^{Note 1} James Russell Lowell, quoted by Virginia Woolf in “Leslie Stephen,” Collected Essays (New York: Har-court, 1967), iv, 80.

^{Note 2} Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, iii (New York: Harcourt, 1980), 208. There are two other versions of Woolf 's diary: the complete manuscript (“A Writer's Diary”), which is in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, and A Writer's Diary (New York: Harcourt, 1954), a one-volume edition, edited by Leonard Woolf, that contains diary entries that pertain chiefly to writing.

^{Note 3} Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” in Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (Sussex: Univ. of Sussex Press, 1976), p. 136.

^{Note 4} Woolf, “A Writer's Diary,” 29 Feb. 1932, Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

^{Note 5} Stephen, Letter to Julia Stephen, 3 Aug. 1893, Berg Collection, New York Public Library. Stephen's letters to his wife are hereafter cited by date in the text.

^{Note 6} According to Miriam Johnson, “identification” with a parent can be determined by the application of two tests: is the child attached to the parent? does the child “feel like” or seem to “be like” the parent? If a child both “feels like,” and has a strong bond to, a parent—characteristics Virginia displayed toward Leslie Stephen—we can conclude that a fundamental identification has taken place (“Fathers, Mothers and Sex Typing,” Sociological Inquiry, 45. No. 1 [1975], 16).

^{Note 7} “To Vita Sackville-West,” 13 May 1927, Letter 1754, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, 6 vols. (New York: Harcourt, 1975–80), iii, 374.

^{Note 8} Bell. Notes on Virginia Woolf's Childhood (New York: Frank Hailman, n.d.), p. 7.

^{Note 9} Stephen, Mausoleum Book. ed. Alan Bell (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), p. 98.

^{Note 10} Entries for 10 March 1897 and 17 Sept. 1897 in Woolf. Diary, 4 January 1897–January 1898, Berg Collection, New York Public Library. Hereafter cited in the text as the 1897 Diary.

^{Note 11} Stephen, “The Study of English Literature,” Men, Books and Mountains, ed. S. O. A. Ullmann (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1956), p. 26.

^{Note 12} Leslie Stephen, “Carlyle's Ethics,” Hours in a Library (London: Smith and Elder, 1892), iii, 293–94. As Leonard Woolf has noted, Carlyle shifted the study of history to “how men lived and had their being”—that is, to knowledge of the ordinary lives of ordinary people—and Stephen approved of this Carlyle trait too. Stephen, of course, dedicated his life, and nearly his sanity, to commemorating obscure figures in his Dictionary of National Biography. Woolf displays the same feel for the way in which the lives of ordinary people illuminate history in her “Lives of the Obscure” essays and in “Women and Fiction.”

^{Note 13} “To J. R. Lowell,” 18 May 1879, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen, ed. F. W. Maitland (London: Duckworth, 1910), p. 337.

^{Note 14} Woolf, Diary of Virginia Woolf, III, 271. Woolf remembers, and associates with Leslie Stephen's guidance in reading history, three historical essays she wrote as an adolescent:

It was the Elizabethan prose writers I loved first and most wildly, stirred by Hakluyt, which father lugged home for me—I think of it with some sentiment—father tramping over the Library with his little girl sitting at H[yde] P[ark] G[ate] in mind. He must have been 65; I 15 or 16 then; and why I don't know, but I became enraptured, though not exactly interested, but the sight of the large yellow page entranced me. I used to read it and dream of those obscure adventurers, and no doubt practised their style in my copybooks. I was then writing a long picturesque essay upon the Christian religion, I think; called Religio Laici, I believe, proving that man has need of a God; but the God was described in process of change; and I also wrote a history of Women; and a history of my own family—all very longwinded and Elizabethan in style.

The three historical essays that Virginia remembers are significant in light of her father's own interests: his agnostic essays describe man's need for a God and suggest that man's idea of God changes as human nature evolves. Stephen, himself preoccupied with his family's history, wrote his brother's biography (The Life of Sir James Fitzjaines Stephen [1895]) and the autobiographical Mausoleum Book. Woolf's history of women examines a topic for which Stephen entertained little interest, except as a biographer of obscure English persons, but Woolf patterned herself after her father when she rescued obscure figures from historical neglect as he did in the Dictionary of National Biography. She decided at an early age, though, to concentrate on resurrecting women rather than men, and some of her historical writing thus created for her a literary tradition independent of the one that produced Stephen.

