SOURCE: Tremper, Ellen. “Prologue: ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’ and Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes.” In “Who Lived at Alfoxton?”: Virginia Woolf and English Romanticism, pp. 35-61. Cranbury, N.J.: Bucknell University Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Tremper investigates the influence of William Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes on Woolf's “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn.”

Here are the poets from whom we descend by way of the mind.

—Between the Acts

Virginia Woolf's relations with her father, Leslie Stephen, were exceptional. Beyond overseeing her education at home, he felt for her an “elective affinity,” unique among his children. She was the one with the literary promise, visible when she was only five or six. She was the one to whom he opened his large library, granting her liberty to roam there at will—an unusual privilege during the Victorian age for a daughter.¹ And later, when...