Cather and Woolf in Dialogue: The Professor's House and To the Lighthouse

Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 2008 by Poresky, Louise A

Perhaps the ocean that lay between Willa Cather and Virginia Woolf has prevented critics from investigating how these two authors influenced each other. Hermione Lee discusses Cather and Woolf s shared "alliance to modernism" (190), and Josephine O'Brien Schaefer traces a single theme, that of war, in novels by Cather and Woolf, but neither suggests that the authors had each other in mind. Leon Edel makes a side comment on the topic-"I have always suspected that Virginia Woolf was influenced by [The Professor's House's] structure in writing To the Lighthouse, a novel with a similar tripartite story, set in different moments of time, in which houses (including the lighthouse) also provide the organizing symbol" (207)-but then proceeds with his primary purpose, a psychoanalytic treatment of The Professor's House. It is only Deborah Lindsay Williams who explores a direct relationship between Cather and Woolf. She sees Mrs. Ramsay in Lucy Gayheart as Cather's "deliberate gesture" toward Woolf s To the Lighthouse (30) and presents a convincing argument that Cather responds to Woolf s portrait of Lily Briscoe and her notion of aesthetics by her creation of Lucy Gayheart. Abundant evidence suggests, however, that a dialogue between Cather and Woolf begins even earlier, with The Professor's House, to which Woolf responds with To the Lighthouse.1

The onset of this dialogue is rooted in the historical details surrounding the composition of these two books. In the summer of 1924, Willa Cather wrote The Professor's House in her rustic cottage on Grand Manan Island. She worked at a furious pace and told her friend, the playwright Zoë Akins, that afterjust two weeks in the country "she was nearly half finished with the first draft of the novel" (Woodress 355). That same summer, over 3000 miles across the Atlantic from the Bay of Fundy, Virginia Woolf was also writing at a furious pace in Monk's House and nearly completed Mrs. Dalloway. At their respective country homes both women worked at their desks during the morning hours, Cather with a view of wild woods and water and Woolf with one of the river Ouse and the hills beyond. In the afternoons each went for a long walk, Woolf "through landscapes of astonishing beauty" (Bell 72) and Cather along the dramatic sea cliffs described in "Before Breakfast."

Cather returned to New York in the fall of 1924 to put the finishing touches on her novel about a man, Godfrey St. Peter, who, though only in his early fifties, sees himself as "quite as near the end of his road as his grandfather had been" when "well on in his eighties" (TPH242).2 In October 1924, just after her return to London and upon completing Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf "could see the Old Man"-and by this," Quentin Bell states, "she almost certainly meant To the Lighthouse" (105). But the last months of 1924, Bell continues, "were spent in preparing Mrs. Dalloway for the press [. . .] and in finishing The Common Reader" (105).

The following spring Cather's novel was bought by Collier's and the first of three installments printed and available in its June issue. Woolf had not yet written a word of To the Lighthouse, but she knew its contents as if they had already been committed to paper:

This is going to be fairly short: to have father's character done complete in it; & mother's; & St. Ives; & childhood; and all the usual things I try to put in-life, death &c. But the center is father's character, sitting in a boat, reciting We perished, each alone, while he crushes a dying mackerel. (Diary 18-19)

During the summer of 1925, while Gather's The Professor's House was being serialized in Collier's, Woolf further developed the concept of To the Lighthouse and, in August, wrote down its first words. But with the personal nature of the novel, the capturing of her own father and mother in Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, along with working long hours at the Hogarth Press and keeping up a hectic social schedule, Woolf suddenly collapsed at Charleston and suffered a bout of ill health that lasted the rest of the year. By the time she returned to To the Lighthouse in January 1926, The Professor's House had been out in book form for five months.

Though we have no explicit evidence that Woolf modeled To the Lighthouse after The Professor's House, Woolf clearly knew Gather's work. During the hiatus in her writing of To the Lighthouse, Woolf published her essay "American Fiction" in which she counts Willa Gather among a small group of American writers that the British "should do well to examine carefully" (174). In addition, after completing To the Lighthouse, Woolf records in her diary her annoyance at having turned down £30 to write on Gather because she thought she hadn't the time to devote to the article. "I am exacerbated by the fact that I spent 4 days last week hammering out de Quincey," Woolf writes, "which has been lying about since June; so refused £30 to write on Willa Gather; & now shall be quit in a week I hope of this unprofitable fiction [To the Lighthouse], & could have wedged in Willa before going back" (Diary 109).