This Week in Literary History: 11-Year-Old Virginia Woolf Takes a Boat Trip to Godrevy Lighthouse

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THIS WEEK IN

SEPTEMBER 12 — SEPTEMBER 18

11-year-old Virginia Woolf takes a boat trip to Godrevy Lighthouse.

Every summer, when Virginia Woolf (née Adeline Virginia Stephen) was a girl, she and her family regularly escaped London to vacation in Cornwall, in a rented house overlooking St. Ives Bay. On September 12, 1892, in Hyde Park Gate News, the family newsletter (bless), 11-year-old Virginia (whose childhood nickname was “the Goat”) reported the family’s recent outing to the bay’s Godrevy Lighthouse, on a Saturday chosen for its “perfect tide and wind.” However, not everyone was included: “Master Adrian Stephen was much disappointed at not being allowed to go.”

Fans of Woolf may recognize this sentiment. Though To the Lighthouse is set on the Isle of Skye in the Hebrides, critics have long understood the setting of the novel as belonging closely to Woolf’s childhood in Cornwall—and have postulated that the summer home gave the budding writer not only inspiration but a particular kind of freedom. “In retrospect nothing that we had as children made as much difference, was quite so important to us, as our summer in Cornwall,” Woolf wrote in 1940, and it seems clear that this one trip to the lighthouse, with her mother’s favorite child frustrated and left behind, stuck in her mind. The family spent 13 summers at Talland House, but did not return after Julia, Virginia’s mother, died.

To the Lighthouse is either Woolf’s most famous novel, or her second most famous novel, after Mrs. Dalloway. Either way, it contains not only the famous lighthouse, but also the best brackets in literature, several fine examples of A+ social distancing, and one of the best literary representations of the vagaries of consciousness, collective and otherwise. It has inspired a music video and an actually-not-terrible made-for-TV movie. It is the kind of novel that novelists revisit time and again. Woolf herself has remained a figure of fascination for readers even decades after her death: she is a titan of modernism, an insult comic who kept a literary burn book, a legendary lover, a total slob, a cringeworthy prankster. One of the many things we lost in the pandemic was the Woolf-themed Met Ball. (Unfortunately we did not lose our random obsession with making Virginia Woolf puns.) And just like you, she thought there were too many personal essays being published. What would she think of us now?

MORE ON WOOLF

When an Apparition of Virginia Woolf Interrupts Your Writing Process

How Much of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity Is in the Writing of Virginia Woolf?

A Brief Visual History of Virginia Woolf’s Book Covers

ESSENTIAL ADVICE
FOR YOUNG WRITERS

“For heaven’s sake, publish nothing before you are thirty.”

—VIRGINIA WOOLF
in “A Letter to a Young Poet” (1932)

In other (old)

news this week

Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning elope (September 12, 1846) • Sir Thomas Overbury is murdered as the result of a scandal caused by his snarky poem “A Wife” (September 14, 1613) • Francis Scott Key, American lawyer and amateur poet, writes a little poem called “The Defence of Fort M’Henry”—which you now know as “The Star-Spangled Banner” (September 14, 1814) • P. G. Wodehouse’s short story “Extricating Young Gussie,” the first to introduce the legendary literary trickster Jeeves and his gentleman employer Bertie, is published in The Saturday Evening Post (September 15, 1915) • Toni Morrison’s influential masterpiece Beloved is published by Alfred A. Knopf (September 16, 1987) • Oprah Winfrey launches her book club (September 17, 1996) • Henry James’ serialized novel What Maisie Knew is published as a single volume (September 17, 1897) • The first edition of The New-York Daily Times, which would later become The New York Times, is published (September 18, 1851) • Aldous Huxley is hired to teach at Eton. One of his students, Eric Blair, will later write a few very famous books—not to mention dunk heartily on Mein Kampf—under a certain familiar pen name (September 18, 1917) • Zora Neale Hurston’s divisive classic Their Eyes Were Watching God is published by J. B. Lippincott & Co. (September 18, 1937)

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WALKING WHILE BLACK

“I don’t think necessity is the mother of invention—invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble. That is the big secret that has brought us down the ages hundreds of thousands of years, from chipping flints to switching on the washing-up machine.”