ok is seen in an early episode of the novel, when Lily is putting away her paints after a session with Mrs. Ramsay and James. She has just had a mild epiphany of aesthetic insight into the attraction between Mr. Bankes and Mrs. Ramsay. Then she glances at her painting:
She could have wept. It was bad, it was bad, it was
infinitely bad! She could have done it differently of
course; the colour could have been thinned and faded; the
shapes etherealised; that was how Paunceforte would have seen
it. But then she did not see it like that. she saw the
colour burning on a framework of steel; the light of a
butterfly's wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral. Of
all that only a few random marks scrawled upon the canvas
remained. And it would never be seen; never be hung even,
and there was Mr. Tansley whispering in her ear, "Women
can't paint, women can't write . . ." (Woolf, To the
Elsewhere, Lily reflects on her own capacity as artist when she chats with Mr. Bankes about the masterpieces he has seen on the continent. It may be better, she concludes in a fit of what might be termed artistically self conscious pique, not to see the great masterpieces: "they only made one hopelessly discontented with one's own work" (Woolf, To the Lighthouse 72). A connection may also be seen between Lily's dissatisfaction with her work and Woolf's discussion of women writers in A Room of One's Own, wherein Woolf says that great literature emerges only in part as a result of luminous talent. That talent needs to be nurtured, not merely by immediate family or against concerns of food, shelter, and clothing (though this helps), but by a tradition of art. As Woolf puts it, the lack of such a tradition "must have told enormously upon the writing of women" (Woolf, Room 77). The key seems to be to "transmit emotion without impediment" (98). She takes to task a ...