References and notes
- Both in this section and in the section entitled “Julia Stephen,” I am relying heavily on unpublished autobiographical memoirs written by Virginia Woolf in 1908 and 1939–40. These memoirs are now in the library at the University of Sussex in England. Direct copying of the memoirs is forbidden. I have worked from notes which are partially incomplete and usually made from memory. Moreover, I was undoubtedly influenced by the particular purpose of this paper. Any construction of the memoirs will be unreliable so long as there is no published version to consult. Fortunately, I have been informed by Mr. A. N. Peasgood, the Sussex Librarian, that the memoirs will be published some time in 1975.
- Wasiolek , Edward . 1975 . “Wanted: A new contextualism,” . Critical Inquiry , I ( 3 ) March I will say, however, that I am not attempting to read the literature by the life but rather the life by the literature. In appropriating literature in the service of biography I do give a special reading of To the Lighthouse. I believe this reading can be justified both in general and in its details. I would not claim, however, that mine is the privileged reading of the text, not even of those aspects with which I am most concerned. These are rather technical, methodological issues which I hope to discuss elsewhere. I have found helpful in these matters
- 1929 . A Room of One's Own , 79 New York : Harcourt Brace and World .
- Bell , Quentin . 1968 . Bloomsbury London In this section, in addition to the memoirs mentioned in Ref. 1, I am relying on an eight‐page fragment in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library entitled “The tea table was the centre of Victorian family life.” I have also used
- Bell , Quentin . 1972 . Virginia Woolf, A Biography London
- From the holograph manuscript of To the Lighthouse in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, 1, 265.
- As I myself recollect that visit from the memoirs mentioned in Ref. 1. Virginia Woolf did not presumably know her mother was to die before another meeting—nor did her mother. The recollection, and perhaps the reconstruction, of the “last visit” shows as much about Virginia Woolf's memory of her mother, and the burdens of that memory, as it does about the mother and her actual death.
- 1972 . To the Lighthouse , New York : Harcourt Brace & Company . All quotations are from. I put page references for the longer quotes in parentheses in the text
- Nicolson , Nigel and Trautman , Joanne , eds. 1975 . The Letters of Virginia Woolf, , Vol. 1 , Harcourt Brace Jovanovich . This is rather confusing however. Woolf was given a ring by her father shortly before his death. She refers to this ring in a letter to Violet Dickenson as the first she had ever been given. See letter No. 152,
- Holograph manuscript To the Lighthouse, Berg Collection, 1, 265.
- By “older children” I mean Prue, Andrew, Nancy and presumably Roger who has a shadowy existence. These older children are sometimes referred to collectively as “the children” or when they are girls as “her” (i.e. Mrs. Ramsay's) daughters.” They sometimes appear to include Jasper and Rose whom I had distinguished as middle‐age children still young enough to be naturally in their mother's orbit.
- 1967 . “Professions for women,” . In Collected Essays, , Vol. 2 , New York : Harcourt, Brace and World .
- Peggy Comstock pointed out to me that the “Angel in the House” is actually, not only imaginatively, the subject and title of a “famous” poem by Coventry Patmore. The heroine of that poem is sentimentally insipid as neither Julia Stephen nor Mrs. Ramsay ever were. Neither the Angel that Virginia Woolf expended so much energy killing nor the one she had to learn to live with can be identified as or reduced to the foolish, self‐sacrificing Victorian heroine.
- 1967 . “On being ill,” . In Collected Essays, , Vol. 4 , New York : Harcourt, Brace and World .
- The evidence is in unpublished volumes of the Writer's Diary, 1925 and 1926, in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.