To the Lighthouse

by Virginia Woolf

Stella McNichol (Editor) and Hermione Lee (Notes)

A pioneering work of modernist fiction, using her unique stream-of-consciousness technique to explore the inner lives of her characters, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is widely regarded as one of the greatest artistic achievements of the twentieth century. This Penguin Classics edition is edited by Stella McNichol, with an introduction and notes by Hermione Lee.

To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionistic depiction of a family holiday, and a meditation on marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and bitterness. For years now the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever; but as the First World War looms, the integrity of family and society will be fatally challenged. With a psychologically introspective mode, the use of memory, reminiscence and shifting perspectives gives the novel an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of Victorian and Edwardian literary values.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is regarded as a major 20th century author and essayist, a key figure in literary history as a feminist and modernist, and the centre of 'The Bloomsbury Group', an informal collective of artists and writers that exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture. Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and A Room of One's Own (1929) a passionate feminist essay.

If you enjoyed To the Lighthouse, you might like James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, also available in Penguin Classics.

'Bears endless re-reading ... the sea encircles the story in a brilliant ebb and flow'
Rachel Billington

• ISBN10: 0141183411
• ISBN13: 9780141183411
• Publish Date: 26 October 2000 (first published 5 May 1927)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
• Imprint: Penguin Classics
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 208
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/isbn/9780141183411

Reviews

[brokentune]

2.5*

Mrs. Ramsay sat silent. She was glad, Lily thought, to rest in silence, uncommunicative; to rest in the extreme obscurity of human relationships. Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows even at the moment of intimacy, This is knowledge? Aren’t things spoilt then, Mrs. Ramsay may have asked (it seemed to have happened so often, this silence by her side) by saying them? Aren’t we more expressive thus? The moment at least seemed extraordinarily fertile. She rammed a little hole in the sand and covered it up, by way of burying in it the perfection of the moment. It was like a drop of silver in which one dipped and illumined the darkness of the past.

As much as I hated this book on my first read, I really enjoyed my re-read of it. That is, I enjoyed the act of reading the book this time. The re-read has only slightly improved my enjoying of the book itself.

Woolf's writing still drives me nuts. The stream of consciousness babble that jumps from one idea to the next without really developing any of them just does not work for me.

And while I get that the jumping around is an expression of the fleeting moments of life that connect people with other people, with their surroundings, and with their own thoughts, I find it really alienating and just frustrating to read. The only impression that I got from this style is a doubt over whether the author had any idea what they wanted to say in the first place...before they added several pages of internal thought process from another character's point of view.

It was his fate, his peculiarity, whether he wished it or not, to come out thus on a spit of land which the sea is slowly eating away, and there to stand, like a desolate sea-bird, alone. It was his power, his gift, suddenly to shed all superfluities, to shrink and diminish so that he looked barer and felt sparer, even physically, yet lost none of his intensity of mind, and so to stand on his little ledge facing the dark of human ignorance, how we know nothing and the sea eats away the ground we stand on — that was his fate, his gift. But having thrown away, when he dismounted, all gestures and fripperies, all trophies of nuts and roses, and shrunk so that not only fame but even his own name was forgotten by him, kept even in that desolation a vigilance which spared no phantom and luxuriated in no vision, and it was in this guise that he inspired in William Bankes (intermittently) and in Charles Tansley (obsequiously)and in his wife now, when she looked up and saw him standing at the edge of the lawn, profoundly, reverence, and pity, and gratitude too, as a stake driven into the bed of a channel upon which the gulls perch and the waves beat inspires in merry boat-loads a feeling of gratitude for the duty it is taking upon itself of marking the channel out there in the floods alone.

Seriously. WTF? Get on already with telling us why they yet again can't make it to the flipping lighthouse.

Fret not, reader, they do get there in the end.

(hide spoiler)

Nope the writing was as annoying as on my first read. However, this time around I was better prepared for the sheer onslaught of words that do not seem to support any discernible plot at all.

So, when I got over being annoyed by the writing, I did manage to get something out of the book:

1. I had not realised how much WWI played a part in this story. Seriously, I had totally forgotten that the story is divided in a part before the war and one set after it. And with that realisation this time (I am not sure how I missed this on the first read ... other than really hating the book), there is a point to the different outlook of the characters, and indeed there is also some character development. My favourite of which was that of the character Carmichael. Though, of course, Lily Briscoe, the young artist, also becomes interesting. I kind of saw her as a modernised continuation of Mrs Ramsay in the third part of the story, and I rather liked this portrayal.

