A Woman of Distinction

Abstract

Tonight, at Monty Shearman’s¹, the Bloomsbury Junta was in full session. In later years, towards the moment of its disintegration, Bloomsbury, under the genial vice-royalty of my friend Clive Bell, took a trend, hitherto unexpected, towards pleasure and fashionable life: but in these days it was still austere, with a degree of Quaker earnestness latent in it. (But then Roger Fry, its leading and most engaging esthetic apostle, came of Quaker stock.) The women were of a type different from that to be seen elsewhere. Something of the Victorian past clung to them still, though they were so much more advanced than their sisters, in both views and intelligence. Virginia Woolf, for instance, notably beautiful with a beauty of bone and form and line that belonged to the stars rather than the sun, manifested, in her appearance, in spite of the modernity that was also clearly hers, a Victorian distinction. She made little effort to bring out the quality of her looks, but she could not destroy it. With her high forehead, fine, aquiline nose and deep-set, sculptural eye sockets, it has often occurred to me, when I have seen Roman patrician busts of the fourth century, how greatly she resembled them. Her beauty was certainly impersonal, but it was in no way cold, and her talk was full of ineffable fun and lightness of play and warmth.

From Laughter in the Next Room (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948; London: Macmillan, 1949) pp. 22–4.