What Was Virginia Woolf Like as a Child? / Emily Temple. In: Lit Hub Jan 25, 2019

What do you think of when you think of Virginia Woolf? Modernist master, literary giant, austere genius? Writer whose books you know you’re meant to read but you still haven’t? Writer whose books you love? Whatever you think of, it’s probably not an eccentric child singing in a bush in Kensington Gardens, but as it turns out, that’s Woolf too. Which is exactly why, on her 137th birthday, I decided to find out what my favorite writer was like as a kid.
Here’s the first thing that surprised me: Virginia Woolf didn’t learn to speak in full sentences until she was three years old. (It did not surprise me to learn that as soon as she did start speaking, she quickly developed the sharpest tongue in the family and took over as the nursery storyteller.) But her slow speech development was not the only unusual thing about her. As Quentin Bell wrote in his biography of his aunt:

From the first she was felt to be incalculable, eccentric and prone to accidents. She could say things that made the grown-ups laugh with her; she did things which made the nursery laugh at her. Is it to this, or to a rather later period, that we can ascribe an incident in Kensington Gardens when, not for the last time by any means, she lost, or at least lost control of, her knickers. She retired into a bush and there, in order to divert public attention, she sang The Last Rose of Summer at the top of her voice. It was this and similar misadventures which earned her, in the nursery, the title of “The Goat” or more simply “Goat,” a name which stuck to her for many years.

(I feel compelled to note here that I find it perfectly appropriate and gratifying to know that even in the nursery, Virginia’s friends and family were able to identify her as the Greatest Of All Time—even if they didn’t know that’s what they were doing.) ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/what-was-virginia-woolf-like-as-a-child/