Art: What Lies Beneath Sometimes you have to judge a book by its cover
Ninety-seven years ago, Virginia Woolf published her masterpiece To the Lighthouse on May 5. Woolf, in a letter to her sister Vanessa Bell, three days later, wrote: “Probably the subject was a little unwise: But then one falls in to these things all in a second – I made it up one afternoon in the Square [Tavistock] without any premeditation, that I can see – how do you make up pictures? Suddenly all in a second?”
But if it was made up “all in a second”, the finished novel is a fascinating portrait of Mr and Mrs Ramsay’s marriage, their eight children, their friends, and a profound meditation on the passing of time.
Woolf’s childhood family holidays in St Ives in Cornwall, and the lighthouse there were Woolf’s inspiration, but the novel itself is set on the west coast of Scotland.
Mrs Ramsay is generous, empathetic and intuitive. Mr Ramsay is self-centred, cantankerous and rational.
When six-year-old James longs to sail to the lighthouse, Mrs Ramsay speaks the novel’s opening line: “Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow, but you’ll have to be up with the lark” – words which Woolf tells us “conveyed an extraordinary joy” – only to have Mr Ramsay say: “But it won’t be fine.”
Bell told Woolf: “You have given a portrait of mother which is more like her to me than anything I could ever have conceived of as possible. It is almost painful to have her so raised from the dead.
“You have made one feel the extraordinary beauty of her character... You have given father too, I think as clearly – but perhaps, I may be wrong, that isn’t quite so difficult. There is more to catch hold of.
“As far as portrait painting goes, you seem to me to be a supreme artist and it is so shattering to find oneself face to face with those two again.”
And in her 1928 diary on November 28, Woolf wrote: “Father’s birthday. He would have been 96 – yes, 96 today. I used to think of him and mother daily; but writing the Lighthouse laid them in my mind.”
The novel was an immediate success and sold 1,690 copies before publication. “If it makes 3,000,” she wrote in her diary, “I shall be, as they say, more than content.”
It did sell that – and more, and allowed the Woolfs to buy their first car.
But this distinctive cover, using hand lettering and woodcuts – and others designed by Vanessa Bell – was “universally condemned amongst booksellers”, Leonard Woolf’s diary reveals (Leonard being Virginia’s husband). Yet, Virginia Woolf had her sister design 38 dust jackets over 30 years.
She praised Vanessa’s covers. “Your style is unique, because so truthful,” were her words.
In this decorative design, the sea swirls at its base, the pointillist light radiates, and scholars tell us that the phallic structure and the widening, reassuring beam capture both male and female qualities.
The artistic, intellectual Bloomsbury group lived colourful, alternative lives. Vanessa married Clive Bell in 1907 and left him in 1916 for Duncan Grant with whom she had a child in 1918.
Duncan Grant had several relationships with men, including Vanessa and Virginia’s brother Adrian, sculptor Stephen Tomlin, and economist John Maynard Keynes. But Grant and Bell’s marriage endured.
Bell died in 1961 at the age of 82, and was buried in Firle parish churchyard in East Sussex. When Duncan Grant died in 1978, he was buried beside her.