What Was Virginia Woolf Looking for in the Night Sky? / Josh Wilbur. In: Lit Hub Daily Dec. 4, 2018

“Behind the cotton wool of daily life is hidden a pattern,” wrote Virginia Woolf. In life and literature, this was her destination: raw, unfiltered reality.
It’s no wonder, then, that astronomy fascinated her. “When you consider things like the stars,” says Katharine in Night and Day, “our affairs don’t seem to matter much do they?” The night sky reveals a vast and enigmatic universe, and Woolf often gazed up in her pursuit of the grand scheme.
Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, was a preeminent man of letters who partook in the Victorian obsession with natural history. His library was filled with volumes, old and new, on biology, geology, and astronomy, and the young Virginia, who did not receive a formal education, spent much of her childhood among this reservoir of knowledge. “I owe all the education I ever had to my father’s library,” she would later write. Woolf almost certainly would have learned about the movements of the planets, the cycles of the moon, and the distance of the stars. During the late 19th century, European intellectual society was grappling with a new awareness of deep time and unprecedented scale, and Woolf grew up in the midst of this sea change.  
As Woolf grew older, she not only developed an interest in stargazing (eventually mounting a telescope at her summer home) but also kept up with the astronomical science of the day. In her 2003 book, Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science, Holly Henry provides a rich body of evidence that Woolf was knowledgeable about the stars and planets as well as the revolutionary discoveries of Einstein and Hubble. Woolf learned the broad facts of astronomy as an avid reader of James Jeans, who wrote The Mysterious Universe (a widely-read science book for laypeople). Woolf interiorized Jeans’ descriptions of an incalculably large, turbulent universe, and, as Henry notes, “passages taken nearly verbatim from Jean’s non-technical astronomy books appear in […] The Waves (1931) and The Years (1937).” Woolf understood well the strangeness of outer space, the significance of distinct galaxies, and, as she wrote in “The Narrow Bridge of Art,” that “the age of the earth is 3,000,000,000 years; that human life lasts but a second…it is in this atmosphere of doubt and conflict that writers have now to create…” ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/what-was-virginia-woolf-looking-for-in-the-night-sky/