The Lighthouse as Tree | Dr. Emily Kopley

The Lighthouse as Tree: Vanessa Bell’s Cover of To the Lighthouse and Virginia Woolf’s 1902 Edition of Wordsworth

About the talk...

Vanessa Bell’s dust jacket for To the Lighthouse (1927) features an abstract lighthouse that doubles as a tree. The novel’s concern with trees supports this reading, as does an apparent source for Bell’s cover design, a sketch of three trees on the back endpapers of Virginia Woolf’s 1902 edition of Wordsworth. Recognizing the sketch as a source for Bell’s cover enriches the novel’s memorialization of Leslie and Julia Stephen, the parents of Woolf and Bell.

After defending the cover design as both lighthouse and tree, I trace the provenance of Woolf’s 1902 Wordsworth—or as much of the provenance as I have been able to determine. I explore the novel’s textual debt to Wordsworth, particularly his Immortality Ode. I then explore the book’s material debt to the poet, or rather to Woolf’s copy of his works. Leslie Stephen turned to Wordsworth when mourning his first wife and, later, his second, and wrote of Wordsworth’s consoling power in his letters, in the essay “Wordsworth’s Ethics” (1876), and in a memoir that his children called “the Mausoleum Book.” Woolf and Bell followed their father in their reading: they looked to Wordsworth, and to the 1902 volume specifically, to help them make remarkable art that immortalizes their dead.

About the speaker...

Emily Kopley (BA Yale, PhD Stanford), is the author of Virginia Woolf and Poetry (OUP, 2021), a critical biography. Her essays on Woolf appear in the TLS, Review of English Studies, English Literature in Transition, Teaching Modernist Women's Writing in English (MLA, 2021), Unpacking the Personal Library (Wilfred Laurier UP, 2022), and elsewhere. She is on the board of Woolf Studies Annual and has received grants from the Mellon Foundation, the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. She teaches at McGill University, in the Department of Jewish Studies.

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