Vintage Photos of a Young Virginia Woolf Playing Cricket (Ages 5 & 12)
Scenes, I note, seldom illustrate my relation with Vanessa; it
has been too deep for ‘scenes’. Vanessa and I were both what we call
tomboys; that is, we played cricket, scrambled over rocks, climbed
trees, were said not to care for clothes and so on.
Until she was fifteen indeed, she was outwardly sober and
austere, the most trustworthy, and always the eldest; sometimes she
would lament her “responsibilities”. But beneath the serious surface …
there burnt also the…passion for art. …Once I saw her scrawl on a black
door a great maze of lines, with white chalk. “When I am a famous
painter-” she began, and then turned shy and rubbed it out in her
capable way…She was awkward as a long-legged colt.
This is how Virginia Woolf remembered her sister Vanessa Bell in correspondence that’s been revived by a Smith College web site.
Later in life, of course, Woolf wrote some of the finest modernist
works of the 20th century. Meanwhile Vanessa became a respected painter —
see 142 of her paintings here – and a central member of the avant-garde Bloomsbury Group.
As adults, they both had a lot of cultural clout. But during another
time — during their “tomboy” years — they were just kids looking for a
good game of cricket. Above, we have an 1894 picture of Virginia (in the
front, about 12 years old) and Vanessa, playing cricket at St. Ives.
Below we have a shot, courtesy of Smith’s web site,
of 5-year-old Virginia playing cricket with her little brother Adrian
Stephen (also later a member of the Bloomsbury Group) in 1886.
Works by Woolf can be found in our Free Audio Books and Free eBooks collections.
via The Paris Review
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