Virginia Woolf’s Greek Lessons

Abstract

By a twist of fate, the young Virginia Woolf studied Greek from 1899 to 1900 with Clara Pater, the elderly sister of Walter Pater. This fact is dutifully recorded in her many biographies and immediately forgotten, with the exception of an obligatory footnote mentioning that Miss Pater was the model for Miss Julia Craye in Woolf’s 1928 short story, “Moments of Being: ‘Slater’s Pins Have No Points.’ ” 1 The implications of this remarkable coincidence, as well as the broader and multiple effects of her lifelong study of Greek, have gone largely unnoticed. Woolf’s enduring engagement with Greek language and culture influenced her views on education for women, female authorship, English literature, neopagan ethics, and homoeroticism. Unlike some of her contemporaries, such as Radclyffe Hall, Woolf’s concept of “sapphism”—the word that she used for female same-sex love instead of the sexological terms “inversion” or “homosexual”—was formed in the context of late Victorian Hellenism. While Woolf plays a central role in any consideration of sapphic modernism, her affiliation with it was decidedly equivocal. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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