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

About the event

Virginia Woolf scholar Emily Kopley will present two lectures on Dec. 3 and 4 at WSU’s Holland and Terrell Libraries. Kopley’s Dec. 4 lecture, “The Lighthouse as Tree: Vanessa Bell’s Cover for To the Lighthouse and Virginia Woolf’s 1902 Edition of Wordsworth,” is set from 3-4:30 p.m. in the Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections reading room.

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, Kopley said, as does an apparent source for Bell’s cover design, a sketch of three trees on the back endpapers of Woolf’s 1902 edition of Wordsworth.

“Recognizing the sketch—which is probably by Bell—as a source for the cover of To the Lighthouse enriches the novel’s memorialization of Leslie and Julia Stephen, the parents of Woolf and Bell,” Kopley said.

Kopley is the author of Virginia Woolf and Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2021). She teaches at McGill University in the Department of Jewish Studies.