This was a safe draft, duly honored on the bank of time; for the
frail baby, named Adeline Virginia Stephen, born on January 25,
1882, at Hyde Park Gate, London, was destined to become as
Virginia Woolf even more famous than her father in the world of
letters; and though she would never rank as a Hollywood starlet
nor parade at Atlantic City, every artist who saw her, everyone
with the slightest aesthetic sensibility, and every friend she had,
celebrated her beauty.

In case heredity was not sufficient capital endowment, there was
environment to swell the account with compound interest, for
Leslie Stephen, her father, was a magnet for the famous and dis-
tinguished of his day. The list of eminent Victorians who were
either related to him (or to his wife), happy to be his friends or
proud to be associated with him in his work, is so dazzling as to
become boring. These celebrities are like the crown jewels, which
are nice to think of as being on show and strongly guarded in the
Tower of London, but which, to tell the truth, are not nearly so
impressive when seen all together as when a few are worn on suit-
able occasions. Let the glittering names, like the precious stones,
take their turn at being displayed.

A few must, however, be mentioned right at the beginning, for
the sake of the record.

Julia Stephen was Leslie Stephen's second wife. His first was
Thackeray's younger daughter Minnie, who died suddenly in 1875,
leaving him with a young daughter. It was Julia's second marriage
also; she had been a widow, with three young children, for eight
years when she and Leslie married in 1878. They had known each
other for a long while -- her first husband, Herbert Duckworth,
a barrister, being an acquaintance of Leslie Stephen -- and had
first met through Tom Hughes (of Tom Brown's Schooldays
fame) when she was Julia Jackson, a strikingly beautiful girl,
courted and admired by eminent artists, and chosen by Burne-
Jones as the model for his painting of the Annunciation.

Not only Julia Jackson's background but her forebears were fas-
cinating. Her mother was one of seven sisters, all famous for their

-4-