How Virginia Woolf Kept Her Brother Alive in Letters

For Virginia Woolf, correspondence became a way to transcend a climate of illness—to envision a future she couldn’t see.Photograph from Alamy

Hours after watching her twenty-six-year-old brother die, Virginia Stephen wrote a letter to one of her dearest friends. In that letter, written on November 20, 1906, she did not utter a word about her brother’s death; she did not so much as mention his name. Virginia was twenty-four—six years from marrying and becoming Virginia Woolf, nine years from publishing her first novel. She and her three siblings had just returned from a trip to Greece and Turkey, which had ended in disaster. Thoby Stephen, Virginia’s eldest brother, had been infected with typhoid.

The letter Virginia wrote the day he died was to Violet Dickinson, who had accompanied the Stephens on their trip. She, too, had come home with typhoid. The two women had been exchanging letters since their return to London, many of them preoccupied with Thoby’s and Violet’s health. That Virginia would have neglected to mention her brother’s death to Violet was strange; stranger still was the letter she sent two days after his death. This time, she did mention him, but her letter conveyed a shocking lie: “Thoby is as well as possible. We aren’t anxious.”

Virginia went on lying to her friend for the next month. In nineteen letters, sent over the course of twenty-eight days, she fabricated a vivid story of Thoby’s recovery. Three days after his death: “There isnt much change. His temp is up to 104 again this afternoon, but otherwise his pulse is good, and he takes milk well.” Five days: “Thoby is going on splendidly.” Nine days: “Dear old Thoby is still on his back—but manages to be about as full of life in that position as most people are on their hind legs.” Twelve days: “He draws birds in bed.” After two weeks, Virginia slipped herself into the narrative: “We begin to flirt with our nurses, and call them ‘my woman’ and they knit pale blue ties which they promise him, if he’s good.” And when nearly a month had passed since her brother had died, Virginia was full of talk about what lay ahead: “He is really getting on well, and we talk of getting up, and going away, and the future.”

The future. From where I sit today and write, Virginia’s desire to leave behind a climate of illness, to get up and go away, to be transported to a future one can’t quite see—and which may not exist—feels familiar and intense. I want to get in my car and drive; sometimes I catch myself thinking that if I drive far enough, for long enough, I will have found my way not only into a different place but into a different time, released from today’s grief and dread. The fantasy is interwoven with worry: in our fond talk of what we’ll do after “all this” is over, are we, like Virginia, deceiving one another, and ourselves? Or might our dreams of escape make room for other possibilities, worlds we want to live in but can’t yet describe? Can desire be a way of knowing?

Recently, I’ve found myself drawn to these early Woolf letters—to their unsettling mix of grief and hope, loss and desire—because in them I see a writer experimenting, perilously, with fantasy’s transformative potential. To some extent, all letters do this: if I write you a letter today, my words will have to be legible to you days from now. Our friendship will have to stretch to accommodate this asynchrony. Though the present tense of my letter will exist for you nowhere but in its pages, the stitching together of my present with yours will pull us both out of our lives, however briefly, and into a notional but shared time. Asynchrony becomes, in letter writing, its own form of intimacy.

In our time of social distancing, it sometimes feels like the only intimacy we have left. Kept literally apart, we text and e-mail, tweet and D.M. Where can it lead us? Correspondence may seem like a dim shadow of the physical presence we crave, but it has its own rewards. Consider what it feels like to receive a letter. In some ways, the letter’s company exceeds what can be received in person. If you visit me, you can leave whenever you please. Send me a letter, though, and it’s mine for as long as I want. Emily Dickinson—for whom so much of sociality was epistolary—described, in a poem, the expansive effects of reading a letter. Alone in her room, she could “slowly pick the lock” of an envelope and feel herself lifted out of her life—suddenly possessed of divine power. “Peruse how infinite I am,” she gloats. Such transformations become addictive. “Please never stop writing me letters,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Robert Lowell: “they always manage to make me feel like my higher self.”

