Godrevy Lighthouse: Log Book.
VIRGINIA WOOLF VISITS THE LIGHTHOUSE
(Woolf, Virginia.) Manuscript registry for the Godrevy Lighthouse, the inspiration for To the Lighthouse. St. Ives, Cornwall, 1859-1934.
8vo.; over 150 pages; blue lined leaves; columns for Date, Name, and Residence; brown half-cloth; “Visitors’ Book” in gilt on the upper panel beneath the Trinity House arms; light wear.
The Light-keepers’ visitors registry recording 159 signatures between 1859 and 1934, including two visits by a young Virginia Stephen. On the first visit, aged 10, she signed for herself: A.V. Stephen / London on September 12, 1892, beneath the signature of her brother Thoby, who signed, J.T. Stephen / London. Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt, a former suitor of Virginia’s mother, who was also along for the trip, signed beneath Virginia.
Though this entry is undated, the visit is detailed by Virginia and her siblings in their family paper, The Hyde Park Gate News, which places it on September 12, 1892. Two years later, almost to the day – September 17, 1894 -- her father Leslie Stephen signed for her and her siblings, recording another end-of-summer journey.
The earliest Stephen visit recorded is August 24, 1887: Thoby visited with his half-brother Gerald Duckworth, friend J.W. Hills, and Leslie Stephen.
To the Lighthouse is set in the Hebrides but draws almost exclusively from the landscape around St. Ives, where Virginia’s family summered from her birth in 1882 until her mother’s death in 1894. Each summer the family rented Talland House, with the now famous views across the bay to Godrevy Lighthouse. The lighthouse itself was built in 1859, an octagonal tower 86 feet tall, of rubble stone in mortar, designed by Scotsman James Walker.
Woolf’s nephew Quentin Bell discusses the importance of St. Ives to her life and work:
St. Ives provided a treasury of reminiscent gold from which Virginia drew again and again; we find it not only in To the Lighthouse, but in Jacob’s Room, and, I think, in The Waves. For her, Cornwall was the Eden of her youth, an unforgettable paradise, and she was always grateful to her parents for having fixed on that spot. (Virginia Woolf, 1982, i.32)
Print Inquire
