Making waves
Virginia Woolf, the mentally fragile half of the celebrated writer-publisher husband and wife team, made a fairly ordinary will that was executed without fuss after her death. Her brainy editor husband Leonard made a solicitor-assisted final will containing small but lethal clerical errors. One or more people goofed, but who, and why?
Leonard and Virginia Woolf based their publishing company in their home in Richmond, southwest London
Virginia Woolf is best known for modernist stream-of-consciousness novels such as Mrs Dalloway (1925) ,To The Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and The Waves (1931). Her non-fiction includes A Room of One's Own (1929) and several volumes of diaries, literary criticism and thousands of letters.
Leonard's substantial oeuvre contains novels, short stories, journalism and his highly-regarded five-volume autobiography.
They were married in 1912 and founded Hogarth Press five years later. In 1923 it published T S Eliot's "The Waste Land.”
Virginia committed suicide, filling her pockets with stones and walking into the River Ouse, near her home in Rodmell, Sussex. Her chronic depressive illness dated to a childhood replete with trauma.
Leonard outlived his wife by 28 years, deeply involved with another woman for most of that time.
Virginia and Leonard had no children - for lack of trying, not lack of wanting. Before her marriage, and in its early stages, Virginia wanted and fully expected to become a mother. Leonard wanted children as well. But they never consummated their marriage.
Virginia did have a number of half- and full-siblings. Some made it into her will, and others were deliberately excluded, albeit for different reasons.
She also had numerous brothers- and sisters-in-law, and several nieces and nephews - by marriage. Leonard was one of ten children, nine of whom survived to adulthood. All nine married, and three had children.
Virginia's will is described below. Leonard's more complicated will is discussed here.
Adeline Virginia Stephen Woolf
When Virginia wrote her will in 1930, most of her best-known works had already been published but royalties were modest. Even when she died 11 years later, her estate was valued only at c. £14,000.
Most of her estate went to Leonard, her sole executor and residuary legatee.
Of her three full siblings, two were still alive (her brother Thoby - Julian Thoby Stephen - died of typhoid fever, age 26). She gave modest gifts to her brother Adrian and her sister Vanessa, as well as to Vanessa's husband Clive Bell and their artist friend Duncan Grant. More than a friend, Grant fathered a child, Angelica, with Vanessa. She is mentioned in Leonard's will.
Virginia gave a small gift to Nelly Boxall, a family servant, and she gave one of her manuscripts to Vita Sackville-West. Vita was the wife of diplomat Harold Nicholson, mother of Nigel Nicholson, friend and possible lover of Virginia, and the model for the hero-turned-heroine protagonist of Orlando. She presided over her famous garden at the family home, Sissinghurst.
Virginia had a total of four half-siblings, none of whom are mentioned in her will.
Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, and her mother, Julia Prinsep Jackson, had each been married before, and widowed. Leslie had a daughter who had mental problems and spent her adult years in an institution until her death at the age of 74.
Virginia's mother had three children. The two boys, Gerald and George Duckworth, sexually abused Virginia. Her mother died when Virginia was 11, and Stella died two years later. Virginia suffered her first nervous breakdowns during her troubled childhood.
" . . . "
My aunt, Mary Beton, I must tell you, died by a fall from her horse when she was riding out to take the air in Bombay. The news of my legacy reached me one night about the same time that the act was passed that gave votes to women. A solicitor ’s letter fell into the post–box and when I opened it I found that she had left me five hundred pounds a year for ever.
Of the two—the vote and the money—the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important. Before that I had made my living by cadging odd jobs from newspapers, by reporting a donkey show here or a wedding there; I had earned a few pounds by addressing envelopes, reading to old ladies, making artificial flowers, teaching the alphabet to small children in a kindergarten. Such were the chief occupations that were open to women before 1918.
...Whenever I change a ten-shilling note a little of that rust and corrosion is rubbed off, fear and bitterness go. Indeed, I thought, slipping the silver into my purse, it is remarkable, remembering the bitterness of those days, what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about. No force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds. Food, house and clothing are mine forever.
Virginia Woolf , "A Room of One's Own," (1929)
