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Updated June 5, 2002
Created July 31, 1998 from material supplied by Denise Brown Taylor.
What were the circumstances of writing To the Lighthouse?
One can conclude that the content of To the Lighthouse (TTL) is largely influenced by the summers that Virginia Woolf spend at St. Ives as a child with her family. Quentin Bell notes that on one occasion in 1892 Thoby and Virginia Stephen were asked to go to the Godrevy Lighthouse by some children and that Adrian was severely disappointed that he was not asked to go also (I 32). However, Bell also notes that the conception of TTL probably occurred around the completion of Mrs Dalloway: on October 9, 1924, "she could already see the 'Old Man'-- and by this she almost certainly meant To the Lighthouse" (2 105). However she was also completing The Common Reader so TTL remained only in her mind for some time. At a birthday party at Charleston on August 19, 1925, she endured another "breakdown." She did not begin to recover from this extended bout of illness, which included a case of the German measles, until the spring of 1926. The only thing written during this time was an essay, "On Being Ill" (2 115).
VW wrote in her diary entry, July 20, 1925, "Father and mother and child in the garden; the death; the sail to the Lighthouse... (I conceive the book in 3 parts: 1, at the drawing room window; 2, seven years passed; 3, the voyage.)" The first entry in her diary concerning TTL appears on May 14, 1925.
By March 16, 1926 she had written 40,000 words of "The Window" section and was finished by April 1926. She found this section easy to write (Bell 121). "Time Passes" presented the most difficulty for VW. In this section she had to write "observing as carefully as a painter does a still life, a landscape, or an interior" (Reid 289). It took over a month to write this section (290). At the end of July, she had a "whole nervous breakdown in miniature." She and Leonard were quarreling about the success of Mrs. Dalloway, and by September she had moments of deep depression (Bell vol. 2, 123). She was able to begin writing again in November. TTL was ready for Leonard's approval of a proof in early 1927.