In August 1908, as Virginia Woolf worked on what would become her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), she wrote to her brother-in-law, the art critic Clive Bell: ‘I think a great deal of my future, and settle what book I am going to write, how I shall re-form the novel and capture multitudes of things at present fugitive, enclose the whole, and shape infinite strange shapes’ (L, i.356). Two years later, she wrote: ‘you will have to wait … to see what has become of it … I should say that my great change was in the way of courage, or conceit; and that I had given up adventuring after other people's forms’ (L, i.446). These letters show her ambition from the outset to reshape the novel as a genre and, a central tenet in her aesthetics, the desire to ‘capture’, in the whole and enduring work of art, the ‘fugitive’ and momentary. Marcel Proust became exemplary: ‘The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut & as evanescent as a butterfly's bloom’ (D, iii.7). Lily Briscoe, the artist heroine of To the Lighthouse, has similar aspirations for her painting: ‘Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly’s wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron’ (TL, 186).