To the Lighthouse Archives

To the Lighthouse

January 29, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, characters, criticism, resource materials

To the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of Virginia Woolf’s late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a triptych of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis.

The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.

Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse – plot summary

Part I: The Window
The novel is set in the Ramsays’ summer home in the Hebrides, on the Isle of Skye. [*] Part I begins just before the start of World War I. Mrs Ramsay assures her six year old son James that they should be able to visit a lighthouse across the bay next day. This prediction is denied by Mr Ramsay, who voices his certainty that the weather will not be clear. This attitude creates a certain tension between Mr and Mrs Ramsay, and also between Mr Ramsay and James. The incident is referred to on various occasions throughout the chapter.

The Ramsays have been joined at the house by a number of friends and colleagues. Lily Briscoe is a young painter attempting a portrayal of Mrs. Ramsay and her son James. She finds herself plagued by doubts throughout the novel, doubts largely fed by the statements of Charles Tansley, another guest, claiming that women can neither paint nor write. Tansley himself is an admirer of Mr Ramsay and his philosophical treatises. During the course of the afternoon, another guest Paul Rayley proposes to Minta Doyle, Lily begins her painting, Mrs. Ramsay soothes the resentful James, and Mr. Ramsay frets over his shortcomings as a philosopher, periodically turning to Mrs. Ramsay for comfort.

The section closes with a large dinner party which is fraught with minor tensions. Mr Ramsay nearly snaps at Augustus Carmichael, a visiting poet, when he asks for a second serving of soup. Mrs Ramsay, who is striving for the perfect dinner party is herself out of sorts when Paul and Minta arrive late to dinner, as Minta lost her grandmother’s brooch on the beach.

[* This Scottish location is completely unconvincing. The setting is clearly modelled on St Ives in Cornwall where Woolf spent all her childhood summer holidays.]

Part II: Time Passes
The second section is a lyrical interlude which gives a sense of time passing, absence, and death. During this period World War I breaks out in Europe. Mrs Ramsay passes away, her daughter Prue dies from complications of childbirth, and her son Andrew is killed in the war. Mr Ramsay is left adrift without his wife to praise and comfort him during his bouts of fear and his anguish regarding the longevity of his philosophical work.

The house itself is neglected during this period, and falls into a state of disrepair. Ten years pass before the family and their friends return for another holiday. Mrs McNab, the housekeeper, employs a few other women to help set the house in order.

Part III: The Lighthouse
Mr Ramsay finally plans on taking the long-delayed trip to the lighthouse with his son James and daughter Cam(illa). The trip almost does not happen, as the children are not ready, but they eventually set off. En route, the children resent their father for forcing them to come along. But James keeps the sailing boat steady, and rather than receiving the harsh words he has come to expect from his father, he hears praise, providing a rare moment of empathy between father and son; Cam’s attitude towards her father has changed as well.

Whilst they visit the lighthouse, Lily attempts to complete her long-unfinished painting. She reconsiders her memory of Mrs Ramsay, grateful for her help in pushing Lily to continue with her art, yet at the same time she struggles to free herself from the tacit control Mrs Ramsay had over other aspects of her life. Upon finishing the painting and seeing that it satisfies her, she realizes that the execution of her vision is more important to her than the idea of leaving some sort of legacy in her work – a lesson Mr Ramsay has yet to learn.

Study resources

To the Lighthouse – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

To the Lighthouse – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

To the Lighthouse – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

To the Lighthouse – eBook edition

To the Lighthouse – 1983 dramatisation on DVD – Amazon UK

To the Lighthouse – audio book (unabridged) – Amazon UK

To the Lighthouse: A Reader’s Guide – critical study – Amazon UK

To the Lighthouse – York Notes (Advanced) – Amazon UK

To the Lighthouse – Macmillan Master Guides – Amazon UK

To the Lighthouse – Penguin Critical Guide – Amazon UK

To the Lighthouse – Palgrave Master Guides – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

