Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury aesthetics

This chapter will focus on passages from To the Lighthouse which relate to Lily Briscoe and her process of creation. In a way this novel might be understood as an attempt by Virginia Woolf to enter into conversation with those visual artists and visual arts critics who were at the very centre of Bloomsbury aesthetics: Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry. Virginia Woolf's interest in painting, and her anxiety as to how her descriptions of painting in To the Lighthouse would be received by painters, and in particular her sister Vanessa Bell and her friend Roger Fry, is well known. I want to roughly sketch three things in this chapter. First, how the understanding of the interlinked ideas of 'sensation' and 'rhythm' which she develops might be drawn into relation with aesthetic ideas explored by the great French painter Paul Cezanne and described by Roger Fry in his critical writings. Second, by considering her 1934 essay Walter Sickert: A Conversation, I want to draw these ideas into relation with Woolf's anxiety about entering into dialogue with the visual artists and aesthetic theorists in the Bloomsbury group.