Alice to the Lighthouse is the first and only full-length study of the relation between children's literature and writing for adults. Lewis Carroll's Alice books created a revolution in writing for and about children which had repercussions not only for subsequent children's writers - such as Stevenson, Kipling, Nesbit, Frances Hodgson Burnett and Mark Twain - but for Virginia Woolf and her generation. Virginia Woolf's celebration of writing as play rather than preaching is the twin of the Post-Impressionist art championed by Roger Fry. Dusinberre connects books for children in the late...

Dusinberre's book explores Woolf's search, in The Common Reader and other non-fictional writings, for an alternative literary tradition for women. Of equal interest to students of Virginia Woolf and of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing, it discusses Montaigne, Donne, Sir John Harington, Dorothy Osborne, Madame de Sevigne, Pepys and Bunyan, together with forms of writing, such as essays, letters and diaries, traditionally associated with women. Questions about printing, the body and the relation between amateurs and professionals create fascinating connections between the early modern...