They might have gone around the giant dome of the Royal Albert Hall and into Kensington Gore. I picture them moving side by side: she in the white summer dress worn in the portrait, and he in one of the dark suits he was often cased in, his long, unkempt beard hiding the knot of his black silk necktie. She was accompanied, I imagine, by her seventy-year-old father, the noted man of letters Sir Leslie Stephen. It’s a short walk from here to Yeoman’s Row, and in July, 1902, when she was twenty, she went there to have her portrait taken. The whitewashed Victorian façade holds the sunlight brightly when the weather is good. She lived in this house, at 22 Hyde Park Gate, in west London, for the first twenty-two years of her life. Here is where the artist Adeline Virginia Stephen was born. This essay is from an introduction to a new Italian translation, by Anna Nadotti, of “To the Lighthouse,” which will be published later this month by Einaudi. Photograph courtesy Heritage Images via Getty
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