This is a family photograph of Gerald Duckworth, Virginia Stephen, Thoby Stephen, Vanessa Stephen, and George Duckworth (back row); Adrian Stephen, Julia Duckworth Stephen, and Leslie Stephen (front row) at Alenhoe, Wimbledon.

The next ten years were difficult for Virginia and her siblings. Virginia Woolf’s mother died in 1895 from rheumatic fever at the age of forty nine, her half-sister Stella died in 1897 from peritonitis; and Woolf’s father died in 1904 at the age of seventy two from abdominal cancer. Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, and Adrian shunned the Victorian principles of their parents’ generation when they moved from Hyde Park Gate to the Bloomsbury district of London in 1904 to start a new life.

Click on this image to open it at full size in a new window.

Reproduction of plate 37a from Leslie Stephen’s Photograph Album
Original: albumen print (7.8 x 10.4 cm.)
Presented by Quentin and Anne Olivier Bell.
Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College

return home