Practice

As Virginia Stephen learned from these and other teachers, she also practised skills. She learned shorthand well enough to do some for her father (PA 43, 50). She listened, observed and discussed. She did research and took notes. She translated texts, using a lexicon and keeping a Greek and Latin reading notebook. She read and read and read, reporting a common occurrence on 25 January 1897: ‘Reading four books at once’ (PA 22). When she tapped on her father's study door, asking for another volume to replace one she had finished, his pleased response was ‘“Gracious child, how you gobble!”’ (L4 27). Her reading prepared her, after her mother's death ‘unveiled’ her perceptions, for this interpretive epiphany on a hot spring night:

[Nessa and I] lay down … in the long grass behind the Flower Walk. I had taken The Golden Treasury with me. I opened it and began to read some poem. And instantly and for the first time I understood the poem (which it was I forget). It was as if it became altogether intelligible; I had a feeling of transparency in words when they cease to be words and become so intensified that one seems to experience them; to foretell them as if they developed what one is already feeling …. no one could have understood from what I said the queer feeling I had in the hot grass, that poetry was coming true. (‘Sketch’ 93)

Virginia Stephen also wrote and wrote and wrote, though we have only a fraction of what she seems to have written in her youth: letters, journal entries, travel sketches, literary exercises and pieces for the Hyde Park Gate News. Written before she turned 22, in the juvenilia we have – approximately 150 letters, three diaries kept until 1904, and the 1891, 1892 and 1895 volumes of the Hyde Park Gate News – Stephen mentions or the texts imply the existence of additional work, and Woolf, in her diaries and memoir, also refers to other juvenilia. Such work has a ghostly and teasing presence – we know about it, but it is absent.

None of the following writing mentioned by Stephen or Woolf, for example, has come to light. In a letter to Thoby editorially dated 14 May 1897, she mentions having written their Aunt Caroline a ‘vehement letter (in shorthand)’ (L1 7).