The ‘dangerous woman’ Virginia Woolf fell in love with

Self-help, this is not — but every so often, an obstacle leads to a rugged path, a different road. Such was the case of Violet Dickinson (1865-1948), friend and literary mentor of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) in her first years of adolescence and youth, back when she was still called Virginia Stephen. Dickinson was a woman belonging to the wealthy, landed aristocracy of Somerset, a person so rich she did not need to work. She was also a little girl who abhorred dolls and small talk, whom her mother called “very fat and happy.” As with everyone from her caste, she had been prepared since birth to be presented to society, a key event in the life of a girl of her class. But at 17 years old, she stood nearly 6’3” — an astounding height at the time — a peculiarity that kept her from being accepted in the Victorian marriage market.

She never married and, against all forecasts, those extra inches turned out to be a blank check towards developing a luminous biography. Dickinson became a liberated woman dedicated to traveling, writing, researching the lives of her ancestors, being the mayor of the city of Bath for a year and helping out, as a visitor who would come to chat with the residents of the Farmfield Reformatory for Inebriate Women. She also cultivated quite diverse friendships, from many nobles of ancient lineage, members of the Stephen clan, a handful of poets, a group of female thieves, a few select art collectors, a family of dwarves from old London, and an inventor of a brand-new technique for crematoriums.

Dickinson is also the protagonist of “Friendships Gallery,” “The Magic Garden” and “A Story to Make You Sleep,” three stories written by Woolf in 1907, when the author was 25 years old. They are a trio of little-known tales in their initial draft form, which were preserved at the New York Public Library. Then, in the fall of 2022, Urmila Seshagiri, a specialist in the London-born author’s work, traveled to Wiltshire to conduct research in the historical archives at Longleat House and discovered an unpublished manuscript dated 1908 and containing the same three stories, typed in violet ink and hand-corrected by the author.

The result of Seshagiri’s research — “a powerful and magical process,” as she calls it — is The Life of Violet: Three Early Stories (Princeton, 2025). The book is “a daring, playful biography of a heroine who unsettles, redirects, transforms and imagines new architectures that connect the past and the present,” reflects Seshagiri, who is a distinguished professor of humanities at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. In the book, Violet is the “tallest hollyhock in the garden,” a giant with fantastical powers who travels around the world, enjoying everything and everyone, rejecting all limits and convention.

At the beginning, Woolf thought of the stories as a private joke for the amusement of her friend Mary Violet, a woman full of energy and impetus, capable of rolling up her skirts and running after hunting dogs, whom Woolf affectionately called Aunt Mary. At the same time, the stories reveal a wild instinct for great literature, thanks to their ability to reinvent literary form as a way to “reimagine women’s lives,” according to Seshagiri. This is Woolf’s first literary experiment, one that foreshadows the thinking process and creative universe of her later works.

“In Violet, many of Woolf’s recurrent themes are already present: the limitations that society imposes on women, the desire to be themselves, to experiment and to not conform with the role that a patriarchal society expects them to fulfill,” says Patricia Díaz Pereda, an expert recognized for her work reclaiming the British author’s previously unpublished texts, letters and diaries.

A “dangerous woman”

According to one of her letters, at first, young Virginia classified Dickinson as a “dangerous woman” because “she did not exert any appropriate influence whatsoever on the young women.” This initial mistrust later turned into fascination, friendship and a certain kind of crush. According to the writing of Quentin Bell in Virginia Woolf: A Biography, published in 1972, “It is clear to the modern reader, though it was not at all clear to Virginia, that she was in love and that her love was returned.” Bell, the nephew of the To the Lighthouse author, says that Dickinson attracted Woolf “because she was so different from her — she possessed a graceful, masculine self-assurance and a lively, unshakable poise: she was a towering, powerful and reassuring presence. But she must have had more than just strength; she must have possessed a certain true greatness of mind and character.”

For her part, in Virginia Woolf’s Women (2002), Vanessa Curtis says that Dickinson “was full of happiness, brusque common sense, jollity and optimism, all of which were qualities much needed and admired by the young Virginia.” Independently of the questions still raised by the exact nature of their relationship, to Curtis there is no doubt that, “Violet was the first true emotional and physical love of Virginia’s early adult life.”

To Hermione Lee, author of Virginia Woolf (1996), Dickinson also played a pivotal role in her writing. “She used Violet as her sounding-board for her evolving ideas about how to live, how to talk and how to write,” says Lee. Díaz Pereda agrees, “When she read Virginia’s texts, she understood her talent. She helped her, she motivated her, and she introduced her to key people at magazines like The Times Literary Supplement, The National Review and The Guardian, a publication that was unrelated to the current newspaper with that name.”

It’s true that Virginia wanted to be a writer from an early age. And she was, until the morning of Friday, March 28, 1941, when she left two goodbye letters, one addressed to her husband, Leonard, and another to her sister Vanessa, before drowning herself with stones in the pockets of her coat in the Ouse River, just over a mile from her home in Rodmell in Sussex County (her body was found three weeks later).

Much earlier, as a little girl, she had been a founding member of Hyde Park Gate News, the family’s children’s newspaper, in which she wrote gossip and news from the Stephens home, in addition to narrating the fantastical hardships of young women trapped by the future imperative of marriage.

