‘Closer than any of the living’: Julia Prinsep Stephen

Abstract

Julia Prinsep Stephen’s influence on Woolf is both more nebulous and more all-encompassing than that of Cameron and Ritchie. Woolf frequently felt her presence, ‘there she is; beautiful, emphatic, with her familiar phrase and her laugh; closer than any of the living are’ (Rem: 40). She draws attention to her through the deictic ‘There she is’, or ‘there she was’ (Sketch: 81).¹ Yet she also denies her, ‘I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her’ (81). She is an invisible presence, there but not there (80). The paradoxes indicate Woolf’s hugely ambivalent response. In trying to represent her mother, she is aware of how difficult it is to ‘single her out as she really was’ (87); and how easy to leave ‘Julia Jackson, the real person, on one side’ (88). Constructs of non-corporeality and sanctity misrepresent and efface her as effectively as do Woolf’s ridicule and caricature of Ritchie and Cameron. As with those forebears, Woolf further obscures her by fictionalising her and by writing out her achievements. Woolf defines her by her beauty, and constructs her doubly as her own mother and as the generalised idealisation of the mother figure, ‘typical, universal, yet our own in particular’ (82). Stephen’s body of work, albeit very slight compared with that of Ritchie and Cameron, is unacknowledged.