– ‘Why?‘(E6 31, 33)

When Virginia Stephen was recovering from the depression and strain of caretaking, the death of her father and a suicide attempt in 1904 (QB1 89–90), Frederic Maitland asked her to write about her father for his biography of Leslie Stephen; Violet Dickinson suggested she write for the Guardian's women's pages edited by Mrs Arthur Lyttelton; and Miss Mary Sheepshanks, ‘a large kindly & rather able sort of woman’ who was serving as the de facto Principal of Morley College, asked her to ‘start a girls club at Morley, & talk about books !’ (PA 217). Virginia Stephen gladly cobbled together this freelance work, but it probably puzzled some relatives and family friends – should she not be searching for a husband (L1 274, 296)? It was just what she needed, though, a mix of memory, writing and something new. Work.

Morley College, an institution on London's South side, Lambeth, attempted to provide what we now call a secondary education to working-class adults woefully underserved by England's educational system. The young, painfully shy, upper-middle-class Virginia Stephen began working at Morley on 18 January 1905 and taught her last class there in autumn 1907. This teaching experience, combined with her earlier homeschooling and her concurrent reviewing, made for a distinctive apprenticeship and contributed to Virginia Stephen's perspective on education, which in turn shaped Virginia Woolf into an essayist with an inclusive pedagogy.

Virginia Stephen's education gave her some limited experience as a student, but when she arrived at Morley on Waterloo Road after a ten-minute cab ride and walked into a ‘great dreary room with tables & chairs & flaring gas jets’ (PA 224), she did so with little preparation for teaching there, no teaching experience and no understanding of the working classes. Her knowledge of the latter was limited to workhouse visits with Stella (PA 42–3; 56), some exposure to Miss Octavia Hill and Stella's future cottages (PA 8 and n, 21, 42, 94), and the servants living in the Stephen household.