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This paper tries to explain why Mrs Ramsay, the protagonist of Virginia Woolf's novel  To the Lighthouse  (1927), reads the probably most misogynist fairy tale by the brothers Grimm,  The Fisherman and His Wife , to her son James. The article highlights the tale's function in the novel, examining first the intertextual use Woolf makes of it, then the nature of the German fairy story, including a brief excursion into the fictional debate about its genesis in Günter Grass' novel  Der Butt  (1977), and finally exploring the meanings of the tale in two Italian variants of the early sixteenth century which have only recently been discovered. This allows us to show the centrality of the fairy tale not only for the section containing it, but for the novel as a whole. The tale focusses on the novel's main theme: desire or the power of symbolic investment. How far should women's wishes be restrained or fulfilled – if they are fulfilled, they may lead to the disruption of the social and symbolic order, as the German tale demonstrates – or, how much may one ask of ‘the sea’ (of life), as does the fisherman's wife, without running the risk of losing everything? These are the key questions of both the tale and the novel. Intertextuality operates in two directions: the tale states the topic,  To the Lighthouse  reshapes it.

Virginia Woolf and the Flounder. The Refashioning of Grimms' “The Fisherman and His Wife” (KHM 19, AaTh/ATU 555) in “To The Lighthouse”