A Visit to Cornwall with Virginia Woolf
"To the Lighthouse" with the London Literary Salon
Earlier this month, I traveled from Scotland all the way down to Cornwall on the long toe stretching out from southwest England into the Atlantic Ocean. As a fan of Poldark, I’ve long wanted to see Cornwall, and I can say it was worth the two days of travel to get there (thanks to train strikes, which also messed up my travel plans back in December and seem to have no end in sight).
I arrived in the beach town St. Ives on a Thursday afternoon, lugged my suitcase up the hill to my guest house, and then made my way along the winding streets to an artist’s studio overlooking Porthmeor Beach. Inside were eleven people sitting in a circle, one seat left empty for me, ready to discuss Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse. Over the next three days, in five more sessions, we would tease out as much meaning from the novel as we could, before departing again at noontime on Sunday.
Imagine a book club where everyone has read the book, is deeply interested in it, and has loads of insightful and thoughtful things to say, and you have an idea of what it was like. I’ve never experienced anything like it before, despite nearly three decades of teaching literature. The problem with academic courses is that so much material is crammed in that you don’t have time to dig deeply into any one text. That is where an organization like The London Literary Salon comes in.
Started by an American, Toby Brothers, in 2008, in her own living room, the salon grew as it attracted more and more people in the London area who loved to read difficult works of literature and wanted guidance and camaraderie along the way. Works by Proust, Joyce, Homer, and Woolf were the focus of the salon, but more recently offerings have expanded into American literature as well as creative writing and philosophy.
The London Literary Salon has also gone global since the pandemic sent us all online. It now offers an array of virtual, slow-and-steady courses as well as jam-packed sessions in locations associated with the texts under discussion. Imagine discussing Homer in Greece, Henry James in Italy, or Woolf in various sites around England!
I met Toby Brothers through a friend of this newsletter (Sharon Bylenga, whom I’ve mentioned here before—Hi Sharon!). When Toby and I met to discuss the possibility of me teaching a course as the salon expands its course offerings, I mentioned that I’ve been wanting to read To the Lighthouse, since I learned that one of its main characters is a woman artist. Toby told me they were doing a study of the novel in St. Ives, Cornwall—where the novel was set and where Woolf’s family spent two months every summer until her mother died, when she was thirteen. Someone had just canceled, so a spot had opened up. It would start the day after my rental in Gullane, Scotland, ended, after which I had no plans. The universe was sending me a sign, I decided.
I’m not always looking for signs, but over this past year, as I’ve wandered here and there, I’ve tried to remain open to what has come my way. Doing so has led me to places I had not planned in advance to visit—like Sicily and Edinburgh, both of which came to me through serendipity and both of which were life-changing!
Serendipity also delivered to me Virginia Woolf. I decided it was time to dig into her work. I will admit that Woolf has always mildly terrified me. She’s a heavyweight. Biographies about her could be used to build biceps. Formidable is perhaps the best word for her. Joyce, Faulkner, Melville . . . eh. They are nothing to Woolf, in my mind. I guess because I didn’t care so much whether or not I “got” them. But Woolf is larger than life, the most serious of women writers, you might say.
“We think back through our mothers if we are women,” she said in “A Room of One’s Own,” perhaps not realizing how large she would loom over future women writers. But I can’t see her as motherly. She has been like a distant star, spawning galaxies. How many scholars, how many monographs and collections, how many volumes of her diaries, how many referential works? Too many to count.
By the time I finished To the Lighthouse, though, she had come much closer—she was like the sun now, blindingly bright and only visible part of the time, but absolutely necessary, nourishing and life-giving. Reading the novel has felt momentous, as if there is now a life before To the Lighthouse and a life after it.
The time we had together in Cornwall was not all heavy literary discussion. We also had plenty of time to explore the town, including the Barbara Hepworth Museum and the Tate Gallery St. Ives. Together, we took a boat ride out to the Godrevy Lighthouse in St. Ives Bay, which the Woolfs could see from their home in town. They would row out there to visit the lighthouse keeper, who lived on the tiny island alone for up to three months at a time. (The lighthouse been automated since 1935.) On our trip, we learned how rough the sea can be and what a feat it must have been to land there! (Today you can only land by helicopter.) We lucked out and had an unusually calm day, but we were still bobbing all over the place in the rolling waves.
Tomorrow I’ll mail out a more personal letter, for paid subscribers, in which I’ll share some of my thoughts about the novel and the scenes of reading and discussing it in that studio in St. Ives. It was such a special experience, and I have a lot more to say about it.
In the meantime, let me know your recommendations for my month in Paris!
All the best,
Anne
Sounds like a magical journey indeed!! Thank you for taking us along in such a relatable, insightful, and inspiring way! :)
Very interesting.