[Vwoolf] Virginia Woolf and British Fascism

Jeannette Smyth jeannette_smyth at earthlink.net
Tue Oct 14 13:18:06 EDT 2014


The phrase refers to Lord Redesdale. As my hurried and imprecise phrasing suggests but does not, apparently, convey.
Jeannette Smyth


On Oct 14, 2014, at 10:37 AM, Mark Hussey wrote:

> Is it really accurate to say Leslie Stephen was “a truly tyrannical father who violently opposed the education of women”? Julia Stephen was certainly opposed to institutionalized education for women, but Leslie seems to have been more open to the idea. And VW did take university courses, and was not taught by governesses.
>  
> From: Vwoolf [mailto:vwoolf-bounces at lists.osu.edu] On Behalf Of Jeannette Smyth
> Sent: Monday, October 13, 2014 11:43 PM
> To: VWOOLF at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
> Subject: [Vwoolf] Virginia Woolf and British Fascism
>  
> Dear Friends:
>  
> The six brilliant Mitford sisters, and how they grew, is my flavor-of-the-month, inspired by the death of the youngest, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, aged 94.
>  
> In reading the de Courcy biography of Diana, the fascist, I was interested to see how many of Diana's Bright Young Things sphere intersected with Bloomsbury. This would have been before she married Oswald Mosely, leader of the British fascists. Mosley gave Vita Sackville-West "the creeps" but she wrote a gardening column for his New Party publication -- in Gordon Square, where VW and her siblings lived after the death of Leslie Stephen, probably the founding locus of Bloomsbury. Harold Nicolson, Sackvile-West's husband, was Mosely's editor at Action and suggested grey shirts as a uniform for Mosely's thugs. The Prince of Wales looked kindly on the New Party; the best man at the Duke of Windsor's wedding was the cuckolded husband of one of Mosley's girlfriends, Baba, the sister of Mosely's late wife. This man, Fruity Metcalfe, as an equerry to the prince, attended a Mosely discussion group called the January Club in 1934.
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> Diana's first husband, Bryan Guiness, lent Carrington the gun with which she committed suicide after Lytton Strachey's death. Diana and Bryan loved the Ham Spray menage of Carrington, Strachey, Ralph Partridge and Frances Marshall, lived nearby and entertained them frequently. 
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> As the most beautiful, one of the richest and most intelligent girls in London, Diana was as much a catch for the hostesses like Emerald Cunard who were also chasing Virginia. Even very peripheral characters in the life of VW -- like Professor Joad, the common law husband of one of the Hogarth Press assistants, Marjorie Joad -- turns up as an avid supporter of Mosely's New Party.
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> Most interestingly, I thought, while Mosely was still  member of the political establishment, the saintly socialist Beatrice Webb (like everyone else) in 1924 called Mosely "the most brilliant man in the House of Commons....the perfect politcian and the perfect gentleman....a Disrealian gentleman-democrat." By the time he was in government, she was calling him an arrogant aristocrat. I must say that the thought of Beatrice Webb -- who told VW, as you will recall, that marriage was a waste pipe for the emotions -- falling for Mosely's notorious sexual charisma makes me like her better.
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> Other Bloomsbury associates like Eddie Marsh were part of the Mitford sisters' younger days. Their education reminded me of nothing so much as Virginia Woolf's -- a truly tyrannical father whp violently opposed the education of women, the girls' education was funded literally by their mother's egg money. Lady Redesdale sent eggs weekly to her husband's club. JThe girls, like Woolf, were educated by 15 governesses -- few lasted more than a few days in the Redesdales' home. Pam, Nancy and Diana, the older girls, had the free run of an enormous well-stocked library, where their Eton-educated brother Tom was also free to play the piano and help guide their reading of the classics. This library was sold when the Redesdales' downsized, so the younger girls -- Unity, Jessica and Deborah -- grew up pining and crying to go to boarding school.
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> It is interesting to think what a prophylactic against fascism that Leonard Woolf's committed, fact-based socialism was for Bloomsbury.
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> Jeannette Smyth
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>  
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