and her love grew with their growth". The Stephens both had aristocratic connections, were considered to belong to the "intellectual aristocracy" and despite Leslie Stephen's obsession with money and fear of poverty, were quite well off financially. They belonged to a social strata of the well educated, who though not wealthy, had inherited sufficient resources to pursue their chosen vocations, a group that at the time was well defined. To many, the Stephens were the ideal Victorian parents, a leading man of letters and a woman admired for beauty, wit, bravery and self-sacrifice. He treated her as a goddess, and in return she pampered him. However, Julia informed him that she could never give up her nursing vocation, and that "I may be called away to nurse people for weeks or have invalids in my house for weeks".
In the early 1880s Leslie Stephen read Froude's life of Carlyle (1882). Like many of his contemporaries he was shocked to learn how badly (he considered) Carlyle had treated his wife, Jane Welsh and wondered if anyone would consider his marriage to have the same flaws, and indeed both shared the tendency to be domestic tyrants. Leslie, who had been a keen mountaineer in the 1860s, suffered a breakdown in 1888 connected with his work on the Dictionary of National Biography, necessitating a three-week visit by them to the Swiss Alps, an occasion documented by Leslie's friend Gabriel Loppé, including one of their particular favourites, in which Julia is peering out of a sunlit hotel room (see below). Laura Stephen became increasingly problematic with outbursts of violence and, confined to a separate part of the house, required her own nurse to feed and clothe her. Eventually she was sent away to a governess in Devon in 1886 and eventually an asylum (Earlswood Asylum 1893–1897 in Surrey). The family had little contact with her after that. In 1891, Vanessa and Virginia Stephen began the Hyde Park Gate News, chronicling life and events within the Stephen family, while the following year the Stephen sisters also used photography to supplement their insights, as did Stella Duckworth. Vanessa Bell's 1892 portrait of her sister and parents in the Library at Talland House (see image 5, below) was one of the family's favourites, and was written about lovingly in Leslie Stephen's memoir.
Number 22 Hyde Park Gate, South Kensington, lay at the south east end of Hyde Park Gate, a narrow cul-de-sac running south from Kensington Road, just west of the Royal Albert Hall, and opposite Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, where the family regularly took their walks (see Map). Built in the early nineteenth century as one of a row of single family townhouses for the upper middle class, it soon became too small for their expanding family. At the time of their marriage, it consisted of a basement, two storeys and an attic. In 1886 substantial renovations added a new top floor, converted the attic into rooms, and added the first bathroom. It was a tall but narrow townhouse, that at that time had no running water. The servants worked "downstairs" in the basement. The ground floor had a drawing room, separated by a curtain from the servant's pantry and a library. Above this on the first floor were Julia and Leslie's bedrooms. On the next floor were the Duckworth children's rooms, and above them the day and night nurseries of the Stephen children occupied two further floors. Finally in the attic, under the eaves, were the servant's bedrooms, accessed by a back staircase. The house was described as dimly lit and crowded with furniture and paintings.
Within it the younger Stephens formed a close-knit group. Life in London differed sharply from that in Cornwall, their outdoor activities consisting mainly of walks in nearby Hyde Park, and their daily activities around their lessons.
Leslie Stephen was in the habit of hiking in Cornwall, and in the spring of 1881 he came across a house in St Ives, and took out a lease on it that September. Although it had limited amenities, its main attraction was the view overlooking Porthminster Bay towards the Godrevy Lighthouse, which the young Virginia could see from the upper windows and which was to become the central figure in her novel To the Lighthouse (1927). It was a large, square house, with a terraced garden, divided by hedges, sloping down toward the sea. Each year between 1882 and 1894, from mid-July to mid-September, the Stephens leased Talland House as a summer residence. Leslie Stephen, who referred to it as "a pocket-paradise", described it as "The pleasantest of my memories... refer to our summers, all of which were passed in Cornwall, especially to the thirteen summers (1882-1894) at St Ives. There we bought the lease of Talland House: a small but roomy house, with a garden of an acre or two all up and down hill, with quaint little terraces divided by hedges of escallonia, a grape-house and kitchen-garden and a so-called ‘orchard’ beyond". It was in Leslie's words, a place of "intense domestic happiness". For the children it was the highlight of their year, Virginia Woolf later described a summer day in August 1890 in her diary (22 March 1921) with the cries of the children playing in the garden and the sound of the sea beyond, concluding that her life was "built on that, permeated by that: how much so I could never explain". The family did not return following Julia's death in May 1895.
In both London and Cornwall, Julia was perpetually entertaining, and was notorious for her manipulation of her guests' lives, constantly matchmaking in the belief everyone should be married, the domestic equivalence of her philanthropy. As her husband observed "My Julia was of course, though with all due reserve, a bit of a matchmaker". While Cornwall was supposed to be a summer respite, Julia Stephen soon immersed herself in the work of caring for the sick and poor there, as well as in London.
Both at Hyde Park Gate and Talland House, the family mingled with much of the country's literary and artistic circles. Frequent guests included literary figures such as Henry James and George Meredith, as well as James Russell Lowell, and the children were exposed to much more intellectual conversations than their mother's at Little Holland House.
Julia and Leslie Stephen had four children;
Vanessa "Nessa" (30 May 1879 – 1961), married Clive Bell
Thoby (9 September 1880 – 1906), founded Bloomsbury Group
Virginia "Jinny", "Ginia" (25 January 1882 – 1941), married Leonard Woolf
Adrian (27 October 1883 – 1948), married Karin Costelloe