By the time Thoby died, Virginia Stephen and Violet Dickinson had been correspondents for nearly five years. Virginia’s letters to Violet (among the hundreds published in the first volume of Woolf’s collected letters) began when she was twenty and her father had recently been diagnosed with cancer. Violet was seventeen years older and nearly a foot taller than Virginia. “I wish you were a Kangaroo,” Virginia wrote, immersed in anxiety and sadness about her father’s decline, “and had a pouch for small Kangaroos to creep to.” In a photograph of the two women standing side by side during this period, that desire for maternal protection is palpable; Virginia leans into Violet and clasps her hand; she wants to be taken in; she looks at the camera as though she wants that desire to be known.

Letters gave the women another way to embrace. In them, Virginia referred to herself as Violet’s “Sparroy” (derived from “sparrow”), offering herself to this older woman as though she were a delicate pet. As her father recovered from an operation, Virginia asked Violet, “Have you a real affection for the Sparroy? She folds you in her feathery arms, so that you may feel the Heart in her ribs.” The letter became a means by which Virginia could not only declare a desire but, as it were, act it out: she folded Violet into her feathery arms, then folded the sheet of paper that was destined for Violet’s hands. The materials of her letter writing—pen and ink, paper—double for Virginia’s distant body: in another letter, she wrote, “you observe how thick the ink gets at this point—quite spontaneous.” We don’t know whether the sexual desire between these women ever moved off the page, but there are moments in the letters that suggest as much. “I will lick you tenderly,” Virginia promised.

In the midst of this correspondence, two years before Thoby died, Virginia lost her father. She kept writing to Violet through the worst of it. The letters become shorter: daily updates on her father’s temperature, his mood, the doctors’ latest prognoses. But we also see, amid that horror, Virginia reaching out to Violet for the comfort of a letter. Watching her father suffer near the very end, Virginia wrote, “It does seem very hard. Life, I am sure, is no pleasure to him—and he would have been glad to die a week ago—but theres no help for it. It is so hard to wait and see him get slowly weaker day by day. But these are the things one has to go through in this Brute of a world apparently.” Then, having acknowledged this terrible truth, she asked, in a postscript, for the balm that only a letter from Violet could provide. “Tell me about your clothes,” she wrote, “and triumphs.”

Virginia sank beneath the grief of her father’s death. She sank into what she would understand as a nervous breakdown. And she sank, eventually, into Violet’s arms. Virginia recovered from that breakdown in Violet’s home in Welwyn, outside London. She didn’t write any letters during that period, but when, after three months, she was deemed well enough to rejoin her siblings, she wrote to Violet: “I think the blood has really been getting into my brain at last. It is the oddest feeling, as though a dead part of me were coming to life.” Coming back to life, for Virginia, meant regaining the ability to think. What followed close behind was an insistent desire to write: “I am longing to begin work. I know I can write, and one of these days I mean to produce a good book.”

The letters Virginia wrote to Violet during her father’s illness testify to the power of correspondence to provide company, comfort, and even love. Something else is at work, though, in the letters she wrote in the wake of Thoby’s death, two years later. If the recipient of a letter has one kind of power (the power to inhabit someone else’s world, and to linger in it), the sender of a letter has a different kind, just as radical: the power to perform; the power to withhold; the power, even, to deceive. What was it that drew Virginia, in the wake of her brother’s death, to this aspect of letter writing?

Violet learned of Thoby’s death only because it was mentioned, a month after the fact, as an aside in a magazine article. Virginia wrote to her immediately: “Do you hate me for telling so many lies? You know we had to do it.” She had to lie, Virginia implies, in order to shield Violet, who was recovering from her own illness. No doubt Virginia did feel intense concern for Violet; in Thoby she had a vivid example, close at hand, of how dangerous typhoid could be. Throughout her letters, Virginia linked the two cases. The day before Thoby’s death—his infection had led to a perforation of his bowels and peritonitis—Virginia had written to Violet: “I don’t know what variety of spots yours are. Thoby swears he beats your temperature, and we are a little scornful of the Dickinson typhoid compared to the Stephen typhoid.” That kind of dark humor masked not only the severity of Thoby’s symptoms but also the urgency of Virginia’s concern for Violet. In the days that followed, without acknowledging his death, Virginia used her brother’s case as a point of reference for understanding her friend’s: “I suppose you and he are about at the same stage now, only I think he has had a much sharper attack.” Ten days later, Virginia ventriloquized her dead brother: “Are you allowed solids yet, he wants to know.” Virginia’s epistolary resurrection of Thoby gave her a way of expressing a fervent wish that Violet stay alive and well. “Now, my Violet,” she wrote, nearly a month into her elaborate lie, “take your medicine and think of me. Shall we ever meet again?”

