Virginia Stephen learned many lessons during and from her home education, and she began practising the skills needed to become a writer early, at first unconsciously, reading for enjoyment and to please her father, writing for fun and to gain her mother's ‘Rather clever, I think’ (VB 64–5), but then more purposefully and diligently. As Virginia Woolf was aware, education is not easily sorted into clear-cut outcomes, but two important results of Virginia Stephen's homeschooling, among many others, were a tangible library and an intangible worldview, just coming into focus, coloured by observations of and perceptions about access and gender. Eventually, her books and her worldview, along with the crucible of isolation she was educated in, would compel Virginia Woolf to converse with others in writing.

A Library of Her Own: Virginia Stephen's Books

When Virginia Stephen leaves Hyde Park Gate in 1904,1 she leaves behind a place ‘tangled and matted with emotion’, a narrow and crowded house filled with a ‘rich red gloom’, and starts anew in 46 Gordon Square, where the light, air and ‘extraordinary increase of space’ exhilarate her (‘Old Bloomsbury’ 183–5). Her room, with windows looking out over plane trees, is at the top of the house (Lee, VW 201), mimicking her father's library location. She leaves her home school and begins an apprenticeship phase in which teaching at Morley College and writing book reviews predominate. What she takes with her, along with a home education consisting of fragments, lessons learned and memories of various teachers, are books: countless books that take her days to unpack (Lee, VW 201); all her father's ‘mangy and worthless’ books (E5 588), including his sixty-three annotated volumes of the DNB; Julia's books; Thoby’s, Vanessa's and Adrian's books; various Stephen books; even some Duckworth books.

And her books. Virginia Stephen went to school in Leslie Stephen's library and took that library with her when she moved, but she also left Hyde Park Gate with a library of her own. Small, but her own, one she continued to build during her apprenticeship.

At Washington State University in Pullman, Virginia Stephen's library can be isolated from the Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, but it is impossible to know in all cases what books were hers.