Virginia Woolf and Rupert Brooke use water throughout their work as a metaphor for powerful emotional states. In “A Sketch of the Past,” (1985) Virginia uses an arresting simile, “I see myself as a fish in a stream; defl ected; held in place; but cannot describe the stream” (MOB 92). She recognises her passivity. She is alive, aware, alert to experience but not actively swimming; held, static, in the current of what seems to be her mother's invisible influence. Water is frequently troped as female. In Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain, Roger Deakin, high priest of wild swimming, describes water's “welcome embrace like all our mothers soothing and kissing us cool” (196). This paper will suggest that for Rupert Brooke, unable to cast off a puritanical, maternal inheritance, swimming became a necessary cleansing that was sometimes calming but, more often, a desired cold, sharp shock.

Both Rupert and Virginia were reliant on powerful mothers but had ambivalent feelings about their infl uence. Both were ambitious, both physically fragile, both frequently ill and treated by the same nerve specialist, Dr. Maurice Craig. Both were sexually illat– ease. The Edwardian period was perplexing and difficult for them. Virginia, uncomfortable with a stifling nineteenth century heritage, actively embraced modernism as a clean start. Influenced by Swinburne, Baudelaire and Wilde, Rupert chose an aesthetic, decadent world–weary image on going up to Cambridge in 1906. This façade transformed during his short life; he assumed several elaborate acts, depending on who was watching.

Virginia seems to have appraised his habit, noting in her essay, “The Intellectual Imagination” (1919) that he “made friend after friend, and passed from one extreme to another of dress and diet” (E3 134). He next tried an abstemious, Fabian, “back–to–nature” role. Finally, traditional, reactionary values reclaimed him. In 1913 in a letter to his first female love, Noel Olivier, he writes, “I'm the most conservative person in the world” (Song of Love 243). The truth was more extreme. By then, he had become stridently misogynistic, anti–Suff ragist, homophobic, anti–pacifist and anti–Semitic.