Alone and happy

The family home of the Stephens was located at 22 Hyde Park Gate, a short walk from the Kensington Gardens. It was an enormous, five-story house, a gloomy place crowded with furniture that was quite noisy, being home to her father, mother, seven servants and eight siblings and step-siblings, product of her parents’ previous marriages. In Moments of Being, a posthumous compilation edited by Quentin Bell and published in 1976 after the discovery of several unpublished manuscripts by Woolf’s husband, Leonard Woolf, Woolf says that two of her stepbrothers, Gerald and George, abused her, the former starting when she was six years old (and he was 18), and the latter when she was an adolescent.

In that dark house, Virginia felt safest reading the books from her father’s library. It was there she learned of the loss of her mother Julia in 1895, of her stepsister Stella three years later, and in 1904 of her father Leslie,who would often be visited by artists and writers like George Eliot (the literary pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans), the poet Tennyson and the novelist Henry James, who once dubbed the Stephens home as the “house of the Deaths.”

After the subsequent demise of their father, the four Stephens siblings — Virginia, Vanessa, Thoby and Adrian — decided to abandon the family home and move to the Bloomsbury neighborhood with several friends. It was a move so subversive at the time that not even Dickinson looked upon it kindly. In addition to other factors, the area was considered unsuitable for people of their class. But the Stephens’s new home, minimalist and full of light, was one of the first places where Virginia felt she could read, write and live as she wished.

The matter of where one lives is a consistent preoccupation in her work. “Property and the freedom to define one’s home on one’s own terms was always of vital importance to Woolf. She recognized that full integration of women into society depended on equal rights before the law; land ownership and the right to inherit and bequeath property were key elements of that equality. On another level, Woolf wrote fiction that elevated the domestic sphere, which had been long trivialized, to a place of profound philosophical and artistic inquiry. For that reason, houses were always located at the center of her literary projects,” says Seshagiri.

That’s why it’s so fascinating to follow the nearly invisible thread traced by Woolf in her search for women who dreamed of having their own space, and made it so. For example, her investigation of Emily Eden, Dickinson’s great-aunt. In a book titled Miss Eden’s Letters, a compilation of Eden’s correspondence from 1797 to 1869, published by Violet, there is a letter dated October 28, 1834 in which Eden confesses to a Mrs. Lister, “I wish I could write like Mrs. Hannah More, and have money enough to build myself [a home like] a Barley Wood.”

One of the things about Dickinson that likely impressed young Virginia the most is that she had her own country home, Burnham Wood, built in Hertfordshire county. It was there where the Mrs. Dalloway author stayed after suffering a nervous breakdown in 1904 linked to the death of her father, and where she made her first suicide attempt. She stayed at Burnham Wood for eight months, during which Dickinson cared for Woolf and even dedicated a story to her entitled “These Thoughts Were Written by Anthony Harte” in which she writes that just as a speck of dust triggers a thunderous sneeze, so too can a tiny act of kindness bring a ray of happiness to a lonely heart.

In the fictionalized version of the story, as told in the The Life of Violet, Woolf writes that the protagonist had reasons for preferring to build her home with her own hands, rather than living in one built by others. And foreshadowing the ideas she would later develop in A Room of One’s own, which was published in 1929, Woolf has the protagonist, Violet, express how wonderful it would be to have a cottage of one’s own. After that, the narrator continues the story by saying that such a statement “was the beginning of the great revolution that is making England a very different place than what it used to be.” The story continues, and in a lyrical outburst, the author describes how Violet works on building her home “digging furiously in the garden or grabbing brambles by the neck, just as some skillful animals catch snakes,” only to exclaim afterward, “no one wants me, but I am very happy on my own.”

For Seshagiri, such an affirmation is a declaration of a very innovative independence for the time. “Violet is a woman who chooses to be ‘very happy on her own’, choosing not to experience loneliness as mere survival or a battle, and who decides against disappearing into invisibility. These were radical decisions in 1902, when she built her house. Today, they can still be seen as radical.”

Friend to friend

Woolf transformed the idea of fiction, giving voice to her character’s interior thoughts, and her books revolutionized the perception of what it means to be a woman. She was able to do all this without having to convince conventional editors thanks to her economic and social standing, by founding Hogarth Press, a publishing house through which she put out her own work (also publishing Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot and Sigmund Freud, in his first English translation).

But in addition to this, in several of her works Woolf opened the biographical genre to other settings and shapes, as seen in Violet and also Orlando (1928), Flush (1933), The Art of Biography (1939) and Roger Fry (1940). “Woolf saw biography as the genre that got to the heart of art’s eternal question: how do we understand our own mortality? What does it mean to live a life, and what are the artistic forms best suited to capturing and transmitting an individual life? Biography seemed to her to be the most fertile genre, original and dynamic for telling the story of what it means to be human,” explains Seshagiri.

For the U.S. researcher, there is no doubt that Violet is “the direct antecedent, the laboratory and the aesthetic seed for Orlando, given that both texts function as fake biographies dedicated to women who Woolf loved.” For Díaz Pereda, the meeting points of the two works are also clear. “One is an early work, and the other represents the maturity of her genius. But in both, there are real things and others that were invented, inspired by friends — in the case of Orlando, by Vita Sackville-West — and are full of humor. Contrary to what is widely believed, Woolf was a very fun, ingenious woman. When she wasn’t in crisis, of course.”

In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf writes, “we think back through our mothers if we are women.” Many years later, perhaps unknowingly, she may have intuited her radiant literary future thanks to her formidable friend.

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