To the Lighthouse (For Further Study)

For Further Study

• Quentin Bell, Bloomsbury Recalled, Columbia University Press, 1997.

  Bell, Woolf's nephew, portrays the literary figures and visual artists he knew so well through a series of vignettes. Reminiscence is key to Bell's prose portraits of his parents, Vanessa and Clive Bell, as well as Leonard Woolf, Ottoline Morrell, and other luminaries and lesser-known members associated with Bloomsbury.

• Jane Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism and the Politics of the Visual, Cambridge University Press, 1997.

  Goldman offers a revisionary, feminist reading of Woolf's work. Focusing on Woolf's engagement with the artistic theories of her time, Goldman traces Woolf's fascination with the aesthetic possibilities of the Postimpressionist exhibition of 1910 and the solar eclipse of 1927 by linking her response to wider literary and cultural contexts.

• Paul Goring, "The Shape of To the Lighthouse: Lily Briscoe's Painting and the Reader's Vision," in Word & Image, Vol. 10, No. 3, pp. 222-29.

  This essay shows how Lily's creation of her painting parallels Woolf's creation of the novel itself.

• Mark Hussey, Virginia Woolf A to Z: A Comprehensive Reference for Students, Teachers and Common Readers to Her Life, Works and Critical Reception, Oxford University Press, 1996.

  An alphabetical reference guide to Woolf's life and work. It includes detailed synopses of all the major and most of the minor works with an overview of their critical reception; all characters, both fictional and factual; contemporaries of Woolf — family members, friends, lovers, and all the Bloomsbury Group members; literary terms associated with Woolf; and place names from both her life and fiction.

• Mitchell Leaska, Granite and Rainbow: The Hidden Life of Virginia Woolf, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1998.

  Accepting the theory that Woolf was afflicted with manic-depressive psychosis — not a neurotic condition, but a genetically transmitted affective disorder — Leaska's book assesses the extent to which this disorder shaped Woolf's genius as a writer.

• Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, Knopf, 1997.

  Often regarded as the best modern biography of Virginia Woolf, Lee extricates her subject from cliches about madness and modernism to reveal a vigorous artist whose work is politically probing as well as psychologically delicate.

• Jane Lilienfeld, "Where the Spear Plants Grew: The Ramsays' Marriage in To the Lighthouse," in New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf, edited by Jane Marcus, The University of Nebraska Press, 1981, pp. 148-69.

  Lilienfeld uses the tools of feminist criticism to examine the Ramsays' marriage. She attempts to prove that Woolf both celebrates and criticizes it while she makes the urgency for creating new modes of human love and partnership clear.

• Nicholas Marsh, Virginia Woolf: The Novels, St. Martin's Press, 1998.

  Marsh uses excerpts from three of Woolf's novels to show how Woolf's writing style illuminates her subject matter.

• Annis Pratt, "Sexual Imagery in To the Lighthouse: A New Feminist Approach," Modern Fiction Studies, 1972, pp. 417-31.

  Pratt's article examines the sections of eroticism in To the Lighthouse, suggesting that Mrs. Ramsay shows the "pseudo-sexual adaptation" imposed upon her by her marriage and culture.

• Panthea Reid, Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf, Oxford University Press, 1996.

  Reid makes a case for the crucially formative relationships Virginia Woolf had with several women in her life, especially with her sister Vanessa, and sees Woolf's art as bound up with a play for the "motherly affection" she felt she was losing or had lost from her sister.