To the Lighthouse

by Virginia Woolf

In 1910 she volunteered for the movement for women’s suffrage. She also participated that February in a daring hoax that embarrassed the British Navy and led to questions being asked in the House of Commons:

dressing up and posing as the Emperor of Abyssinia and his retinue. The “Dreadnought Hoax” was front-page news, complete with photographs of the phony Ethiopians with flowing robes, blackened faces, and false beards.

To the British establishment, one of the most embarrassing aspects of the Dreadnought affair was that a woman had taken part in the hoax.

Virginia met Leonard Woolf, recently back on leave from Ceylon. Soon after this, Leonard became a lodger at the house Virginia shared with Adrian, the economist John Maynard Keynes, and the painter Duncan Grant.