Exhibit A: Art and Aesthetics in Woolf's Time

“By the way, surely Lily Briscoe must have been a rather good painter--before her time perhaps, but with great gifts really?”[1] So wrote Vanessa Bell to her sister Virginia Woolf on a spring day in 1927, referring to the fictional young artist inspired by Bell and featured in Woolf’s latest modernist novel, To the Lighthouse. Both Bell, a painter, and Woolf, a writer, participated in conversations around contemporary developments in art and aesthetics: in the early twentieth century, these revolved around Post-Impressionism and form. New conceptions of form in both the visual and literary arts helped pave the way for modernist innovations.  

[1] Vanessa Bell and Regina Marler, Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 318.