Teachers

Leslie and Julia Stephen were impatient and demanding teachers (QB1 26; Annan 104). Leslie once frightened the 4-year-old Thoby by ‘jokingly threatening’ to make him read a list of names’ (Love 155). Vanessa Bell recalled her mother did not teach them Latin, French and history very well and that it was a relief ‘when for a short time she went abroad with my father and we had a harmless, ordinary, little governess. It is much too nerve-racking to be taught by one's parents’ (61). Stephen remembers Julia ‘took it on herself to teach us our lessons, and thus established a very close and rather trying relationship, for she was of a quick temper, and least of all inclined to spare her children’ (‘Reminiscences’ 38–9). Also, Julia often interrupted her children's basic education with her nursing or by sending them to Maria Jackson, their grandmother, in Brighton (Reid 20–4).

At 22 Hyde Park Gate, the dining-room table was the formal classroom, whereas Leslie's informal evening readings were in the drawing room. But the two most important classrooms were Leslie Stephen's library and Julia Stephen's tea table, reflecting their education debate.

Leslie Stephen's Library

Leslie's library was the private study of a man of letters, but he allowed his daughter access and borrowing privileges. Walking into it, Virginia Stephen entered a space that named a curriculum, reflected a pedagogy, taught lessons and introduced a community. The room was large, with ‘three long windows at the top of the house’ (E5 585), making it more light-filled than the rest of the building. It was ‘entirely booklined’ (‘Sketch’ 119), but some system probably existed since in Woolf's memories, Leslie easily finds and replaces books for her. Books were also scattered around Leslie's low rocking chair, where he reclined, smoked his pipes (‘Sketch’ 112), rocked and wrote: ‘The thud of a book dropped on the floor could be heard in the room beneath’ (E5 585). According to Woolf, ‘His old rocking chair … was the centre of the room which was the brain of the house’ (‘Sketch’ 119). Rarely disturbed there, reading and writing for at least two or three hours a day even near the end of his life (Maitland 485), he demonstrated daily the advantages of having a room of one's own.