Lily Briscoe

In Virginia Woolfs To the Lighthouse

 Lily's charm was her Chinese eyes, aslant in her white, puckered little
face, but it would take a clever man to see it
Such was the complexity of things. For what happened to her,
especially staying with the Ramsays, was to be made to feel violently
two opposite things at the same time; that's what you feel, was one;
that's what I feel, was the other, and then they fought together in her
mind, as now.
As Lily looked blankly at the canvas, with its uncompromising white
stare she again faces the most immediate question that an artistor a
writermust ask: Where to begin that was the question at what
point to made the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed
her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions
Fictional Women Painters:
Journey to the Silent Kingdom:
Virginia Woolfs To the Lighthouse
Consciousness of a painter at work
Modernism Postimpressionism
Artistic Vision should art be representative of reality?
Inward struggle
Expression of Woolfs ongoing engagement with postimpressionism
and formalist aesthetics
Family
Gender roles
 3 ways of looking at art: 1. colour 2. literary 3. as the artist
Angel of the House killed and embraced
Roger Fry
the reestablishment of purely aesthetic criteria in
place of the criterion of conformity to appearancethe rediscovery
of the principles of structural design and harmonya goal that is
consistent with both Woolf s scheme for the To the Lighthouse and
Lilys vision of her painting.
 Time
Distance
Colours
One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with, she reflected. Fifty pairs of
eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with, she thought.
Among them, must be one that was stone blind to her beauty. One
wanted most some secret sense, fine as air, with which to steal through
keyholes and surround her where she sat knitting, talking, sitting silent
in the window alone; which took to itself and treasured up like the air
which held the smoke of the steamer, her thoughts, her imaginations,
her desires.