Introduction: ‘Born into a Large Connection’

Abstract

In A Sketch of the Past, towards the end of her life, Virginia Woolf was again considering her forebears and memorialising her past. She was wondering, ‘Who was I then? Adeline Virginia Stephen, the second daughter of Leslie and Julia Prinsep Stephen, born on 25th January 1882, descended from a great many people’ (Sketch: 65). She was ‘born into a large connection’ (65), an extended family and their friends with Anglo-Indian, French and English roots and branches. The focus on Woolf’s pre-eminent place in twentieth-century literary modernism has meant that legacies from this ‘communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth century world’ (65) have been insufficiently acknowledged. Woolf herself remains ambivalent about her lines of descent, exhibiting both nostalgia for, and affiliation with, her past; but simultaneously trying to reject, suppress and obscure its influence. She constructs an unresolved dialogue between her past and her present, figured through her divided persona ‘two people, I now, I then’ (75).