The Ties that Bind: Virginia Woolf, Leslie Stephen and Ancestral Mountains

Abstract

This article examines Virginia Woolf’s late short story, ‘The Symbol’, which takes as its focus the problem of writing the mountain landscape. Not only is the mountain vulnerable to misrepresentation in being “elevated” to the function of a literary symbol, for Woolf it is also freighted with the overbearing weight of her father’s mountaineering legacy, both on the slopes and on the written page. Read in the light of the Alpine exploits of her father (Sir Leslie Stephen), this article presents ‘The Symbol’ not as a minor work on the peripheries of the writer’s oeuvre, but as an important vehicle through which Woolf is able to confront not only her ambivalent relationship with her late father and his legacy, but also the ontological complexities of representing the mountain in creative fiction.