Selected Essays – by Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – biography

part of biographical documentary

Principal characters

Mr Ramsay	a prominent metaphysical philosopher
Mrs Ramsay	his dutiful, beautiful, and loving wife
James Ramsay	their youngest son
Lily Briscoe	a young and single painter
Paul Rayley	a young friend of the Ramsays
Minta Doyle	a friend of the Ramsays who marries Paul
Charles Tansley	a young philosophy pupil of Mr Ramsay’s
William Bankes	a botanist and old friend of the Ramsays
Augustus Carmichael	opium-using poet visitor
Mrs McNab	the Ramsay’s elderly housekeeper
Andrew Ramsay	the eldest son, who is killed during the war
Jasper Ramsay	one of the Ramsay’s sons
Roger Ramsay	one of the Ramsay’s sons
Prue Ramsay	the eldest daughter, who dies in childbirth
Rose Ramsay	one of the Ramsay’s daughters
Nancy Ramsay	one of the Ramsay’s daughters
Cam(illa) Ramsay	the youngest Ramsay daughter

To the Lighthouse – first edition

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927) Cover design by Vanessa Bell.

“Advance sales totaled over 1,600 copies, more than twice the number for Mrs Dalloway. Virginia’s mood at the time expressed itself in her gaily ironic joke with Vita Sackville-West. When Vita returned from her second trip to Persia, she found a copy of To the Lighthouse waiting for her, inscribed by Virginia, “In my opinion the best novel I have ever written”. It was a bound dummy copy, with blank pages. Leonard Woolf, anticipating both an artistic and a commercial success for To the Lighthouse, ordered 3,000 copies printed by R. & R. Clark (a thousand more than Mrs Dalloway) and quickly ordered another 1,000 copies in a second impression. The novel outsold her previous fiction. The American publisher of Hogarth Press books, Harcourt Brace, printed 4,000 copies initially (almost twice the number of copies for Mrs Dalloway). American readers had begun to take notice of Woolf’s novels.”

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941

More illustrated Hogarth Press first editions

Mont Blanc pen – the Virginia Woolf special edition

Writing

“I feel certain that I am going mad again”

Virginia Woolf – podcast

A eulogy on words

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Orlando (1928) is one of her lesser-known novels, although it’s critical reputation has risen in recent years. It’s a delightful fantasy which features a character who changes sex part-way through the book – and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Using this device (which turns out to be strangely credible) Woolf explores issues of gender and identity as her hero-heroine moves through a variety of lives and personal adventures. Orlando starts out as an emissary to the Court of St James, lives through friendships with Swift and Alexander Pope, and ends up motoring through the west end of London on a shopping expedition in the 1920s. The character is loosely based on Vita Sackville-West, who at one time was Woolf’s lover. The novel itself was described by Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.
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Kew Gardens is a collection of experimental short stories in which Woolf tested out ideas and techniques which she then later incorporated into her novels. After Chekhov, they represent the most important development in the modern short story as a literary form. Incident and narrative are replaced by evocations of mood, poetic imagery, philosophic reflection, and subtleties of composition and structure. The shortest piece, ‘Monday or Tuesday’, is a one-page wonder of compression. This collection is a cornerstone of literary modernism. No other writer – with the possible exception of Nadine Gordimer, has taken the short story as a literary genre as far as this.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
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Virginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant and business partner at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. This is an attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject which has been very popular with readers ever since it was first published..
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Virginia Woolf – web links

Virginia Woolf at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

Blogging Woolf
Book reviews, Bloomsbury related issues, links, study resources, news of conferences, exhibitions, and events, regularly updated.

Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of her work, fiction and non-fiction publications, photograph albumns, list of biographies, and external web links

Virginia Woolf at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of the novels The Voyage Out, Night and Day, Jacob’s Room, and the collection of stories Monday or Tuesday in a variety of digital formats.

Woolf Online
An electronic edition and commentary on To the Lighthouse with notes on its composition, revisions, and printing – plus relevant extracts from the diaries, essays, and letters.

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search texts of all the major novels and essays, word by word – locate quotations, references, and individual terms

Virginia Woolf – a timeline in phtographs
A collection of well and lesser-known photographs documenting Woolf’s life from early childhood, through youth, marriage, and fame – plus some first edition book jackets – to a soundtrack by Philip Glass. They capture her elegant appearance, the big hats, and her obsessive smoking. No captions or dates, but well worth watching.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury – including Gordon Square, Gower Street, Bedford Square, Tavistock Square, plus links to women’s history web sites.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
Bulletins of events, annual lectures, society publications, and extensive links to Woolf and Bloomsbury related web sites

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
Charming sound recording of radio talk given by Virginia Woolf in 1937 – a podcast accompanied by a slideshow of photographs.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephen compiled a photograph album and wrote an epistolary memoir, known as the “Mausoleum Book,” to mourn the death of his wife, Julia, in 1895 – an archive at Smith College – Massachusetts

Virginia Woolf first editions
Hogarth Press book jacket covers of the first editions of Woolf’s novels, essays, and stories – largely designed by her sister, Vanessa Bell.

