To the Lighthouse

ABOUT THE BOOK

Using Virginia Woolf’s distinctive stream-of-consciousness approach, the narrative of

To the Lighthouse wavers between members of the Ramsay family and their guests on
two separate occasions, at their remote holiday house in the Isle of Skye. Flitting
lightly over major events, the book focuses intensely on the internal life of the
characters. The immediate experience of each moment, and the changing atmosphere
between a group of human beings and within individual minds, are vividly explored.
At the heart of the novel is the matriarch Mrs Ramsay, an enigmatic and saintly
figure, to whom the others look for the achievement of the perfect, if temporary
fulfilment that transcends the transient nature of day-to-day life.

‘More beauty and penetrative characterization than can here be described resides
within this book’
Rachel A. Taylor, review, Spectator,1927

‘[Woolf] and Sterne are both fantasists. They start with a little object,
take a flutter from it, and settle on it again. They combine a humorous
appreciation of the muddle of life with a keen sense of its beauty’
E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 1927

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, first
editor of The Dictionary of National Biography, and sister of the artist Vanessa Bell.
In 1912 she was married to the writer Leonard Woolf, and moved in advanced,
bohemian circles for most of her life. An influential member of the Modernist
movement, her contemporaries included T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence and Roger Fry.
Besides founding the Hogarth Press with her husband in1917, Woolf was a prolific
writer, a thinker and an essayist, author of the progressively feminist A Room of One’s
Own. Having suffered from a series of mental breakdowns throughout her life, on the
28th of March 1941 she killed herself.

REACTIONS TO THE NOVEL

http://www.uah.edu/woolf/lighthousecontemprev.html

Contemporary Reviews of To the Lighthouse

Unsigned review, Times Literary Supplement—5 May 1927

In form To the Lighthouse is as elastic as a novel can be… while it depends almost on
the passing of time, it expands or contracts the time-sense very freely…It is a book,
with an ironical or wistful questioning of life and reality…the people in Mrs.Woolf’s
book seem to be looking through each other at some farther question; and, although
they interact vividly, they are not completely real…to know people in outline is one
way of knowing them. And they are seen here in the way they are meant to be seen.
But the result is that, while you know quite well the kind of people represented in the
story, they lack something as individuals . . . A sad book in the main , with all its
entertainment, it is one to return to.

Louis Kronenberger, review, New York Times—8 May 1927

To the Lighthouse . . .is a book of interrelationships among people, and though there
are major and minor characters the major ones…[are] more truly the means for
giving to the story its harmony and unity, its focal points. Those who reject To the
Lighthouse as inferior to Mrs. Dalloway because it offers no one with half the
memorable lucidity of Clarissa Dalloway must fail to perceive its larger and,
artistically, more difficult aims. They must fail to notice the richer qualities of mind
and imagination and emotion which Mrs. Woolf, perhaps not wanting them, omitted
from Mrs. Dalloway…the story which opens brilliantly and carries on through a
magnificent interlude ends with too little force and expressiveness. At any rate the
rest of the book has its excellencies . . .Mrs. Woolf makes use of her remarkable
method of characterization, a method not based on observation or personal
experience, but purely synthetic, purely creational…Neither Clarissa nor Mrs.
Ramsay has anything autobiographical about her…It is, I think, in the superb
interlude called ‘Time Passes’ that Mrs. Woolf reaches the most impressive
height of the book . . . It is inferior to Mrs. Dalloway in the degree to which its aims
are achieved; it is superior in the magnitude of the aims themselves.

Arnold Bennet, review, Evening Standard—23 June 1927

I must say, despite my notorious grave reservations concerning Virginia Woolf, that
the most original of the bunch is To the Lighthouse. It is the best book of hers that I
know. Her character drawing has improved. Mrs. Ramsay almost amounts to a
complete person. Unfortunately she goes and dies, and her decease cuts the book in
two…The middle part, entitled ‘Time Passes’, shows a novel device to give the reader
the impression of the passing of time…In my opinion it does not succeed. It is a short
cut,
but a short cut that does not get you anywhere. I have heard a good deal about the
wonders of Mrs. Woolf’s style. She sometimes discovers a truly brilliant simile…The
form of her sentences is rather tryingly monotonous, and the distance between her
nominatives and her verbs is steadily increasing. Still, To the Lighthouse has stuff in
it strong enough to withstand quite a lot of adverse criticism.

STARTING POINTS FOR YOUR DISCUSSION:

Which characters did you sympathise with?

What could the lighthouse represent?

What is the effect of Mrs Ramsay’s death, both on the other characters and the
atmosphere of the book?

How do you react to the revelations in the section, Time Passes?

How is artistic ambition treated in various characters in the book?

What is the nature of Mrs Ramsay’s female power? In what ways is her evening meal
similar and different to the artistic endeavours of those around her?

How much do working class characters come into the book? Is its middle-class focus
a failing, or an accurate representation of the social world that the Ramsays live in?

Do the shifts in time and narrative focus create a feeling of restlessness? How does
this reflect the way Woolf’s characters experience the world?

Does each character tend to find an icon or symbol of some sort, like James’
obsession with the lighthouse, or Mr Ramsay’s lines of verse? How does this affect
our understanding of the characters?

How effectively do the different viewpoints co-exist within the novel?

OTHER BOOKS BY VIRGINIA WOOLF:

Novels:

The Voyage Out, 1915

Night and Day, 1919

Jacob's Room, 1922

Mrs. Dalloway, 1925

Orlando, 1928

The Waves, 1931

The Years, 1937

Between the Acts,1941

Non-fiction:

The Common Reader: First Series, 1925

A Room of One's Own, 1929

The Common Reader: Second Series, 1932

Three Guineas, 1938

Roger Fry: a Biography, 1940

SUGGESTED FURTHER READING:

Mrs Dalloway ~ Virginia Woolf

The Hours ~ Michael Cunningham
Dubliners ~ James Joyce
Howards End ~ E M Forster
The Waste Land ~T S Eliot

OTHER ONLINE RESOURCES:

The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain: www.virginiawoolfsociety.co.uk

The International Virginia Woolf Society: www.utoronto.ca/IVWS/

BBC Four Audio Interviews:

www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/profilepages/woolfv1.shtml