Virginia Woolf and the Natural World: Summer Course 2026
Further information about the lectures and talks on this course.
Lectures
Alison Hennegan, Women and Nature in Jacob’s Room (1922)
The relation between women and nature is an uneasy one in Jacob’s Room (1922). Women abound in the novel – mothers, wives, daughters, mistresses, servants – and the presence of the natural world is everywhere present. But for Jacob and his male peers, in their predominantly sexually segregated worlds of school and university, real women are a perpetual riddle, part threat, part idealised fantasy.
Here they are seen as threat during a service in the College chapel: misplaced, and dehumanised in their comparison with dogs, the wrong sort of ‘natural’:
No one would think of bringing a dog into church. For though a dog is all very well on a gravel path, and shows no disrespect to the flowers, the way he wanders down an aisle, looking, lifting a paw, and approaching a pillar with a purpose that makes the blood run cold …
… a dog destroys the service completely. So do these women … Heaven knows why it is. For one thing thought Jacob, they’re as ugly as sin. - Jacob’s Room, pp. 39-40
And understanding these troublesome creatures is made harder by the version of women offered by the Greek and Roman classical literature in which the young men have been immersed since boyhood and in which Woman is aligned with the natural world in perplexing and unhelpful ways.
This lecture addresses the novel’s exploration of the many tensions between conflicting notions of Nature and Woman, and the struggles of actual men, especially young ones, to make sense of women and to reach some partial accommodation with them.
Karina Jakubowicz, The Artist’s Garden in To the Lighthouse (1927)
‘So now [Lily] always saw, when she thought of Mr Ramsay’s work, a scrubbed kitchen table. It lodged now in the fork of a pear tree, for they had reached the orchard. And with a painful effort of concentration, she focused her mind, not upon the silver-bossed bark of the tree, or upon its fish-shaped leaves, but upon a phantom kitchen table, one of those scrubbed board tables, grained and knotted, whose virtue seems to have been laid bare by years of muscular integrity, which stuck there, its four legs in air.’
- Woolf, To the Lighthouse, Part I
From the turbulent ocean beyond the Ramsays’ summer home, to the forked pear tree and flowerbeds in the garden surrounding the house, To the Lighthouse is full of images of nature that radiate with significance. As we see in Lily’s painting of the garden, these motifs are not simply decorative or benign. Rather, they are places of struggle for identity and self-worth.
This lecture explores the importance of nature and the garden to Woolf’s thinking about gender in the novel. What does the garden mean to Mrs Ramsay, Victorian wife, mother, and gardener? And what does it mean to Lily, a modern woman and an artist who chooses not to marry? And how, in turn, does the garden shape these different visions of womanhood?
Kate Eliot, Land and Sea in The Waves (1931)
This remarkable book begins with dawn breaking over sea:
‘The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.
As they neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thin veil of white water across the sand. The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously. Gradually the dark bar on the horizon became clear as if the sediment in an old wine-bottle had sunk and left the glass green. Behind it, too, the sky cleared as if the white sediment there had sunk, or as if the arm of a woman couched beneath the horizon had raised a lamp and flat bars of white, green and yellow spread across the sky like the blades of a fan. Then she raised her lamp higher and the air seemed to become fibrous and to tear away from the green surface flickering and flaming in red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from a bonfire. Gradually the fibres of the burning bonfire were fused into one haze, one incandescence which lifted the weight of the woollen grey sky on top of it and turned it to a million atoms of soft blue. The surface of the sea slowly became transparent and lay rippling and sparkling until the dark stripes were almost rubbed out. Slowly the arm that held the lamp raised it higher and then higher until a broad flame became visible; an arc of fire burnt on the rim of the horizon, and all round it the sea blazed gold.’
Between the episodes of her characters’ lives, Woolf writes intense, sometimes eerie, scenes from nature. What do they mean? Why are the sea and the sky so important in this novel of six intertwined lives?
Trudi Tate, The Weather in History: The Years (1937)
Virginia Woolf’s late novel, The Years (1937), is divided into unnumbered chapters, each set in a particular year: 1880, 1891, 1907, etc. The book is a remarkable history of Woolf’s lifetime. Each section begins with a description of the time of day, the season, the weather, the natural world.
