Customer Reviews

Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work

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DeSalvo has given us something ground-breaking, heart-breaking, but above all important, in this book. This book brings so much insight into Woolf, her work, and the time in which she lived (ie V.W. as representative of the experience of other children of the time) and does it all in 305 immensely readable pages. This is that kind of fantasy bridge book that allows true readers insight into an author without first having to go and study critical theory for ten years to even get through most books about great authors! I am an avid, organic, non-academic reader and this book was excellent for me. I think it also rescues and gives Virginia Woolf to all of us, as a writer, a woman, a child, a victim of circumstance. As opposed to mad, she was one incredible artist who adapted extremely well in such an isolated and shaming time. DeSalvo you should be honored (as you were, by Kennedy Fraser's New Yorker review, which led me to you!)

We readers assume a lot when we pick up a book. We assume, for example, that a biographer or scholar can be trusted to present you with the facts, and they'll let you know when they're speculating. Apparently, though, this is not a safe assumption in all cases.

I've read quite a few books about Virginia Woolf, so I thought it was time to read this one. As I began and saw how DeSalvo phrased her conclusions, I could only assume she had some explosive, new evidence to support her claims. I was appalled as I read on, realizing she had no new or firm information, that she was making these conclusions out of the same "infirm" evidence we all have.

This book tells a very detailed, elaborate story of pervasive sexual abuse throughout Virginia Woolf's childhood as if it's a fact, when the truth is there simply is very little real evidence to support those conclusions.

I could accept a "what if" scenario, where some facts of Woolf's experiences conform to what we know of the experiences of incest and sexual abuse survivors. That could persuade one to consider the possibility of on-going, systematic sexual abuse. I'm willing to admit it is possible. But DeSalvo doesn't say "what if". She describes this as if it's established fact, indisputable, and widely accepted.
What are the charges? Both of Virginia Woolf's parents had children from previous marriages, so their household was a complex one, and, according to DeSalvo, a veritable horrorshow of sexual abuse. I made a list of what she states as fact and/or implies very broadly:

-- Virginia Woolf's parents, Leslie and Julia Stephen, both brutalized and victimized Virginia's mentally handicapped half-sister Laura, who was merely rebellious and maybe got caught masturbating.
-- Her half-brother Gerald Duckworth sexually abused Virginia as a child. DeSalvo implies it was on-going, repeated abuse.
-- Her cousin JK Stephen raped her half-sister Stella.
-- Her father raped her half-sister Stella after her mother died.
-- Stella was also raped by her fiancé Jack Hills, whose insistence on brutal honeymoon sex resulted in her death.
-- Jack Hills also raped her sister Vanessa after Stella died.
-- Her other half-brother George Duckworth raped both Vanessa and Virginia repeatedly over a period of years.
-- Vanessa and Virginia had sex.
-- Virginia had sex with Vanessa's husband Clive Bell.
-- Vanessa and Virginia sexually abused Vanessa's daughter Angelica.

And she bases that on what? Woolf reported two occasions of sexually inappropriate behavior:

1. When she was quite young, her half-brother Gerald fondled her sexually on one occasion. He touched her between her legs, under her clothing. She doesn't say whether he penetrated her with his fingers or how long this fondling lasted, but it took place in a public area of the home and so one assumes it was a brief ordeal for her.

2. As adults, both Virginia and and her sister Vanessa referred to occasions during their teenage years when their other half-brother George made midnight visits to their bedrooms after they'd been out together at parties. They described clumsy caresses, embraces, and kisses -- more like an overly affectionate puppy rather than a raping monster. They joke about it. While it's possible this may have included unwanted sexual touching, it's also possible this was no more than an excess of high spirits: playful wrestling or romping, slaps, tickling -- certainly unwelcome and inappropriate, but neither ever say anything to give an impression of sexual assault.

Virginia's family was loving, openly affectionate, and "touchy-feely" -- in photos they are often draped over one another comfortably. They sit slouched together. Their letters to one another read like love letters. They were physically affectionate. The kisses and embraces are the innocent expressions of affection. To read more into it seems to me unwarranted and grotesque.

