Welcome to Woolf Online

Published in 2013, Woolf Online is currently a digital archive of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927)

Project Overview

The site is intended to serve as a resource for research and study of Woolf's modernist classic. On this site you will find images and transcriptions of the holograph drafts (in three notebooks housed in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library), the typescripts, the proofs, and various early editions of the novel, including the first British and American editions and their variants. Also included is a wealth of contextual materials, such as diary entries and letters pertaining to the novel, early reviews of the novel, selected essays Woolf wrote during the two- year period during which she worked on To the Lighthouse, and photographs of the Stephen family, Cornwall, and Talland House, all of which inform the setting and characters of the novel. Because the three notebooks housed in the Berg Collection are fragile and access to them is now severely limited, Woolf Online performs an especially valuable service by making these drafts available to scholars, students and the public at large in brilliant images, easily legible with the aid of a magnifying feature and easily readable with transcriptions that overlay images of the originals. Users of this site can page through Woolf's handwritten drafts from cover to cover as if they were in the Berg reading room. Even the verso pages, where Woolf sometimes calculated how many words she had written so far, have been included here.

For further information please consult the following: