Lily Briscoe in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse

One element of Lily Briscoe's fibre as artist that can

be traced to Woolf's character as writer is the element of

insecurity, selfcriticism, selfconsciousness, self interrogative sentence that may be said to en chemise all artists nevertheless particularly women artists. That this element is fundamental to Lily's persona in the early on part of the book is promisen in an early episode of the novel, when Lily is putt away her paints after a session with Mrs. Ramsay and James. She has just had a mild epiphany of aesthetic insight into the attraction between Mr. Bankes and Mrs. Ramsay. therefore she glances at her painting:

She could apply wept. It was bad, it was bad, it was

infinitely bad! She could have done it differently of

course; the colour could have been weakened and faded; the

shapes etherealised; that was how Paunceforte would have seen

it. But then she did not see it like that. she saw the

colour burning on a framework of steel; the light of a

butterfly's wing manufacture upon the arches of a cathedral. Of

all that only a few random marks scrawled upon the canvas

remained. And it would never be seen; never be hung even,

and there was Mr. Tansley whispering in her ear, "Women

can't paint, women can't write . . ." (Woolf, To the

The deliberate parallels that Woolf draws between Lily and Woolf herself can be construe from several points of view.

The cliche injunction to writers of writing what they know is doubtlessly one aspect of this, and certain superficial similarities between Woolf and Lily may be easily discerned. In To the Lighthouse, Woolf paints a picture of what Martin Luther fairy Jr. in another context called "the bleakness of complain despair" (King 90), and it is Lily who comes closest to noticing the depth and content of that despair among the Ramsays. The restitution of the connection between character and writer in the case of To the Lighthouse also goes to Woolf's using Lily and the novel as a whole for multiple purposes: as a means of elaborating characters of mental realism, as a means of discussing aesthetic sensibility in general and Woolf's aesthetic attitude in particular, and as an pattern or emblem of aesthetic method or approach. The really fact of the novel argues that Woolf herself may be associated with these purposes, and it is supported two by Woolf's other writing and by the research of assorted commentators.

It has become customary to write of Virginia Woolf as though

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