a literary genius. Woolf experimented with innovative approaches to writing that set her apart from her contemporaries by largely abandoning plot in favour of psychological exploration. She made it her mission to delve into the human condition – something most people took so much for granted that they failed to consider its importance.
Of course, this approach didn’t make her books easy to read, but the whole point of the method was to challenge literary norms. Just as one needed to apply effort to understand the work of the Cubist artistic movement, which was prevalent at that time, so Woolf published literature with a similar requirement for analysis. She had turned the novel into high art. This wasn’t to everyone’s taste, but it would inevitably prove very influential. It was a sea change in defining the purpose of the novel, as the author was no longer expected to take the work to the reader. Instead, the reader was expected to do their own work and accept the challenge of interpreting a text’s meaning. It was an intellectual workout on offer, rather than an unthinking stroll. Inevitably, this catalysed a division within the realm of the novel, as it divided into the ‘literary novel’ and the ‘commercial novel’. The landscape of fiction publishing had been irreversibly altered by progress, and Woolf was at the forefront of the march to modernity.
The surface plot for Mrs Dalloway is simply that Clarissa Dalloway is preparing to host a party in the evening. But beyond the surface, Woolf explores the thought processes of Mrs Dalloway as she is prompted to reflect on her life and past events. Central to the novel is reference to the effect of World War I on British society in the post-war years and, in particular, the loss of loved ones and the altering fate of those left behind. The consequences of this included the physical and psychological damage done to those who fought and survived, as well as to those who survived despite never having set foot on the battlefield. It all adds up to an odd juxtaposition of people carrying on their lives, with parties, families and friends, while an unspoken suffering erodes their happiness.
The chronology of To the Lighthouse brackets World War I, examining the societal transformation caused by the conflict. The eponymous lighthouse is the summer home of the Ramsay family, on the Isle of Sky, in the Hebrides archipelago, off Scotland. The dynamic of the social environment inevitably changes year after year, but the war causes an abrupt change, due in part to the hiatus, but also due to three deaths – one from old age, one from combat and one from complications in childbirth. The use of the lighthouse is, of course, symbolic as a metaphorical guiding light that leads people to safety in life’s travels. Despite the turbulence that life has wrought on the surviving members of the family, they manage to maintain the notion that meeting at the island provides them with a sense of insight and contentment that their world would otherwise lack.
Woolf’s general take on society and the individual lives of her characters has an air of the upper-middle class about it, as those are the people seen to throw parties and have holiday homes, but this doesn’t detract from the weight of her prose or to remove her meaning from the reaches of other readers. This is because she uses these characters as devices to bring protagonists together in order to investigate the interaction of personality with great skill.
The Bloomsbury Set
Virginia Woolf came from a background of intellectualism, however, this was largely cemented by her family’s relocation from Kensington to Bloomsbury, where she became part of an intellectual elite known as the Bloomsbury Set. Together, they were all goldfish in the same bowl, looking out at the world around them with a similar artistic palette.
The pretentions of her social group actually allowed her to blossom as a writer, because she was given the encouragement and freedom she needed to experiment with her prose. In short, she was allowed to think of herself as an author and she was told what she wanted to hear. This was vitally important to someone with nagging self-doubt, so she developed deep and lasting bonds with those who saw and nurtured her potential. Indeed, she married one of them – Leonard Woolf – and remained devoted to him.
In time, of course, the pretentions of the Bloomsbury Set transcended into success, as they were undoubtedly intelligent, talented and well educated. This process of ascendance was, in part, aided by a number of stunts designed to draw public attention. One stunt in particular has become famous for its daring and humour: the Dreadnought Hoax. This was an elaborate plan to gain egress to the battleship HMS Dreadnought for no other reason than to have a good look around. A number of the Bloomsbury Set, including Woolf, disguised themselves as Abyssinian princes. They wore the appropriate garb of robes and turbans, but they also ‘blacked-up’ and sported fake beards. With escort and interpreter in tow, they boarded a VIP coach and took a train from Paddington to Weymouth, where they were received as genuine royalty with honour guard and allowed to inspect Royal Navy fleet. All the while, they pretended to communicate in a foreign tongue by uttering gibberish furnished with Greek and Latin, which the interpreter duly pretended to understand and translate.
Having returned to London, a photograph of the Bloomsbury Set, still in character, was sent to the Daily Mirror newspaper and the hoax was revealed. Not surprisingly, the affair turned into a scandal. The Foreign Office and the Royal Navy were the target of a great deal of finger-pointing, partly in fun and partly in seriousness for allowing such a blatant lapse in national security. The situation wasn’t helped by the fact that the Bloomsbury Set were pacifists, which only served to rub salt into the wound. When the Navy high command pushed to have the perpetrators punished, they found themselves powerless to do anything. For one thing, no laws were broken, and secondly the consensus was that they themselves should be punished for allowing themselves to be beguiled by such a lame practical joke.
Needless to say, the Dreadnought Hoax planted the Bloomsbury Set in the public consciousness once and for all, as the oxygen of publicity was theirs to breathe in and enjoy. The hoax occurred on 7 February, 1910. Woolf’s first novel was begun the same year, although she did not publish until 1915, by which time she was already a minor celebrity.
Despite her subsequent success, Woolf was never particularly contented, however, for she had such a troubled soul and indefatigable mind. Today her malady would, doubtless, be described as a bipolar condition, for she oscillated from exuberant mood highs to despairing clinical lows. In the end, she was convinced that she would never come full circle again, so she decided to cut her loses while in the grip of a crushing depression that rendered her unable to see any light at the end of the tunnel. Virginia Woolf died in 1941, leaving behind a highly respected, progressive and considerable canon of essays, critique and novels.
The following is a list of abbreviated titles used in this edition.
MS: To the Lighthouse: The Original Holograph Draft, transcribed and ed. Susan Dick (Toronto University Press, 1982; Hogarth Press, 1983). Square brackets are used to indicate words deleted in original draft.
TL: To the Lighthouse, first British edn (Hogarth Press, 5 May 1927).
Moments of Being: Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings of Virginia Woolf, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (Chatto & Windus, 1976).
Diary: The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5 vols., ed. Anne Olivier Bell (Hogarth Press, 1977; Penguin Books, 1979).
Letters: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols., ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (Hogarth Press, 1975–80).
Essays: The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 3 vols. (to be 6 vols.), ed. Andrew McNeillie (Hogarth Press, 1986).
CE: Collected Essays, 4 vols., ed. Leonard Woolf (Chatto & Windus, 1966, 1967).
Mausoleum: Sir Leslie Stephen’s Mausoleum Book (1895), introduced by Alan Bell (OUP, 1977).