'The Repulsive Jane'

How Jane Ellen Harrison Showed Woolf the Way

The autumn of 1904 was a pivotal moment in Virginia Woolf’s life. She was only twenty-two years old, her father had just died, and she was recovering from a bout of mental illness so severe it had prompted her first suicide attempt. After recuperating at the home of her friend Violet Dickinson, she spent October in Cambridge with her Aunt Caroline Emeila Stephen, a woman so austere her niece nicknamed her ‘nun’. In a few weeks she would move to bohemian Bloomsbury and begin her career as a published writer, but for now she was in-between, neither a girl in her father’s house or a woman in her own.

What was Cambridge like in the autumn of 1904? The plane trees on Sidgwick Avenue were certainly a lot younger. Whereas now you have to slip over two inches of leaves and clamber round an elephantine trunk or two, then you could neatly trip alongside the walls of Newnham College and let yourself in by the back gate. Or if you were feeling formal, you could duck under the drooping conifers on Malting Lane and announce yourself at the porter’s lodge on Newnham Walk, contemplating the filigreed Memorial Gates while you waited to be let in. Personally, I like the notion of sneaking in by the back door. If you pick the right one it takes you straight into the garden – no porters, no keys. It’s an experience like the one enjoyed by the narrator in A Room of One’s Own when she enters the grounds of Fernham, a fictional women’s college in Oxbridge. Finding the gate unmanned, she meets no resistance. ‘I pushed into the garden,’ she says, ‘for, unwisely, the door was left open and no beadles seemed about.’