Virginia’s performance wasn’t only for Violet’s benefit, though. She had also found a way of pretending, for herself, that her brother had in fact survived. In her brilliant biography of Woolf, Hermione Lee writes that these strange letters “mark the beginning of her keeping Thoby by turning him into fiction.” Woolf would return to this elegiac turn of thought over the years, formalizing it in novels: versions of Thoby can be found again in “Jacob’s Room” (1922) and “The Waves” (1931), and versions of their parents in “To the Lighthouse” (1927). In “A Sketch of the Past,” a memoir begun near the end of her life, Woolf explained that her capacity to respond to a “shock” had made her into a writer:

It is only by putting [a shock] into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me.

Thoby’s death undoubtedly was a “shock,” one that threatened to undo her. Writing letters to Violet had given Virginia a means of keeping contact with the brother she had already lost and of holding fast to a friend whose loss she feared.

In one sense, her lies could not succeed. Thoby was dead, and Violet would soon enough know the truth. But, by offering a provisional reprieve from news she’d soon enough have to face, Virginia’s lies—awkward, creepy, scandalous as they were—pointed to a source of relief more durable than the lies themselves. Writing would be, for her, a way to live. Even in the face of shocking loss, writing might give pleasure. And letter writing in particular—its power to summon presence out of absence, to warp the ordinary progress of time—would make it possible not simply to record but to animate her past, to draw it into her present, to make room for it in a future worth having. That work would absorb her. In the middle of her grief for Thoby and her lies to Violet, Virginia offered this self-diagnosis in a letter to another friend, Nelly Cecil: “I cant help feeling that the more I work and the less I talk the better—at least the less bad—for the world at present.”

There are times when I, too, would rather work than talk. This seems to be one of those times. Writing offers a way to engage with the present while also deferring its entanglements to some future—perhaps a future in which one will feel readier to unravel them. Correspondence, whether letters or D.M.s, can afford the room—and exact the cost—of doing so in one’s relationships. Everything I write is a letter. Every letter is addressed to the future. By whom will my words be read, and when?

Back in the period when Virginia was anxiously watching her father die, she told Violet that she planned to keep the letters that she’d received from her: “I’ve never kept a single letter all my life—but this romantic friendship ought to be preserved.” And yet Virginia did not preserve Violet’s letters; none of them survive. Violet, on the other hand, produced a set of typescript copies of Virginia’s letters to her and bound them in a few volumes. In 1936, many years after the two had drifted apart, in what Hermione Lee calls “an odd moment of reproach or appeal,” Violet returned the letters to Virginia. Virginia was taken aback by the version of herself that had been preserved there. “Do you like that girl?” she asked, in a letter. “I’m not sure that I do.” Virginia Woolf, by then the fifty-four-year-old author of seven novels, implored her friend: “all I beg of you is dont let anybody else read those letters.”

Presumably Woolf was embarrassed by the youthful effusions of that girl; maybe she felt some shame about the lies she had found it necessary to tell. To have reached middle age and to be suddenly confronted with the record of young, effusive love is to face a dizzying question about who you are, about what relation you bear to who you once were—to summon together the many selves that exist across time. Rereading her letters to Violet, Virginia must have realized that Thoby Stephen had never had the chance for such a reappraisal.

Something altered in her life when he died. The day after Christmas, in 1929, Woolf wrote in her diary about feeling haunted by him: “Thoby’s form looms behind—that queer ghost.” And yet, at the same time, he seems to lie ahead of her. She imagined him waiting for her, somewhere, at the end of her life: “I think of death sometimes as the end of an excursion which I went on when he died. As if I should come in & say well, here you are.” As if his dying had put her on the path to her own death. As if her very life were a letter, Thoby its recipient. As if every version of herself—even the girl at twenty, even the dead woman she would soon enough become—could somehow be preserved, alive, in its folds. For there she was.