Julia Stephen

Biography

Julia Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson; formerly Duckworth; 7 February 1846 – 5 May 1895) was an English Pre-Raphaelite model and philanthropist. She was the wife of the biographer Leslie Stephen and mother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, members of the Bloomsbury Group. Julia Prinsep Jackson was born in Calcutta to an Anglo-Indian family, and when she was two her mother and her two sisters moved back to England. She became the favourite model of her aunt, the celebrated photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, who made more than 50 portraits of her. Through another maternal aunt, she became a frequent visitor at Little Holland House, then home to an important literary and artistic circle, and came to the attention of a number of Pre-Raphaelite painters who portrayed her in their work. Married to Herbert Duckworth, a barrister, in 1867 she was soon widowed with three infant children. Devastated, she turned to nursing, philanthropy and agnosticism, and found herself attracted to the writing and life of Leslie Stephen, with whom she shared a friend in Anny Thackeray, his sister-in-law. After Leslie Stephen's wife died in 1875 he became close friends with Julia and they married in 1878. Julia and Leslie Stephen had four further children, living at 22 Hyde Park Gate, South Kensington, together with his seven-year-old mentally disabled daughter, Laura Makepeace Stephen. Many of her seven children and their descendants became notable. In addition to her family duties and modelling, she wrote a book based on her nursing experiences, Notes from Sick Rooms, in 1883. She also wrote children's stories for her family, eventually published posthumously as Stories for Children and became involved in social justice advocacy. Julia Stephen had firm views on the role of women, namely that their work was of equal value to that of men, but in different spheres, and she opposed the suffrage movement for votes for women. The Stephens entertained many visitors at their London home and their summer residence at St Ives, Cornwall. Eventually the demands on her both at home and outside the home started to take their toll. Julia Stephen died at her home following an episode of rheumatic fever in 1895, at the age of 49, when her youngest child was only 11. The writer Virginia Woolf provides a number of insights into the domestic life of the Stephens in both her autobiographical and fictional work.

== Life ==

=== Family === Julia Stephen was born in Calcutta, Bengal, then the capital of British India, on 7 February 1846, as Julia Prinsep Jackson. Her parents, Maria "Mia" Theodosia Pattle (1818–1892) and John Jackson (1804–1887), belonged to two Anglo-Indian families, although Maria's mother, Adeline Marie Pattle (née de l'Etang), was French. Her father, a Cambridge educated physician who spent 25 years (1830–1855) with the Bengal Medical Service and the East India Company, and a professor at the fledgling Calcutta Medical College, was the third son of George Jackson and Mary Howard of Bengal. While Dr Jackson came from humble origins, but had a successful career that brought him into circles of influence, the Pattles moved naturally in the upper echelons of Anglo-Bengali society. Maria Pattle was the fifth of seven sisters famed for their beauty, verve and eccentricity, and who inherited some Bengali blood through their maternal grandmother, Thérèse Josephe Blin de Grincourt. They spoke Hindustani among themselves, and were a sensation on their visits to London and Paris. By contrast with the colourful Maria, Jackson was less overt, and tolerant of her passion for her friend, the poet Coventry Patmore. Jackson and Maria Pattle were married in Calcutta on 17 January 1837 and had six children, of whom Julia was the youngest, the third of three surviving daughters, Adeline Maria (1837–1881), Mary Louisa (1840–1916) and Julia (see Table of ancestors). They had two sons and a daughter. The Jacksons were a well educated, literary, and artistic proconsular middle-class family.

