Virginia Woolf Scholar Presents Dec. 3 and 4 Lectures on Writer’s Books

Virginia Woolf scholar Emily Kopley will present two lectures on Dec. 3 and 4 at Washington State University’s Holland and Terrell Libraries. Kopley describes Woolf’s personal library, the writer’s exploration of poetry, and the cover art of To the Lighthouse, inspired by Woolf’s 1902 edition of English poet William Wordsworth.

WSU purchased Woolf’s private library in 1969, and it became public in 1971. The Woolf Library fills 219 shelves of books, totaling roughly 9,900 volumes, in WSU’s Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC).

Kopley’s Dec. 3 lecture, “Virginia Woolf’s Poetry Library,” is intended for a wide audience and takes place from 3-4 p.m. in the old Holland Library lobby (first floor adjacent to the Dimensions Lab). Focusing on Woolf’s poetry titles, Kopley said these books help readers to understand Woolf’s attitude towards poetry, which she considered a rival and muse to her own form, the novel.

“The dates of inscriptions, signatures, and bookplates support a narrative nowhere explicitly conveyed: the deaths of the poetry tastemakers in Woolf’s family—in particular, her father and her older brother—freed her to explore poetry without a guide,” Kopley said. “This turn towards poetry inspired the rhythmical, impressionistic prose for which Woolf is celebrated.”

Following the lecture, attendees are invited to the MASC reading room in Terrell Library’s ground floor to see more from the Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf.

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 meant for a smaller, more specialized audience and is set from 3-4:30 p.m. in the MASC 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 explores the novel’s textual debt to Wordsworth, particularly his “Immortality Ode,” as well as the book’s material debt to the poet, or rather to Woolf’s copy of his works. Leslie Stephen turned to Wordsworth when mourning his first wife and, later, his second, and wrote of Wordsworth’s consoling power in his letters, in the essay “Wordsworth’s Ethics” (1876), and in a memoir that his children called “the Mausoleum Book.”

“Woolf and Bell followed their father in their reading,” Kopley said. “They looked to Wordsworth, and to the 1902 volume specifically, to help them make remarkable art that immortalizes their dead.”

Kopley is the author of Virginia Woolf and Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2021). Her essays on Woolf appear in the TLS (Times Literary Supplement), Review of English Studies, English Literature in Transition, Teaching Modernist Women’s Writing in English (Modern Language Association, 2021), Unpacking the Personal Library: The Public and Private Life of Books (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2022), and elsewhere. She is on the board of Woolf Studies Annual and has received grants from the Mellon Foundation, the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. She teaches at McGill University in the Department of Jewish Studies.