ABSTRACT
Over Virginia's early life, says her nephew Quentin Bell, there hung the menace of disaster, insanity, and early death. One of her half-sisters was mad, as was her cousin; her beloved and beautiful mother, Julia, almost twenty years younger than her husband, died very young. Julia's staunchest daughter, Stella, who was the model for Holman Hunt's Lady of Shalott, had to take over the keeping of Virginia's famous father, Leslie Stephen, inconsolable as he was upon the loss of her mother. The study of her "little language" which will follow in no way concerns itself with some hyperbolic miniaturization as perfection, but rather with the old and modest "common voice, singing out of doors," issuing from the great procession of anonymous writers and speakers from time immemorial. Virginia's writing is at its height: to this resolution of the writer's mind—in that of Bernard, modest, bumbling, and knowing—and of all people's lives, the strong lines of this strong prose is heading.
