This page provides current society news bulletins and links to recent news items related to the study of Virginia Woolf available on the web. While we will attempt to keep this list up to date, it is not comprehensive. Check the links page for other Virginia Woolf resources available on the web. The most current forum for Virginia Woolf news is the VWOOLF Electronic Discussion List, whose members often post recent news items to the list.

Society News Columns:

August 1, 2008

January 25, 2008

Current News Items:

Talland House and the Godrevy Lighthouse

"Turning, she looked across the bay, and there, sure enough, coming regularly across the waves first two quick strokes and then one long steady stroke, was the light of the Lighthouse. It had been lit."
--Virginia Woolf, "The Window," To the Lighthouse

Click on the picture for an enlargement.

The Godrevy Lighthouse
Photo Credit: Anthony Rogers, Gweltek, Ruan Minor, Cornwall, UK. Taken on 30 September 2004, at about 16:30 from Lands End Airfield in Cornwall UK. Please do not replicate this photo without permission.

Godrevy Lighthouse is clearly visible today from the old wrought-iron balconies of Talland House, St Ives, where Virginia Woolf spent 13 idyllic summers between 1882 and 1894. Although her family gave up the lease when Julia Stephen, Woolf’s mother, died aged only 49, something of St. Ives and Cornwall was always to remain with her. Woolf returned again to St Ives after an interval of nearly ten years and crept up the carriage drive to peer at the house and the ghosts of her childhood. From her lodgings in nearby Carbis Bay, she again had a clear view out to Godrevy and it was during this trip in 1905 that the seeds of her famous novel To the Lighthouse were firmly sown. Towards the end of her life, depressed at her inability to write, worried by her shaking hand, frozen by the bitter winter and the strains of living through her second World War, she again turned up the past for comfort, writing of those precious family holidays taken at Talland House. Godrevy is immortalised not just in To the Lighthouse but also in her autobiographical writings, letters and diaries, and in two other novels--The Waves and Jacob's Room. Woolf would no doubt be alarmed to see a new development of modern housing built on the patch of land that her father Leslie Stephen purchased just beneath Talland House with the express intent of protecting the beautiful view out to the lighthouse. She would be shocked by the recent planning permission to build 17 “luxury apartments” on what was once the Talland House orchard and kitchen gardens. But she would be thrilled and relieved to know that in 2005, a plan by Trinity House to switch off Godrevy light was overturned and quashed by not only the harbourmasters and ship owners who rely on the light, but also by the written support of many Woolfians who appreciate the connection between Godrevy Lighthouse and one of the most lyrical and elegiac novels of the twentieth century.
Vanessa Curtis

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