A newly discovered letter has confirmed that Virginia Woolf had lessons with FM Alexander. The letter – written by Walter Carrington, one of the most influential teachers to have trained with FM Alexander – provides few details.
Much more is known about the lessons taken by Virginia’s husband Leonard, partly thanks to Virginia’s own writings about his experience.
Walter Carrington’s letter, written in October 1968, gives a tantilizing glimpse of Virginia Woolf’s lessons nonetheless:
Leonard brought Virginia to Ashley Place [FM Alexander’s teaching practice] for quite a number of lessons but how far she felt herself to be helped I do not know. They were both on friendly terms with F. M. and I remember discussing printing with Leonard in the waiting room while V. was having a lesson.
A detailed analysis by Regina Stratil of the Woolfs’ interactions with FM Alexander suggests that Virginia visited his practice around the autumn of 1937.
Leonard himself went to see FM Alexander around June 1937 on the recommendation of George Bernard Shaw. His reason for going was to help deal with a hand tremor which had afflicted him since infancy. The effect of Alexander’s lessons on Leonard was remarkable; for example, Virginia wrote in her diary entry of July 1937 that,
L. [Leonard] is trembling less & less – can drink his coffee steady – & has, at 56, cured a disease that has, I guess, moulded his life wrongly since he was 5. All his shyness, his suffering from society, his sharpness, & definiteness, might have been smoothed. I mean by this something mostly superficial, but possibly constricting underneath also.
FM Alexander had similar striking effects on others in the Woolfs’ circle during the 1930s. For example, the novelist and writer Aldous Huxley himself wrote much later that
This, as I know by experience, is an exceedingly valuable technique. For not only does one have to become aware of the data of organic reality (to the exclusion of the insane life of phantasy); one also, in the process of practising this awareness, makes it possible for the physical organism to function as it ought to function, thus improving the general state of physical and mental health.
Huxley’s wife Maria also wrote in a letter of February 1936,
He [Alexander] certainly has made a new and unrecognizable person of Aldous, not physically only but mentally and therefore morally. Or rather, he has brought out, actively, all we, Aldous’s best friends, know never came out either in the novels or with strangers.
Huxley’s experience of lessons with FM Alexander in the 1930s affected him profoundly for the rest of his life. For example, the character ‘Miller’ in his novel Eyeless in Gaza (1936) is loosely based on Alexander, and his book Ends and Means (1937) was inspired by the Technique.
References
All quotations in the text are from:
Regina Stratil, ‘Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s lessons with F. M. Alexander’, Poise, Vol. 2 (2024), article POI024JE1.14. Downloadable from:
https://mouritz.org/journal/articles/POI024JE1.14