Teachers

Virginia Stephen's letters and diaries reveal a young woman who needs encouragement above everything, as do all young writers – ‘Do you feel convinced I can write?’ she writes to Violet in July 1905 (L1 202, her emphasis) – but also questions, suggestions for revision, and challenges without the imposition of constraints. In other words, a good teacher. As an apprentice, Stephen learned from a student, her reading, and her friends’ occasional and informal critiques, but her main teachers, the ones who taught her how to be a professional, were the editors and journals she wrote for.

When Virginia Stephen talked about reviewing with a Morley student, she discovered Miss Williams had to turn pages ‘with a keen eye’ for ‘quotations picked up at random’, link them together with ‘a connecting word’, and rapidly pull it all together in an unfavourable or favourable notice having nothing to do with the author. She knew Miss Williams had potential, but she also understood Miss Williams's situation meant she had no time to read the books she reviewed and must handle words like another woman might ‘[manipulate] the bottles of a patent mouth wash’. This conversation may have been the impetus for the ‘Gutter and Stamp system’ Virginia Woolf sarcastically proposed in ‘Reviewing’, in which the ‘gutter’ will ‘write out a short statement of the book; extract the plot … ; quote a few anecdotes’, and the ‘taster’ will stamp it with ‘an asterisk to signify approval, a dagger to signify disapproval’ (E6 209). At the time, her student taught Stephen she wanted to avoid becoming ‘a writing machine’ controlled by an editor (‘Report’ 202). Indeed, literary manuals warned against such a practice.

Virginia Stephen also picked up guidance from her reading. Her ‘youthful training’ on the Hyde Park Gate News (Brosnan 23) reveals her imitating journalistic style as early as age 9 (QB1 28). Her parents probably subscribed to the Cornhill and Nineteenth Century (Gillespie, ‘Essays’ 198, 211), and she could have read reviews there, in other magazines, and in newspapers, where, Waller notes, ‘the review had become ubiquitous’ (117). Although Dubino argues Leslie Stephen did not actively provide his daughter with practical or instructional assistance (‘VW’ 27), Virginia may have learned from reading her father's work – his earlier pieces and the biographical essays he continued to write up until 1902