Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

“THE EVENING UNDER LAMPLIGHT…WITH THE PHOTOGRAPH
ALBUM”: TO THE LIGHTHOUSE AS FAMILY SCRAPBOOK
by Elisa Kay Sparks
Ever since Diane Gillespie’s germinal essay “‘Her Kodak Pointed at His Head’: Virginia
Woolf and Photography” (1993), scholarship on, theorizing about, and availability
of photographs from the Stephen family archives have continued to increase in quantity
and quality. 1 Maggie Humm’s recent books, Modernist Women and Visual Cultures and
Snapshots of Bloomsbury, Vanessa Curtis’s detailed documentation of Th e Hidden Houses of
Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, Marion Bell and Marion Whybrow’s account of Virginia and
Vanessa’s memories of St. Ives, as well as Karen Kukil’s helpful curatorship of Leslie Stephen’s
photo album, now posted on the Smith College Library’s web site, represent the latest and
best of this tradition. As Humm and Kukil and a number of other scholars have noted, To
the Lighthouse draws heavily on the collection of family photographs Woolf reviewed during
its composition, including not only those selected by her father while he was writing Th e
Mausoleum Book, but also those of her great aunt, Julia Margaret Cameron, which she was
then sorting for her Introduction to Victorian Photographs of Famous Men & Fair Women
(published by the Hogarth Press in1926). Recent scholarship has also explored the role
public photographs play in the novel; see for example the work of Alexandra Neel and Leslie
Hankins on the photography and fi lms of Antarctic expeditions.
In creating an altered book on To the Lighthouse, I recently had cause to re-think
the role that photography plays in the novel in a seldom used visual register. As I
Figure 1: Altered book Anyone Can Draw by Elisa Kay Sparks, pp. 1-2.