When students walk into a school, they walk into a context providing structure and support: space divided into buildings and rooms; time divided into smaller units; curriculum naming or implying cultural values and knowledge divided into courses; pedagogy assuming how learning occurs; lessons about agreed-upon topics; and community. Teachers have training and credentials, are assigned to phases in student development, have an overall rationale and goals, and work to create learning situations.

But Virginia Stephen went to school at 22 Hyde Park Gate. There, she absorbed lessons from teachers generally untrained in a discipline or pedagogy, navigated between two positions on education for girls and constructed much of the curriculum and assignments on her own. All students piece together their educations, but Stephen, isolated and coping with fractured instruction, had to work harder to make lessons cohere. But learn her lessons she did.

Virginia Stephen's school at 22 Hyde Park Gate provided context and curricula, reflected pedagogies and represented communities. It provided many teachers in addition to her father, some within the home, some coming in, and some outside. Her primary instructors – Leslie and Julia Stephen; her brother, Thoby; her aunt, Anne Thackeray Ritchie; newspapers; libraries; King's College teachers; and Janet Case, her tutor – all helped educate the girl who became Virginia Woolf. As a student at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Virginia Stephen pieced together various curricula, pedagogies, lessons and communities, mixed ‘many different things’ together, and learned, above all else, how to create community in and through writing.

Education for Girls and Women

Virginia Stephen had a complex educational inheritance, one that shaped Virginia Woolf into an essayist compelled to leave an educational legacy. Born in 1882 to a father 50 years old and a mother in her second childbearing round, she grew up not in a late-Victorian atmosphere of values, attitudes and behaviours, but in a mid-Victorian one (‘Sketch’ 147; Gordon 23). Decades of tradition and conventional wisdom had shaped the family into which she was born, and beliefs about educating girls and women were far from settled or stable before or during her lifetime.