Teachers

Luckily, Virginia Stephen's homeschooling was not limited to her parents’ teaching. Teachers coming from outside the home, particularly relatives and reading material, brought other curricula, pedagogies, lessons and communities with them: Thoby brought the Greeks, his schools and argument; Anne Thackeray Ritchie brought women writers and their literary community; and Atalanta and Tit-Bits brought exciting ideas, other girls, other social classes.

Thoby Stephen's Talk

The first time 10-year-old Thoby came home from Evelyns, the prep school he began attending in January 1891, he ‘[broke] through the schoolboy convention about “work”’ and shared with his 8-year-old sister, ‘handing it [what he was learning] on as something worth knowing’ (‘Sketch 1’ 108). Although Thoby had started with a ‘deficiency in Greek’ that put him at the bottom of the school (Love 158), the day after he got home, he ‘rather fitfully, but excitedly’ told Virginia the Hector and Troy story. ‘[I]t was through him’, Woolf recalls, ‘that I first heard about the Greeks’ (‘Sketch’ 125–6). When Thoby brings his story home to his sister, though, they do not sit in the dining room or nursery. Rather, Woolf remembers, ‘he was shy of telling it; and so must keep walking up and down; and so we kept on going upstairs and then downstairs’ (‘Sketch 1’ 108). Thoby's talk, his willingness not to become as ‘separate’ as brothers and sisters ‘often become when the boys go to public schools and the sisters stay at home’ (‘Sketch’ 125), occurs in a liminal space, on a threshold between Leslie's library and Julia's tea table. Thoby's shy narrative on the stairs thus bridges his parents’ two worlds, existing between their competing curricula, pedagogies, lessons and communities. Thoby also bridges home and school worlds for his sister. In Three Guineas, Woolf rails against Arthur's Education Fund, the system under which Victorian families financed their sons’ educations to the detriment of their daughters’. Thoby attended Evelyns Preparatory School (1891–4), Clifton College (1894–9) and Trinity at Cambridge (1899–1903), and Adrian attended Evelyns, Westminster and Trinity, Cambridge. George and Gerald Duckworth went to Evelyns and

Eton (QB1 32; MacGibbon 26) before going to Cambridge, where George went to Trinity and Gerald to Clare. Virginia, on the other hand, attended non-matriculation classes through the Ladies Department at King's College London and had tutors.