Let your imagination set sail in this discussion of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse in the final episode of our first season. It’s a story about love, family, loss, and growing up. It’s also a story about the fluidity of perspective, drawing readers into the perceptions and interior lives of its characters as they relate to one another and the world. Through a language at once impressionistic and precise, Woolf depicts currents of thought and feeling, while raising questions about patriarchy, tradition, and the woman as artist.
We could not be more delighted to introduce this week’s expert guests. First we hear an extended reflection from Dr. Urmila Seshagiri, who is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She has published on literary modernism and Woolf, and is preparing the first scholarly edition of Woolf’s memoir A Sketch of the Past.
Then, we interview Professor Dame Hermione Lee, who was President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017 and is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. She is one of the most highly acclaimed literary biographers in the English-speaking world. In 1996, she published a landmark biography of Virginia Woolf, and her most recent biography, Tom Stoppard: A Life, came out last month.
Literate will be back in January with a new season!
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Sources
Briggs, Julia. “The Novels of the 1930s and the Impact of History.” Roe and Sellers, pp. 72–90.
Flint, Kate. “An Introduction to To the Lighthouse.” British Library, 25 May 2016, https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/an-introduction-to-to-the-lighthouse.
Lee, Hermione. “Biomythographers: Rewriting the Lives of Virginia Woolf.” Essays in Criticism, vol. 46, no. 2, 1996, pp. 95-114.
Marcus, Laura. “Woolf’s Feminism and Feminism’s Woolf.” Roe and Sellers, pp. 209–244.
Parsons, Deborah. Theorists of the Modernist Novel: James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf. London, Routledge, 2007.
Roe, Sue and Susan Sellers, editors. The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000. Cambridge Companions to Literature.
Whitworth, Michael. “Virginia Woolf and Modernism.” Roe and Sellers, pp. 146–163.
Woolf, Virginia. “Modern Fiction.” The Common Reader, 1925, Project Gutenberg of Australia, http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300031h.html#C12.
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. New York, Harcourt, Inc., 2005.
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992.
Woolf, Virginia. “To the Lighthouse: Holograph ms.” Photo of material from the Berg Collection, New York Public Library. Woolf Online, edited by Pamela L. Caughie, Nick Hayward, Mark Hussey, Peter Shillingsburg, and George K. Thiruvathukal, http://www.woolfonline.com/?node=content/image/gallery&project=1&parent=2&taxa=6&content=732.