Here too we are tripped up in the pitfalls of language. There is a very wide range of activity that we call sexual abuse. On one extreme might be on-going, systematic sexual assault, rape, forced or violent intercourse, taking place over a period of years. On the other extreme might be two children playing doctor. Unfortunately, we use the same language to describe everything on that spectrum. DeSalvo exploits this vagueness in our language and the vagueness in Woolf's descriptions to extrapolate a worst-case scenario, and then calls it the truth. She takes the broadest, most extreme interpretation of all possible scenarios. When Woolf says they had to "endure" George's attentions or Leslie's "demands," there is no reason to see these as having been sexual. Yet that is how DeSalvo interprets them.

And classifying the incidents with Gerald and George in the same category as violent or on-going sexual abuse trivializes the experience of incest and abuse survivors from the more extreme end of that spectrum.

Nowhere does one see evidence that Woolf thought of herself as a victim, apart from being the victim of unpleasantness, boredom, and neglect.

It wasn't just the half-brothers. DeSalvo assumes that almost all the males in this circle were busy abusing the females and children. It seems monstrous to accuse Virginia's father Leslie Stephen of sexual abuse of his children. He may have been self-centered and insensitive, but there is abundant evidence that he was a very moral man and loved his children deeply. Virginia's brother-in-law Jack Hills admitted feeling attracted to Virginia and Vanessa. For this, DeSalvo brands him a rapist.

Men are not the only victims of DeSalvo's broad brush. Vanessa talks about Virginia as her bed partner, and from this DeSalvo concludes they had incestuous lesbian sex. News flash: Many sisters sleep together without having sex.

Woolf and her friends rejected physical modesty as Victorian silliness, and so you see pictures of these people posing naked, pretending to be real-life statues. Some of them were artists and often painted people nude. Their children played in the nude. From this, DeSalvo concludes that Virginia's young niece Angelica was sexually abused. Again she takes the most extreme interpretation of the words Angelica uses in her autobiography.

Doesn't a teacher, scholar, or biographer have some responsibility to provide real evidence for their conclusions? And how bizarre to legitimize this collection of fantastical suppositions by publishing it, touting it as some ground-breaking examination of new facts. I kept waiting for these new facts. There were none. I'm thunderstruck, to be honest, that any responsible publisher would have agreed to publish this book and that any scholar would take this book seriously. It seems to me more an exercise in extreme extrapolation.

To me, DeSalvo commits a biographer's cardinal sin: She proceeds from the foregone conclusion that these things happened, and then selectively presents facts that support that conclusion -- facts that *may* be interpreted that way, in *one* possible interpretation out of many.

So how does DeSalvo explain the fact that Woolf reported only these two instances and nothing more? She says Woolf was in denial. So she was in un-denial enough to describe those incidents with her half-brothers, but in denial for all the rest of it? Huh? In a pinch I suppose this might hold some water if there was actual evidence of further abuse (beyond what Woolf herself reported). But there isn't any. So isn't this a logical fallacy? There is faulty thinking here.

There are any number of material or practical problems with the "widespread and pervasive sexual abuse scenario". When Woolf was ill in 1913-15, would her sister Vanessa have agreed to send her to the home of the molesting/raping half-brother to recuperate? Would her husband Leonard have known about this widespread and pervasive sexual abuse and also remained silent in his multi-volume autobiographies? It just doesn't add up.

And it's so completely out of character for Virginia Woolf as a person. Does she deserve to be mistrusted or second-guessed? Is there any reason to believe she would have protected molesters? Was she in the habit of making excuses for the bad behavior of the males around her? Certainly not. I can't think of anyone less likely to fail to fully investigate her own feelings. That was her palate, her métier, her genius.

And how absolutely awful to accuse people who can't defend themselves of something the supposed victim never accused them of, ninety years later.

I want to emphasize again two things: 1. I do not deny that Woolf was sexually fondled by her half-brother and that this itself was sexual abuse. Even if this is the only thing that ever happened to her, it's still sexual abuse. Full stop. It's all the rest of DeSalvo's claims I object to. And second, I repeat, I would have been content if this book had used conditional language such as "might have" or "could have." But it didn't. All DeSalvo's suppositions are stated baldly as factual. The reader will be very badly mislead. Read Hermione Lee's excellent biography of Virginia Woolf instead.

