Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

The Evening Under Lamplight…
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one particular photograph of Julia sitting on these steps with Virginia and Adrian in the
background as foundational to the triangle motif in the book (Kukil pl. 37d), along with
one of Julia holding Vanessa, which imitates the monumental triangularity of Renaissance
Madonnas (pl. 36j). But the tradition of shooting Julia in triangular formats seems to have
quite a long history: from an image of Julia as a child wrapped in a cloak rendered by her
Aunt, Julia Margaret Cameron (pl. 31a), to the portrait of Julia with her fi rst husband,
Herbert Duckworth, also included in Leslie Stephen’s album (pl. 33a), to what Kukil
designates as Vanessa’s favorite photograph of her mother, the image of Julia looking out
a triangularly-draped window, haloed by an aura of radiant light (pl. 39c). Clearly, Woolf,
like her artist heroine Lily Briscoe, is here synthesizing a whole series of detailed and literal
observations into the abstraction of signifi cant form. 6
We can also fi nd a number of other less abstracted images of Julia in the book. One
of the most striking is Mr. Tansley’s mythifi cation of Mrs. Ramsay as a kind of earth goddess,
standing in front of a picture of Queen Victoria. Th e lyrical vision of her “With stars
in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets” (TTL 14) corresponds
almost exactly to one of Cameron’s photographs of Julia Duckworth, included by Leslie
Stephen in Th e Mausoleum Book (facing p. 58). Her pose in Cameron’s picture also echoes
a common image of Queen Victoria “wearing the blue ribbon of the garter” (TTL 14),
seen here in a souvenir postcard which I incorporated into my altered book (see Figure 2),
and also available as a scrap (Allen and Hoverstadt pl. 91 [111]).
Figure 2: Altered book Anyone Can Draw by Elisa Kay Sparks, pp. 5-6.
Similarly literal though more diff use and elaborated is the reference to another photograph
from Th e Mausoleum Book, the famous one of the young Virginia observing Leslie
and Julia reading at Talland House which Leslie Stephen specifi cally cites as one that
makes him “see as with my bodily eyes” Julia’s “holy and tender love” (Stephen 58-59).