Hi all,
Karin Stephen is likely an unfamiliar name to you-- at least it was to me before beginning this project. The easiest way to reference her is by mentioning her marriage to Adrian Stephen-- Virginia Woolf's brother. She went to Cambridge and was part of the exclusive Bloomsbury Group, which included Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, among others. Wikipedia does not include the Stephens as being part of "Bloomsbury Proper" but Leonard Woolf later in life indeed lists the couple as "Old Bloomsbury" with Virginia Woolf and the rest. Regardless, history doesn't remember Karin Stephen like the others. After World War I, Karin Stephen studied medicine and later gave the first lecture on psychoanalysis at Cambridge University. Her lectures and medical books garnered immense esteem. Though quite successful from this standpoint, she seemed always to struggle to "fit in," whether at Cambridge or the psychiatric hospitals where she worked. She herself suffered from deafness and depression.
The letters I've chosen for you and will ask you to transcribe, at least in part (they are long and she has difficult handwriting), are from a young Karin Stephen at twenty-one years old.
The first letter
She wrote during her travels through Europe and Southeast Asia with her older sister Ray and Ray's husband Oliver Strachey (older brother of Lytton Strachey of the Bloomsbury Group.) Here, she is departing from Rangoon, Burma.
A little background to this letter--
During her travels, she doesn't reveal as much but she often plays the third wheel to Oliver and Ray who seem to "change their plans day to day." (Later, in the Jan. 24th letter she confesses that she had told Ray and Oliver how she "suffered at their hands from moral browbeating" when they talk about literature and music. She describes herself as "a miserable moth [flung] into the destroying candle.") Karin desperately wants to go to Burma but the couple decide to sight-see more through January on their way to Bombay. Karin is dismayed and nervous at the idea of traveling to Burma alone.
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The second letter
June 2nd, 1912
Karin Stephen has returned to Cambridge and immensely enjoys feeling like a veteran of the "heavenly" place. Her letters focus on the cultivation of her social circle. In the letter previous to this, she begins with the rather awkward phrase, "Yesterday afternoon 'Mappie' took me round to several social occasions, where I encountered some of the people I know and made social engagements for next week." She also writes at the end that she has "arranged to meet with this German philosophical genius at dinner; that might be great sport."
You'll see the Keynes mentioned in the letter I've chosen for you.
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You will encounter many many names that will be unfamiliar. She writes her mother daily, so presumably her mother will recognize all these names. I've gotten moderately comfortable with these folder in particular but I still struggle with all the characters-- going backwards to find original introductions of one person or another is extremely tedious and I often get the feeling that names are dropped in without a gesture of you-may-not-know-who-this-person-is.
You may want to focus on how K.S. describes herself-- she can be at times quite self-deprecating and at other times quite proud. How does she think of others and what would you wager they think of her (at least in her view)? For such a brilliant mind, it seems interesting or odd, I'm not sure, that she should write so exclusively yet still so tentatively about these interactions with her peers.
As a note, these are personal letters written to her mother. We're not asked by this collection to assess Karin Stephen's intellectualism-- though it may shine through in many moments, it is always framed by a sense of the social and the personal. For my presentation I will select a few more pieces from a later time period, but for now, assist me in a few questions. What was her place was in the Bloomsbury Group? Deborah-- you've been working with Virginia Woolf letters, do we have an idea of what the "mold" of a group member is? How should Karin Stephen be fitted into history?
I'll think about your question, Michelle, and also have it mind as I do my own research.
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ReplyDeleteHere is what I think about Karin Stephen's relationship with Bloomsbury after considering it a little bit. In terms of her relationship to Bloomsbury, Karin Stephen may have been hampered by her marriage to Adrian Stephen. Of the four Stephen children(Thoby, Vanessa, Virginia, and Adrian), Adrian Stephen was reputed to be the least intellectual one by far. Bloomsbury grew from its seeds in Thoby Stephen's friends from Cambridge, mostly associated with a secret society called The Apostles, but later became defined as Bloomsbury because the Stephen children lived there and held conversational evenings in their home. That the meetings were held in the Stephen home is why Vanessa and Virginia Stephen are considered to be at the heart of Bloomsbury as well. Adrian was the odd man out, even in his family, and was considered by Bloomsburians to be intellectually inferior. As a group, they were pretty judgmental. Just a first stab at your question.
ReplyDeleteAs someone unfamiliar with the Bloomsbury group and what constituted becoming a member, it's hard from these letters for me to decipher Stephen's place. However, the second letter is interesting in the amount of detail with which she goes into concerning the dinner party. I found the map of who sat where at the table amusing and maybe a little telling on some level as she clearly has an interest in knowing and defining her social setting to her family. The letter focuses at times on the intellectual aspects of her night, not really for their own sake but for what they do for her in the politics of the dinner table. She's proud, for instance, of breaking the shell of Fredrick Pollock who is said to be a grumpy dude usually. She was able to talk with him all of dinner about indian philosophy and buddhism which were among a number of "any amount of things" he had to say. Interesting too was her mention of George Moore (G.E. Moore) "going for another," coupled with the mention of Henri Bergson by someone (couldn't make out who).
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure yet what to make of these letter but I feel a certain kinship with them. In them I get the sense of a young person excited to engage in the more heady aspects of life and society while also filtering those aspects through a concern with the social aspect of the intellectual life that play such a big part of being in your early 20s. It's sort of a blending of worlds.