DeSalvo has given us something ground-breaking, heart-breaking, but above all important, in this book. This book brings so much insight into Woolf, her work, and the time in which she lived (ie V.W. as representative of the experience of other children of the time) and does it all in 305 immensely readable pages. This is that kind of fantasy bridge book that allows true readers insight into an author without first having to go and study critical theory for ten years to even get through most books about great authors! I am an avid, organic, non-academic reader and this book was excellent for me. I think it also rescues and gives Virginia Woolf to all of us, as a writer, a woman, a child, a victim of circumstance. As opposed to mad, she was one incredible artist who adapted extremely well in such an isolated and shaming time. DeSalvo you should be honored (as you were, by Kennedy Fraser's New Yorker review, which led me to you!)

Scholarly without suffering from an overuse of lexicon, DeSalvo's study investigates how sexual abuse affected not only the development of Virginia Woolf's life and fiction but also the lives of the other members of her family as well as their internecine tangle of relationships. DeSalvo portrays the Stephen household and reveals how its adult members and doctors treated female members who diverged from societal norms or who behaved, it was then thought, "hysterically"--often, we now know, in response to incest.

The book is an important, passionate attack on the still-prevalent notion that Woolf suffered from madness: "her biographers have continued to portray her as mad, rather than having been treated as if she were mad." Instead, Woolf was responding as any adolescent would to childhood trauma, and what should be noted (and celebrated) is her success at survival. "What seems almost a miracle," DeSalvo writes, "is watching Virginia Stephen, at fifteen, in the process of creating herself as a significant, purposeful, dignified human being."

The meat of the book is the first part and a chapter entitled, "1897: Virginia Woolf at Fifteen." The three opening chapters present biographical sketches of Laura (the "madwoman in the attic" of Woolf's household) and of Virginia's sisters Stella and Vanessa; the section on the year 1897 shows how Virginia responded to her own experiences. These portraits detail overwhelming evidence for rampant incest, sexual abuse, and emotional abuse; it also describes the treatment accorded to girls who in any way departed from the patriarchal expectations of the middle-class Victorian family household. In addition, DeSalvo discusses how these childhood experiences replicated themselves in the complex web of Woolf's adult relationships: "Virginia flirted with Clive, her sister's husband; Angelica, Vanessa and Duncan's daughter, married Bunny Garnett, Duncan's former lover; Virginia said that she would seduce Angelica...; Bunny teased that he would seduce Quentin [Vanessa's son]."

The weakest sections of the book, it must be said, are those that subject Woolf's juvenilia and diaries to speculative psychoanalysis. "I believe that we are seeing Virginia use that process which psychoanalysts refer to as "reversal of the opposite." "I believe that Virginia is communicating something of great significance here...." (DeSalvo's repetition of the phrase "I believe," while honest in alerting the reader to the speculative nature of her statements, is unnecessary and ultimately cloying.) The irony here is that Woolf's adolescent writings are both revealing and fascinating on their own, without placing them on the couch.

Fortunately, DeSalvo's interpretations of Woolf's adult writing are more grounded and informative. Examined are "The Voyage Out," "Jacob's Room," "To the Lighthouse," "The Waves," "The Years," "Between the Acts," as well as selections from her nonfiction. Not only does DeSalvo's commentary shed new light on novels I've already read, but it will also affect (for the better) the way I read Woolf's work in the future. And that's the best reason for owning this book: it doesn't simply add to our knowledge of Woolf's biography; it also enhances our understanding of her literature.

An excellent book. I have researched into Victorian domestic life and when reading this book felt that I may infact be doing a little correcting in my mind, but I was wrong. DeSalvo has researched this very well.

As for those comments disagreeing with the 'far-off' statements regarding the abuse of Virginia, I would also strongly disagree with them. As is the case for anyone who has grown up in a family of closed communication and secrets, it is actually very lucky for her that so much evidence still survives, through her work from childhood (at 10 years old) and throughout her adult life, not to mention the telling letters surrounding her life.

A very interesting book.

I cannot believe that this speculative, didactic
rant has received all 5 stars. If you want to know
and understand Virginia Woolf, read Hermione Lee's
great (and definitive) biography. Period.