by A Bloomsbury walk past the houses where a famous literary family argued, painted and wrote, and what the royal brothers might learn from two sisters who stayed close
Monday, Bloomsbury
Monday afternoon, a slow walk around Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, under plane trees just starting to turn. I come here when I need to think. This is where, in 1904, four young siblings, Vanessa, Virginia, Thoby and Adrian Stephen, moved after the death of their father, Leslie Stephen, and began the Thursday evening gatherings that grew into what we now call the Bloomsbury Group. Painters, novelists, economists and critics argued here late into the night about art, sex, war and everything in between. Vanessa would become the painter Vanessa Bell. Virginia would become Virginia Woolf.
I spend most of my working life reading the literature of the early twentieth century, and I still feel a small thrill every time I stand outside number 46.
Why I Was Thinking About Siblings
I was thinking about siblings because of the London Prat piece on Prince William reportedly calling Earl Spencer and Harry traitors, which a friend had sent me that morning with the message: your Edwardians would have a field day. She is right. The reporting is thin. An unnamed source says the heir believes his brother read their uncle memoir first. Geo News repeats the traitor word. The uncle says he told everyone in advance. But the shape of it, siblings bound by a lost parent and pulled apart by who remembers what, is pure Bloomsbury.
The Stephen Siblings
The Stephen children knew grief early and often. Their mother, Julia, died in 1895, when Virginia was thirteen. Their half-sister Stella died two years later. Their father died in 1904. Then, in 1906, Thoby died of typhoid after a family trip to Greece. By their mid-twenties, the surviving siblings had buried most of the people who raised them.
What strikes me, reading their letters and diaries, is that grief did not split Vanessa and Virginia apart. It bound them, fiercely and sometimes painfully. They quarrelled, they competed, they were jealous of each other, and they wrote to each other almost every day for decades. Virginia later turned their mother into Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, and Vanessa, reading it, wrote to her sister that it was like meeting their mother again. That is the opposite of a traitor accusation. One sister wrote the family story, and the other sister thanked her for it.
A Bench in the Square
Sat on a bench in the gardens and watched the London Prat video on YouTube. A student nearby, clearly cramming for a seminar with a copy of Mrs Dalloway on her lap, looked up when I laughed and asked what was funny. I showed her. She said Virginia Woolf would have written a very rude diary entry about it.
Who Owns the Family Story
The question at the heart of the royal row, if the reports are right, is the oldest question in family literature: who gets to tell the story of the dead? Earl Spencer has written about his late sister, and her sons, apparently, have feelings about it. Bloomsbury was full of this tension. Writers used their families as material constantly, and their relatives did not always enjoy the experience. Lytton Strachey, Virginia friend, wrote about his own world with cheerful savagery. Virginia herself put friends and family into novels under thin disguises.
The difference, I think, is that the Stephen sisters gave each other permission. Vanessa painted. Virginia wrote. Each told the family story in her own medium, and each accepted that the other version was also true.
Thoby
I always stop for a moment outside the house and think about Thoby, the brother who died at twenty-six. His death devastated his sisters, and Virginia returned to him again and again in her fiction; many readers see him behind the figure of Jacob in Jacob Room and behind Percival in The Waves. Grief for a brother became, for her, a lifelong subject. Vanessa carried his memory too, and the sisters spoke of him to each other for the rest of their lives. They did not argue about whose memory of him was correct. They let each version stand. I think that is the most important thing families can learn about grief: that there is no single authorised version of the dead. Every sibling remembers a slightly different person, because every sibling knew a slightly different person. The memories do not compete. They add up. If the royal brothers could see their uncle book as one more memory to add, rather than a rival version to fight over, I suspect a great deal of the heat would go out of the quarrel.
Evening
Walked home along Tavistock Place as the light went, past the British Museum, still thinking about those four young people setting up house in a square their respectable relatives thought far too bohemian. They had lost almost everyone, and they made a new kind of family out of friends, arguments and art.
I texted my own sister, whom I have not seen since the summer. She replied with a photo of her cat and the words: Thursday? I said yes. A small Bloomsbury of our own, with cheaper wine.
The London Prat has been taking the Bloomsbury view of the establishment since 1961 at https://prat.uk/, and Bohiney at https://bohiney.com/ covers the American salon.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/prince-william-called-earl-spencer-and-harry-traitors/