For example, the 1891 chapter opens in London, in autumn, while the 1911 chapter, by contrast, opens in high summer in the south of France and moves to Dorset. Each scene is beautiful, lyrical, somewhat puzzling. What do the lyrical descriptions mean? Why does Woolf approach the history of her own time through nature, especially the seasons and the weather?
Now, in the time of climate change, we see weather as historical, affected in part by human activities, with damaging consequences for humans, agriculture, and the natural world. How does the natural world look to Woolf in the 1930s? How does she see nature in history?
Ellie Mitchell, Earth and Sky in Between the Acts (1941)
Taking place in 'a hollow [...] in the very heart of England', Between the Acts is a novel which roots itself deep in the earth. In this lecture, Ellie will explore the vertical spatiality of the novel, positioning it in relation to contemporary discussions in history, archaeology, and geology. Moving downwards and upwards, the lecture will traverse the shape of the land in Between the Acts, digging down to retrieve its buried histories and looking up to contemplate the role of the sky, the threat of warfare from the aeroplanes overhead, and the mediating act of rainfall.
Talks
Harriet Baker on Woolf’s Asheham Diary.
Harriet will introduce us to this diary, and Woolf's experiment in nature writing. She will read some extracts, and situate the diary within Woolf's life and work.
Bonnie Lander Johnson on the history of Woodland
In her book Vanishing Landscapes: The Story of Plants and How We Lost Them, Bonnie writes:
We all once lived in a landscape. We worked and loved, slept and dreamed inside it. We observed the change of the seasons, the incremental growth of plants and flowers, the sudden movement of wind and rain. We relied on plants for everything but we did not view them as mere objects for our pleasure and useful. We studied them in order to understand the purpose for which they were created. Each plant signified a larger story in which we played a vital role. […] Flowers fattened bees but they also showed us how to live, their faces turned all day to heaven and inward at night. We were not the authors of nature but part of its fabric.
This was our experience of the natural world until we became modern people. In the sixteenth century a convergence of events severed us from the plants we lived among, transforming them into objects for our use and changing the shape of the landscape that is still around us.
Vanishing Landscapes (2025), p. 1
Virginia Woolf, too, was deeply interested in the history of the English landscape and the ways in which it shaped the people and the writing. And Woolf was concerned to see the natural world shrinking under the pressures of modernity.
Bonnie will talk about the history of the English landscape through our relationship to plants and how we lost them. She will focus on woodlands and will look at Woolf’s interest in woodlands in Sussex, where she lived for much of her adult life.
Ann Kennedy Smith on Virginia Woolf, Rupert Brooke, and the ‘Neo-Pagans’
In 1911 Virginia Woolf visited Rupert Brooke in Grantchester and bathed naked with him in the moonlight. That year she dubbed his circle of male and female friends, half-mockingly, ‘the Neo-Pagans’ for their nature-loving unworldliness which stood in contrast to values held by her own more sceptical, intellectual Bloomsbury group.
The outbreak of war, and Brooke’s death in 1915, made the memory of those innocent days of ‘sleeping on the ground, waking at dawn, and swimming in a river’ bittersweet. This talk explores what became of the others in the Neo-Pagan circle, including Gwen and Jacques Raverat, Ka Cox and the four Olivier sisters, and the lasting legacy of their pre-war idyll.
You can read more about the Neo-Pagans in Ann’s Substack post here.
Claudia Tobin on Virginia Woolf at Monks House
In 1919, Virginia and Leonard Woolf bought Monks House, a seventeenth-century cottage in the quiet village of Rodmell, East Sussex with a cottage garden which flowed out into water meadows and the Sussex Downs. It would become a country retreat for the rest of their lives and offered an alternative rhythm to Bloomsbury. It was in her garden writing lodge that Virginia Woolf wrote many of her novels, as well as essays, reviews, and letters. This talk will explore the role of the garden and landscape surrounding Monks House as a generative site for Woolf’s creative life.