Delhi-based Scottish writer-historian William Dalrymple has said that his great aunt and noted English author Virginia Woolf was ‘part Bengali’.
“I can share something about Virginia Woolf that no one knows much about— the fact that she was part-Bengali,” he told an Indian literary magazine earlier this year.
“We both have Bengali ancestors and much like her, I am half Bengali too. We have a mutual great grandmother who was born in Chandannagar (a city in the Hooghly district in the Indian state of West Bengal),” he added.
Her full name is Adeline Virginia Stephen, and she is regarded as one of the most significant modernist writers of the 20th century as well as a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative technique.
In her novels “To the Lighthouse,” “Mrs. Dalloway,” and “Orlando,” she popularised the avant-garde stream-of-consciousness technique.
Virginia Woolf, who was born in 1882 into a wealthy English family, was raised by parents who valued freedom of thought. Writing since she was a young child, she released The Voyage Out, her debut book, in 1915.
Her pioneering feminist works are “A Room of One’s Own” and “Three Guineas”. In her personal life, she suffered bouts of deep depression. She committed suicide in 1941, at the age of 59.
Mentionable, William in an article published by BBC in April 2016 wrote: “My Kolkata (formerly Calcutta)-born, part-Bengali great aunt was Julia Margaret Cameron, one of the greatest photographers of the 19th Century.”
Virginia, her great-nephew said, came from Franco-Bengali origins, and “we have the marriage certificate of her Bengali grandmother and a Frenchman in the family.”
Even when she was living abroad, her grandmother was very conscious of her Bengali and Hindu heritage, according to William.
According to him, they were seven sisters who were viewed as Hindu exotica when they arrived in London or even when they traveled to Paris due to the style of Indian jewelry they wore and the textile heritage they introduced to the West.
“If you look at Virginia’s face, she has a very Bengali face. That is an Indian face. I am two generations down, so I have never really met her. But Virginia Woolf was quite a Bengali,” the writer who bagged several awards for his works.
Also an acclaimed photographer, William demanded that Virginia Woolf be celebrated as “a daughter of the soil just as Rabindranath Tagore is.
“Maybe someday I will write a book about the Bengali heritage of Virginia Woolf. Some of her works are very lyrical, especially her poems which are very influenced by Bengali literary styles of that era,” he said.