Virginia Woolf – on video
Biographical studies and documentary videos with comments on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group and the social background of their times.

Virginia Woolf Miscellany
An archive of academic journal essays 2003—2014, featuring news items, book reviews, and full length studies.

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group

Virginia Woolf – To the Lighthouse

October 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927) Cover design by Vanessa Bell.

“Advance sales totaled over 1,600 copies, more than twice the number for Mrs Dalloway. Virginia’s mood at the time expressed itself in her gaily ironic joke with Vita Sackville-West. When Vita returned from her second trip to Persia, she found a copy of To the Lighthouse waiting for her, inscribed by Virginia, “In my opinion the best novel I have ever written”. It was a bound dummy copy, with blank pages. Leonard Woolf, anticipating both an artistic and a commercial success for To the Lighthouse, ordered 3,000 copies printed by R. & R. Clark (a thousand more than Mrs Dalloway) and quickly ordered another 1,000 copies in a second impression. The novel outsold her previous fiction. The American publisher of Hogarth Press books, Harcourt Brace, printed 4,000 copies initially (almost twice the number of copies for Mrs Dalloway). American readers had begun to take notice of Woolf’s novels.”

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941

Hogarth Press studies

Woolf’s-head Publishing is a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but also a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It was produced as an exhibition catalogue and has quite rightly gone on to enjoy an independent life of its own. This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

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Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41 John Willis brings the remarkable story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s success as publishers to life. He generates interesting thumbnail sketches of all the Hogarth Press authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus. He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press. This is a scholarly work with extensive footnotes, bibliographies, and suggestions for further reading – but most of all it is a very readable study in cultural history.

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Virginia Woolf an MFS reader

August 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

academic essays on Woolf and her major novels

For those who may not know, MFS is not some sort of DIY building material, but Modern Fiction Studies, a prestigious academic journal, and Virginia Woolf an MFS reader is a compilation of essays on Virginia Woolf drawn from its archives going back over the last half century of its publication. The chapters are arranged in three thematic sections, each arranged chronologically according to the text under consideration.

It’s a book written by university teachers, designed to be read and (they hope) quoted by other teachers in the books that they write as part of seeking career promotion. That’s the nature of academic life today. In some instances it produces valuable results: for the main part it results in worthless dross. This system is the root of both the main strength and the weakness of this book.

Brenda Silvers’ introductory essay huffs and puffs about the adoption of Virginia Woolf into popular culture – but it’s mainly hot under the collar about Edward Albee’s play (Who’s Afraid..) and its possibly disguised gay theme. She also goes in for some quite bogus generalizing on the interpretation of photographs:

Woolf’s photographs [she means photographs of Woolf] in general … prove frightening to their viewers.

That will be news to the many people who buy and admire her portrait wherever it is on sale.

Susan Friedman offers an account of The Voyage Out which sees Rachel Vinrace as an example of Woolf’s ‘Common Reader’ – someone unprejudiced by formal academic experience and unburdened by the authority of criticism. This is quite a useful way of matching Wool’s theory with her fiction.

Charles Hoffmann traces the development of Mrs Dalloway from a short story (Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street) to a full length novel following the connections between notebooks, manuscripts, and drafts which are scattered in various collections on both sides of the Atlantic. This is an approach to literary scholarship which has the advantage of being unencumbered by lots of ‘theory’ and is rooted in the practicality of literary texts.

Tammy Clewell has a thoughtful piece on death, mourning, and grief in Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway. This argues with persuasive supporting evidence that Woolf was promoting more radical views on these topics than is commonly supposed. She does not want her readers to relax any opposition to the barbarous mass slaughter behind every war memorial and slogans such as ‘their names shall live forever’:

In relation to these postwar forms of memorialization, Jacob’s Room stands out precisely for what it withholds: the text offers no faith in religious immortality, no applause for individual heroism, no celebration of male comradery, no stoical acceptance of fate, no aesthetic smoothing over of the war’s human cost of any kind.