=== Early life (1846–1867) === Julia's two older sisters were sent to England for reasons of health in 1846 to stay with her mother's sister Sarah Monckton Pattle and her husband Henry Prinsep, who leased Little Holland House in Kensington in 1850. Julia and her mother joined them in 1848 when Julia was two. Later the family moved to Well Walk, Hampstead. Her father followed them to England, from India, in 1855, the family living in Hendon at Brent Lodge on Brent Lane, where Julia was home schooled. Julia's sisters, Mary and Adeline were married shortly after. Adeline married Henry Vaughan ("Harry") in 1856 and Mary married Herbert Fisher in 1862, leaving Julia as her mother's companion and caretaker. Her mother's long history of ill health dates from around 1856, and Julia would accompany her on her travels to find remedies. On one of these, where they visited her sister (now Mary Fisher.) in Venice in 1862, she encountered her new brother-in-law's friend, Herbert Duckworth (1833−1870), whom she would later marry. In 1866 the Jacksons moved to Saxonbury, in Frant, near Tunbridge Wells. There she would meet the agnostic biographer Leslie Stephen (1832–1904) later that year, shortly before his engagement to Minny Thackeray. Stephen eventually became her second husband. He described Saxonbury as "a good country house with a pleasant garden and two or three fields". The Pattle sisters and their families (see Pattle family tree) provided important connections for Julia and her mother. As Quentin Bell, Julia's grandson, described it, they had "a certain awareness of social possibilities". Sarah Monckton Pattle (1816-1887), had married Henry Thoby Prinsep (1793–1878), an administrator with the East India Company, and their home at Little Holland House was an important intellectual centre and influence on Julia, that she would later describe to her children as "bohemian". Little Holland House, a farmhouse on the Holland estate, that served as the dower house, was then on the outskirts of London, and nicknamed the "Enchanted Palace", where Sarah Prinsep ran the equivalent of a French salon. Quentin Bell states that Julia was "largely brought up in" Little Holland House. The house was also frequented by Leslie Stephen. One of the Prinseps' sons, another of Julia's many cousins, was the artist, Valentine Cameron Prinsep (1838–1904). Another of Maria Jackson's sisters was Virginia Pattle (1827–1910), who married (1850) Lord Charles Eastnor, later the third Earl Somers (1819–1883). Their eldest daughter (Julia's cousin) was Lady Isabella Caroline Somers-Cocks (1851–1921), the temperance leader, while the younger, Lady Adeline Marie (1852–1920) became the Duchess of Bedford. Julia and her mother were frequent guests at Eastnor Castle, the home of Lord Charles and Lady Virginia. Another maternal aunt, and also her godmother, Julia Margaret Pattle (Julia Margaret Cameron 1815–1879), was a celebrated photographer, who took many photographs of her niece, and created a photograph album for her sister, Maria in 1863 (the Mia Album). Sarah Prinsep and her sisters were adept at making great men feel at ease, and they frequented her house. There one might find Disraeli, Carlyle, Tennyson and Rossetti taking tea and playing croquet, while the painter George Frederic Watts (1817–1904) lived and worked there, as did for a while Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898). It was at Little Holland House that Julia came to the attention of these Pre-Raphaelite painters and also William Holman Hunt (1827–1910), for all of whom she modelled as well as (see Gallery I) Frederick Leighton (1830–1896). She was also introduced to writers such as William Thackeray (1828–1909) and George Meredith (1828–1909), and formed a friendship with Thackeray's daughters, Anne (1837–1919) and Harriet Marian "Minny" (1840–1875). Julia was much admired, her mother observing that every man who met her in a railway carriage fell in love with her, and indeed everyone did love her. Leonard Woolf described her as "one of the most beautiful women in England". In 1864, at the age of 18, she declined marriage proposals from both Hunt and the sculptor, Thomas Woolner, another Pre-Raphaelite, who was devastated when she married three years later. Leslie Stephen remarked that Hunt only married his second wife, Edith Waugh, because she resembled Julia. Another sculptor for whom she modelled, and who was enamoured with her, was Carlo Marochetti (1805–1867). She was his model for the memorial to the young Princess Elizabeth (daughter of Charles I), when she was 10 years old, and he created a bust of Julia Jackson that is now at the Charleston Farmhouse, in Sussex. Throughout her life, she had no lack of admirers. These included the U.S. Ambassador, Russell Lowell. and Henry James. At 5 feet 6 inches (1.68 metres) she was tall for a Victorian woman and had large, practical hands, deriding "the lovely filbert nails which are the pride of many", shunning vanity, fashion and affectation.

=== Marriage ===

==== (1) Herbert Duckworth 1867–1870 ====

On 1 February 1867, at the age of 21, Julia became engaged to Herbert Duckworth, a member of the Somerset landed gentry, a graduate of Cambridge University and Lincoln's Inn (1858), and now a barrister and they were married on 4 May at Frant. Julia Margaret Cameron took a number of portraits of her during this period, which Cameron considered symbolic of transition. The marriage was a happy one, Julia later stating "no one had tasted more perfect happiness...the greatest happiness that can fall to the lot of a woman". Julia's second husband, Leslie Stephen, had known Herbert Duckworth from when they were at Cambridge together ten years earlier. He described him as "the kind of man who might be expected to settle down as a thorough country gentleman ... simple, straight forward and manly ... a singularly modest and sweet-tempered man". Leslie Stephen felt "a touch of pain" later, in writing about the purity of their love, commenting on her letters to Herbert, he stated that she "made a complete surrender of herself in the fullest sense: she would have no reserves from her lover, and confesses her entire devotion to him". As he read through Julia's letters to Herbert after her death, Leslie had misgivings in comparing "the strength of her passion" at this stage of her life to her later marriage to himself. The Duckworths lived at 38 Bryanston Square (see images of exterior and interiors), Marylebone, London, a townhouse belonging to the Duckworth family, and the following year, their first child was born on 5 March 1868. Two other children followed in quick succession. Their third child, Gerald Duckworth, was born six weeks after his father's premature death in September 1870, at the age of 37, from an undiagnosed internal abscess. He was said to be reaching for a fig for her, while they were visiting Julia's sister (now Adeline Vaughan) at Upton Castle, New Milford, Pembrokeshire, when it ruptured. Within twenty-four hours, he was dead. Julia and Herbert Duckworth had three children;

George (5 March 1868 – 1934), a senior civil servant Stella (30 May 1869 – 1897), died aged 28 Gerald (29 October 1870 – 1937), founder of Duckworth Publishing.