On 31 January 1939, Virginia Woolf noted in her diary: ‘I wrote the old Henry Taylor telescope story that has been humming in my head these 10 years.’ The short story to which she was referring was published as ‘The Searchlight’ in the posthumous A Haunted House and Other Stories. The ‘humming’ had, however, already been transferred to the page ten years previously, when Woolf wrote a story which she entitled ‘What the Telescope Discovered’, followed a year later by the incomplete ‘Incongruous/Inaccurate Memories’. In all, Woolf produced some fourteen different drafts of ‘the telescope story’, with fragments of other drafts. A number of the later draft versions set the scene at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, where Woolf’s great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, a pioneer photographer, and her close neighbour and friend the Poet Laureate Alfred Tennyson were living in the mid-nineteenth century.

While some of the drafts of Woolf’s ‘telescope story’ are dated, others are not, leading to uncertainties about the chronology of the story’s composition. J. W. Graham, in an article published in 1976 that was the first to look in detail at the variant drafts, took the published version, ‘The Searchlight’, as the culminating narrative for Woolf. He noted the date of the first of the ‘Searchlight drafts’ as 31 January 1939 (the date Woolf gives in her diary), but records three subsequent, though undated, typescripts. The last of these was, he argued, clearly the work of a professional typist and hence a ‘final’ version. His argument was that