The best-written essay in the collection (and unsurprisingly the most frequently quoted by others) is Karen deMeester’s on ‘Trauma and Recovery in Mrs Dalloway‘. This argues that Woolf gives accurate expression to the condition of psychological trauma – particularly of course in the case of Septimus Warren Smith, who has seen through the horrors upon which his society is based. But even more bravely, deMeester argues that Clarissa Dalloway is a social coward, because although she sees the same truths as Septimus, she chooses to re-unite with the world which has caused the horrors in the first place. As Peter Walsh says of her:

she frittered her time away, lunching, dining, giving these incessant parties of hers, talking nonsense, saying things she didn’t mean, blunting the edge of her mind, losing her discrimination

It’s not often one sees Peter Walsh (a lightweight figure) quoted with such approval. But he has a point – and so does deMeester.

Urmila Seehagiri desperately wants to offer a racial and post-colonial reading of Woolf’s work, and she digs and digs, hoping to come up with some suitable material. To the Lighthouse yields the fact that Lily Briscoe has ‘little Chinese eyes’; Woolf took part in the Dreadnought Hoax and attended the Ballets Russes. No distinction is made between fictional and biographical evidence. When To the Lighthouse is addressed in detail, broken teacups are the signal for an extended account of the history of the tea trade with India and China. Then, via a detour into the theories of art held by Roger Fry and Clive Bell, she concludes that Lily Briscoe’s ‘little Chinese eyes’

attain the ‘ultra-primitive directness of vision’ that Fry attributes to East Asian cultures, and her arrangement of forms is liberating because it is autotelic. Privileging the completion of Lily’s painting over mending broken familial structures, Woolf creates a racially differentiated model for modern English subjectivity that holds itself separate from patriarchal and imperialist hierarchies.

Many of the other essays suffer from this very dubious critical method. A single word or short phrase is seized upon; a tenuous connection with another text (fiction, biography, or theory) is made; and a literary critic’s comment upon some apparently similar phenomenon is noted. The flaw is that a logical and positive connection between the starting and finishing point is taken for granted without any critical examination or supporting evidence. The connections between these elements are at best loose, and more often mere fugitive verbal associations.

And that, I’m afraid, is the state of literary criticism in the university today. Some good solid textual scholarship, holding out against a tide of convoluted windbaggery masquerading as ‘critical theory’. Can you understand the last quote above?

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Maren Linnet, Virginia Woolf: An MFS Reader, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009, pp.443, ISBN 0801891183

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group

Virginia Woolf greatest works

September 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

fictional works – plus some film versions

Jacob’s Room (1922) was Woolf’s first and most dramatic break with traditional narrative fiction. It was also the first of her novels she published herself, as co-founder of the Hogarth Press. This gave her for the first time the freedom to write exactly as she wished. The story is a thinly disguised portrait of her brother Thoby – as he is perceived by others, and in his dealings with two young women. The novel does not have a conventional plot, and the point of view shifts constantly and without any signals or transitions from one character to another. Woolf was creating a form of story telling in which several things are discussed at the same time, creating an impression of simultaneity, and a flow of continuity in life which was one of her most important contributions to literary modernism.

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Mrs Dalloway (1925) is probably the most accessible of her great novels. A day in the life of a London society hostess is used as the structure for her experiments in multiple points of view. The themes she explores are the nature of personal identity; memory and consciousness; the passage of time; and the tensions between the forces of Life and Death. The novel abandons conventional notions of plot in favour of a mosaic of events. She gives a very lyrical response to the fundamental question, ‘What is it like to be alive?’ And her answer is a sensuous expression of metropolitan existence. The novel also features her rich expression of ‘interior monologue’ as a narrative technique, and it offers a subtle critique of society recovering in the aftermath of the first world war. This novel is now seen as a central text of English literary modernism.

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To the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of her late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a tryptich of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis. The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.

Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Orlando (1928) is one of her lesser-known novels, although it’s critical reputation has risen in recent years. It’s a delightful fantasy which features a character who changes sex part-way through the book – and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Using this device (which turns out to be strangely credible) Woolf explores issues of gender and identity as her hero-heroine moves through a variety of lives and personal adventures. Orlando starts out as an emissary to the Court of St James, lives through friendships with Swift and Alexander Pope, and ends up motoring through the west end of London on a shopping expedition in the 1920s. The character is loosely based on Vita Sackville-West, who at one time was Woolf’s lover. The novel itself was described by Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.

Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

The Waves (1931) is her most experimental and most demanding novel. Rather like her exact contemporary James Joyce, she was pushing the possibilities of the novel to their furthest limit. She abandons conventional narrative and setting altogether, and substitutes the interior monologues of six different characters. They are friends (and lovers) whose lives are revealed by what they think about themselves and each other. The monologues that span the characters’ lives are broken up by nine brief third-person interludes detailing a coastal scene at varying stages in a day from sunrise to sunset. Readers have to work out who is ‘thinking’ at any moment – but assistance is provided by patterns of imagery and fragments of repeated ideas associated with each character. Not for the faint-hearted. Read the other novels first.

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Between the Acts (1941) is her last novel, in which she returns to a less demanding literary style. Despite being written immediately before her suicide, she combines a playful wittiness with her satirical critique of English upper middle-class life. The story is set in the summer of 1939 on the day of the annual village fete at Pointz Hall. It describes a country pageant on English history written by Miss La Trobe, and its effects on the people who watch it. Most of the audience misunderstand it in various ways, but the implication is that it is a work of art which temporarily creates order amidst the chaos of human life. There’s lots of social comedy, some amusing reflections on English weather, and meteorological metaphors and imagery run cleverly throughout the book.

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The Complete Shorter Fiction contains all the classic short stories such as The Mark on the Wall, A Haunted House, and The String Quartet – but also the shorter fragments and experimental pieces such as Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street. These ‘sketches’ (as she called them) were used to practice the techniques she used in her longer fictions. Nearly fifty pieces written over the course of Woolf’s writing career are arranged chronologically to offer insights into her development as a writer. This is one for connoisseurs – well presented and edited in a scholarly manner.

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Film versions

The Hours DVD is an amazingly successful film adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s fictional take on Mrs Dalloway. Fragments of Virginia Woolf’s biography are interwoven with stories from 1950s Los Angeles and contemporary New York. It’s not a direct adaptation but a stunning interpretation of Woolf and her world, her themes, and even her narrative techniques. It is beautifully photographed, and the evocation of Woolf’s creative process is particularly impressive. Nicole Kidman creates a very sympathetic portrayal of Virginia Woolf, Julianne Moore glues the plot together with a magnificent performance as a woman at the end of her tether, and Meryl Streep is a slightly over-the-top but acceptable modern Clarissa. Music by Philip Glass. This is a film which no Woolf enthusiast should miss.

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Mrs Dalloway DVD is an excellent film version of Mrs Dalloway directed by Dutch filmmaker Marleen Gorris. It’s a visually low key rendering of the original, but it captures the spirit of the novel very well. Outstanding performance by Vanessa Redgrave in the principal role, and Natascha McElhone as her younger self and a young Kenneth Brannah as Charles Tansley. The screenplay was written by actor-author Eileen Atkins.

Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Virginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. An attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject.

Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Virginia Woolf – web links

Virginia Woolf at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

Blogging Woolf
Book reviews, Bloomsbury related issues, links, study resources, news of conferences, exhibitions, and events, regularly updated.

Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of her work, fiction and non-fiction publications, photograph albumns, list of biographies, and external web links

Virginia Woolf at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of her novels and stories in a variety of digital formats.

Woolf Online
An electronic edition and commentary on To the Lighthouse with notes on its composition, revisions, and printing – plus relevant extracts from the diaries, essays, and letters.

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search texts of all the major novels and essays, word by word – locate quotations, references, and individual terms

Orlando – Sally Potter’s film archive
The text and film script, production notes, casting, locations, set designs, publicity photos, video clips, costume designs, and interviews.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
Bulletins of events, annual lectures, society publications, and extensive links to Woolf and Bloomsbury related web sites

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
Charming sound recording of radio talk given by Virginia Woolf in 1937 – a podcast accompanied by a slideshow of photographs.

Virginia Woolf first editions
Hogarth Press book jacket covers of the first editions of Woolf’s novels, essays, and stories – largely designed by her sister, Vanessa Bell.

Virginia Woolf – on video
Biographical studies and documentary videos with comments on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group and the social background of their times.

Virginia Woolf Miscellany
An archive of academic journal essays 2003—2014, featuring news items, book reviews, and full length studies.

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group