We have long been fans of Ann Kennedy Smith’s excellent blog, which focuses on the friendship networks of Cambridge University women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and so it’s a real pleasure to welcome her to Something Rhymed today. Ann’s piece below profiles one of Virginia Woolf’s important literary bonds – not her tempestuous friendship with Katherine Mansfield, which we have discussed on this site before, but Woolf’s relationship with another writer Kathleen Lyttelton.
Ann’s work has been edited by Clêr Lewis. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.
In November 1904 Virginia Stephen (who would become Virginia Woolf when she married) was twenty-two and excited about beginning her new life. She had just moved into 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury with her sister and two brothers and wanted to put her sadness at the recent death of her father, and her subsequent major breakdown, behind her. She needed to earn her own living, but how? Her older friend Violet Dickinson suggested that she should send a sample of her writing to a friend of hers who worked for a weekly journal aimed at clergymen called The Guardian (not to be confused with The Manchester Guardian).
Kathleen Lyttelton, the forty-eight-year-old editor of The Guardian’s women’s supplement, lived with her daughter Margaret just a few minutes’ walk away, at 56 Gower Street.
They too were new to Bloomsbury, having moved there after the death of Lyttelton’s husband, the Bishop of Southampton. Lyttelton was an active suffrage campaigner and author of Women and their Work (1901). But she was also a short-story writer; the passionate ‘Francesca’s Revenge’ was published by Blackwoods Magazine in 1891. Although she now worked as a journalist, her job as editor allowed her to combine her twin interests in women’s issues and literature.
‘I don’t in the least want Mrs L.’s candid criticism; I want her cheque!’, Woolf told Dickinson impatiently. She had just sent off a sample of her writing and was anxiously waiting for a response. It was a positive one. Lyttelton generously invited her to contribute 1,500 words on any subject she liked. A few weeks later, in December 1904, The Guardian published Woolf’s essay ‘Haworth, November 1904’, in which she wrote: ‘Haworth expresses the Brontës; the Brontës express Haworth… They fit like a snail to its shell.’
When she met the woman she called ‘My Editress’ soon afterwards,Woolf liked her immediately.
‘Mrs Lyttelton has just been – she is a delightful big sensible woman,’ she told Dickinson. ‘I wish she would pet me! I think she has possibilities that way!’ Warm and easy-going as she was, Lyttelton was not interested in being a substitute mother. Instead, she treated the younger woman as a professional writer, which caused occasional upsets. Woolf never got over having to shorten her review of The Golden Bowl by Henry James, but it was only what any male editor would have done (and did).
Lyttelton’s weekly Guardian columns show her to be an investigative and outspoken journalist who campaigned for equal access to higher education and improved legal rights for women. But she was also a lover of good novels, although she did not envy the limited life choices of Jane Austen’s women characters, of whom she wondered ‘how these unemployed young women managed to while away the long weary hours of the day’. Lyttelton was in no doubt that modern women (like herself and Woolf) who could make a career for themselves as writers were more fortunate.
Over the next two years, Woolf and Lyttelton developed a friendship based on warmth and mutual respect. Mrs L’s ‘melancholy roar of laughter’ amused Woolf. ‘I went to tea with her, and she roared at me, like a shaggy old Lioness with wide jaws, and gave me 4 books to review.’
During this time The Guardian published over 30 book reviews and essays by Woolf, including a funny and touching obituary of her family dog, Shag. She sometimes complained about the newspaper’s preachy tone (‘how they ever got such a black little goat into their fold, I can’t conceive’) but being published regularly gave Woolf new confidence in being able to earn a living by her pen.
There were more difficult times to come. Woolf’s beloved brother Thoby died of typhoid fever in November of that year, and less than two months later, Lyttelton herself died suddenly of influenza and ‘a weak heart’ aged fifty-one. Painful as such losses were, Woolf was already on her way as a writer by then.
In 1933, when she herself was fifty-one, Woolf wrote her essay ‘Professions for Women’. She recalled (a little inaccurately) how her career as a published writer began – by simply, she said, sending a few pages of her writing to a newspaper, ‘and my effort was rewarded on the first day of the following month – a glorious day it was for me – by a letter from an editor containing a cheque for one pound ten shillings and six pence’.
The thrill of being paid for her writing was a memory that Woolf cherished all her life.
Ann Kennedy Smith is a published writer and contributor to Slightly Foxed, TLS and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Her ‘Ladies Dining Society’ blog celebrates the friendship networks of Cambridge University women 1870-1946. You can follow Ann on Twitter @akennedysmith
Edited by Clêr Lewis. Clêr has an MA in creative writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is working on her first novel.
If this post has inspired an idea for a future Something Rhymed post, please do get in touch. You can find out more about what we are looking for here. Former contributor and post editor Kathleen Dixon Donnelly has written a review of A Secret Sisterhood on her own blog Such Friends. You can read it here.
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