^{Note 15} But Woolf always felt her home education was a social handicap—the source of her social awkwardness and the origin of her alienation from Oxbridge and its “insider's” male intellectual elite, an elite she learned to spurn only late in life. She described the destructive effects of her home education in a letter to Vita Sackville-West: “I agree about the lack of jolly vulgarity. But then think how I was brought up! No school; mooning about alone among my father's books; never any chance to pick up all that goes on in schools—throwing balls; ragging: slang; vulgarity; scenes; jealousies—only rages with my half brothers, and being walked off my legs round the Serpentine by my father” (16 March 1926, Letter 1625, Letters, iii, 247). Vanessa Bell reports that Virginia “always said she had no education” (Notes on Virginia Woolf's Childhood, p. 7), and Woolf herself uses almost two thirds of Three Guineas to rail against the “unpaid-for education” of the private home, the training provided for young women only after the coffers of “Arthur's Education Fund” (or Thoby's or Adrian's?) have been filled. Woolf's attitude toward her home education was clearly an ambivalent one. Leslie Stephen's tutelage gave her the solid intellectual background she needed to become a writer, made Stephen her professional role model, and saved her from what she called the “one-sided” education of the university. Yet her exclusion from the male academic world infuriated her and, in combination with some of Leslie Stephen's perversely self-indulgent behavior, contributed to her powerful feminism.

^{Note 16} “ita Sackville-West,” 19 Feb. 1929, Letter 2005, Letters, iv, 27. See also “A Writer's Diary,” 3 Sept. 1928 and 3 Sept. 1931.

^{Note 17} Stephen, “The Study of English Literature,” p. 26. Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book?” The Second Common Reader (New York: Harcourt, 1960), p. 237.

^{Note 18} Stephen, English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Duckworth, 1904), pp. 2–3. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

^{Note 19} Annan, Leslie Stephen: His Thought and Character in Relation to His Time (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1952), p. 271.

^{Note 20} Symonds and Courthope are the other main critics of Stephen's time who use the evolutionary metaphor, combined with Taine's sociological approach, to describe the development of literary genres. Neither, however, identifies shifting social class as the agent of the development of new genres. Symonds says that a literary type embodies the “national spirit” at a given time; but he does not connect the “national spirit” to the matter of social class, and, unlike Stephen, he says we have no way of determining how the germ of a specific literary type is generated in a nation. He is much more interested in describing the five stages (birth, adolescence, maturity, decline, and death) through which a genre passes and in using internal stylistic variations to account for the peculiarities of each stage (see “On the Application of Evolutionary Principles to Art and Literature,” Essays Speculative and Suggestive [London: Smith and Elder, 1883]). W. J. Courthope examines the way that politics and intellectual movements shape the evolution of English poetry from its Anglo-Saxon beginnings to the romantic movement. He does not conclude, however, that one distinct genre expresses an age better than another or that a single social class embodies the most vigorous instincts of a period (see History of English Poetry, 6 vols. [London: Macmillan, 1895–1910]).

^{Note 21} Woolf, “The Niece of an Earl,” The Second Common Reader, p. 193.

^{Note 22} Collected Essays, ii, 180–81. Woolf s acute consciousness of shifting class structures does not come only, of course, from reading, and living with, Leslie Stephen. Leonard Woolf, a socialist, worked for many years on behalf of the Cooperative Movement; Margaret Llewelyn Davies was an old friend of the Stephen family.

^{Note 23} T. S. Eliot and others were trying at this time to revive the poetic drama. Woolf saw poetic drama as “the one form which seems dead beyond any possibility of resurrection today” and insisted that only poetic prose could capture the full range of the modern mind.

^{Note 24} “To Hugh Walpole,” 19 April 1939, Letter 3560, Letters, vi, 364. See also “To Hugh Walpole,” 23 April 1940, Letter 3601, vi, 394.

^{Note 25} Stephen, “Thoughts on Criticism by a Critic,” Men, Books and Mountains, p. 219.