SOURCE: “The Window: Knowledge of Other Minds in Virginia Woolf's ‘To the Lighthouse,’” in New Literary History, Vol. 26, Autumn, 1995, pp. 731–53.

In the following essay, which was originally presented at the Seventeenth International Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg/Wechsel, Austria, in 1994, Nussbaum discusses the ability of people to know and understand the minds of others as Woolf sets forth her theory in To the Lighthouse.

“How, then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were?”¹ Sitting close to Mrs. Ramsay, “close as she could get” (78), her arms around Mrs. Ramsay's knees, loving her intensely, Lily Briscoe wonders how to get inside her to see the “sacred inscriptions” in her heart, “which if one could spell them out, would teach one everything, but they would never be offered openly, never made public” (79). She searches for a technique by which these internal...