Critical Reception

Abstract

When Leonard Woolf read the manuscript of To the Lighthouse he pronounced it his wife’s best work. It was in his view a psychological poem and a masterpiece. Virginia Woolfs sister, Vanessa Bell, naturally read it with their parents in mind. Her reaction was totally positive: It seems to me that in the first part of the book you have given a portrait of mother which is more like her to me than anything I could ever have conceived of as possible. It is almost painful to have her so raised from the dead … [It is] shattering to find oneself face to face with those two again.’ (Vanessa Bell’s letter is printed in an Appendix to volume 3 of Virginia Woolf’s Letters.)