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CC BY-NC 4.0

A contribution to: Literature and Art

Edited by Elizabeth Benjamin and Sophie Corser

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 9

Modern Humanities Research Association

Art

Abstract.  This essay explores the implicit connection between Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), a novel featuring the figure of a painter as one of its protagonists, and the Post- Impressionist portraits of Woolf painted by her sister Vanessa Bell between 1911 and 1912. I will posit that this relation is based on a series of analogous aesthetic principles that manifest the closeness of the professional and private relationship between the sister artists. Moreover, I propose a reading of To the Lighthouse that, although taking into account the influence of Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist dichotomy between ‘vision and design’, especially highlights Woolf’s metanarrative commentary on her own aesthetic principles, as variously discussed in both her private and her public texts. I also suggest that the artworks in question are distinct and at the same time closely connected manifestations of Woolfian ideals, that often conceive of crossing the boundaries between literature and painting. On the one hand, the presence of the painter Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse allows Woolf to explore manifold aesthetic and psychological issues that represent serious concerns for herself as a writer, and can be seen as an opportunity to consider the fundamental aspects of her own artistic vision; on the other hand, the presence of a novelist (Woolf herself) in some of Vanessa Bell’s paintings may be interpreted as a prefiguration of her sister’s mature aesthetic principles, which are surprisingly reflected – along with the tenets of Post-Impressionism that fascinated them both – in her own painterly technique.

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