Introduction

Virginia Stephen began corresponding with Mary Sheepshanks, the vice-principal of Morley College, in late December 1904 and took up a voluntary teaching post at the beginning of 1905. Over the course of her three years teaching once a week at Morley, Virginia Stephen taught history of art, history, English composition and poetry appreciation. When she first mentions voluntary teaching at Morley College to her then closest friend, Violet Dickinson, it is with a characteristic mixture of taciturnity and enthusiasm.

This January 1905 letter reveals the contradictory impulses that typified Virginia Stephen's attitude towards her work at Morley. Immediately striking is her reluctance to admit that she has any ‘views’ to ‘talk over’ with the college's vice-principal. The self-deprecating, mock-cockney aside, ‘which I aint none’, comically links Virginia Stephen to her future working-class students at Morley, however, it also registers some anxiety about her unfamiliarity with Mary Sheepshanks's world of voluntarism, public spirit and social enquiry. This is compounded by the confused way in which she relates what her role will entail. While her reference to ‘a little gossip and sympathy’ apparently reveals a dismissive attitude towards the demands of teaching, this lackadaisical tone is undermined by the uneasiness registered in the inverted commas enclosing ‘talks’. In the final line she appears to be sending up Mary Sheepshanks through her parodic, Dickensian figuring of her as ‘the good Sheepshanks’. This flippant aside encodes a key anxiety for Virginia Stephen throughout her work at Morley – her association of her voluntary teaching with what she perceived as the patronising, philanthropic activities of Victorian ladies, including her mother and half-sister, Stella Duckworth.