2. Which brings me to Mrs. Ramsay. Wowser. What an interesting woman stuck in the customs of her time. Seriously, on this re-read I ended up constantly comparing Mrs. Ramsay to E.M. Forster's Mrs. Wilcox of Howards End.
Both are women brought up and living the mores of the previous generation at a time when the next generation already seem to have moved so far ahead that the Mrs. Ramsays and Mrs. Wilcoxs of the world seem lost and out of place. The tragedy is compounded when both characters express how they are fully aware of their situation but cannot see a way to change.

3. There was quite a lot angst and anxiety in this story: whether it was Mrs. Ramsay feeling trapped in her own life or Lily wallowing in self-doubt after Charles (was it Charles?) tells her that women can't paint (...or be any other kind of true artist).

Was there some of Woolf's own in this? I don't know. However, I really wished that Woolf had dismissed her plan of jumping from thought to thought and from character to character and spent more time with the individual characters themselves.

In summary, I did get a lot more out of the book on the re-read BUT I still dislike the writing style and lack of narrative clarity of the book immensely.

It's not a book I would recommend to anyone. In fact, I'd sooner recommend Mrs. Dalloway, and that one was not a favourite either.

[rohshey]

Oh how will I describe the heaviness of it all. I suppose I must try. I am thinking that one should be warned as the effort you need muster is immense.

Virginia Woolf writes using a stream of consciousness, which provides for an interesting read as she explores the psychological effects of same events on different characters and permits the reader to study the characters in the novel to a greater extent. She doesn't speak from the first-person point of view of each character, but uses the third-person instead, so that all characters, no matter what age, have similar intellectual capacity as it appears. You'll need to devote a great deal of attention to the novel, it is hardly a light book, and you would probably only enjoy it to the full extent if you like this type of writing. Personally, Woolf's style is not one that I prefer, and I had a hard time getting into the novel.

Just as the book began to envelope me within the small world of the Ramsays, the self-conscious cleverness disturbed the engagement. My mind receded from the Ramsays and instead saw Virginia Woolf sitting and thinking of some phrase for readers more impressed by cleverness than simple sincerity.

If you've never read any of her works previously, it is a pretty good novel to begin with to determine whether this style is to your liking.

[celinenyx]

I believe myself to be a highly sensitive person - bright lights annoy me, extremely loud noises drive me to panic attacks, I can go crazy over the ticking of a clock. I know what it's like to hop from one thought to the other, what it's like to daydream without abandon, and how it feels when sensory input becomes too much.

And then Virginia Woolf comes in and puts this all on steroids.

Reading To the Lighthouse was comparable to being inside someone's head when they take LSD. The sort of hyper-reality which Woolf tries to describe through language becomes a caricature of itself. She writes metaphores within metaphores within metaphores, and honestly, that's just not how the human mind works. That's not stream of conciousness, that's attempting to create poetry within prose. I like to be caught up in a stream of thoughts, even if they go from one point to the other without having a frame of reference, because that's relatable to me. What Woolf does in To the Lighthouse has completely lost its point of reference, and the writing irks me like no tomorrow. It's almost impossible to read - and if it sounds so wrong within the readers conciousness, how is it an apt description of someone's conciousness? For example, a boy in his teens watching his father. It starts off just fine, but ends in some weird Poe-esque description that somehow should be representative of a sixteen-year-olds thinking:

He had always kept this old symbol of taking a nife and striking his father to the heart. Only now, as he grew older, and sat staring at his fater in an impotent rage, it was not him, that old man reading, whom he wanted to kill, but it was the thing that descended on him-without his knowing it perhaps: that fierce sudden black-winged harpy, with its talons and its beak all cold and hard, that struck and struck at you (he could feel the beak on his bare legs, where it had struck when he was a child) and then [etc]

I also feel like almost all of the female characters were a version of Woolf herself. Now, this is actually more common in fiction than most people realise, but in this case I felt like she took it too far. The man of the house is the tyrant, and every single one of them falls for his charm. It makes an argument about how women are somehow always caring and lose pieces to themselves to men, and this kind of rudimentary counter-feminism was very alienating to me. Maybe that's how Woolf felt in the 1920s, but it can hardly be how all the women felt.

Even though I enjoy a well-done stream of conciousness, Woolf took it too far, and the end result was depressing and near-unreadable.

[Michael @ Knowledge Lost]

To the Lighthouse is a book where nothing much happens, in fact the plot takes a backseat and instead Virginia Woolf focuses on a philosophical introspect. There is not much in the way of dialogue but rather uses multiple perspectives of people offering throughs and observations to make up this truly modernist piece of literature. Focusing on mainly memories and people’s emotions this book can be very dry if you don’t spend the time to look into the problems with prospective. Woolf explores the value of people’s lives, showing you that there is to someone that just their outer beauty. This book has often been described as a landmark in high modernism, while I won’t pretend to understand it fully, it was worth reading, next I might have to tackle Finnegans Wake.