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To the Lighthouse
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By Virginia Woolf, review by Bruce Meyer
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To the Lighthouse
By Virginia Woolf, review by Bruce Meyer
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Visit the Reading Room forum to discuss this book with fellow readers
Before you read the book
Of all of Virginia Woolf's novels, To the Lighthouse is one of the most autobiographical. As is the case with the Ramsays who have eight children, Woolf came from a large family. The patriarchs of both clans are intellectuals of considerable acclaim: Woolf's father was the critic Leslie Stephen and the fictional Mr. Ramsay is a philosopher who is working his way through an advanced sequence of logic.
About the author
Woolf was born in 1882 into one of Victorian England's leading cultural families. Her early life was spent in a genteel and intellectual milieu where she was surrounded by some of the leading minds of her time. As a personality, however, she was fragile and the horrors of the 20th century — including periods of extreme anxiety and the destruction of her beloved Bloomsbury home during the London Blitz in 1941 — drove her to suicide.
For Woolf, the gap between the world as a work of art and the reality of a world bent on destruction proved too much for her. Regardless of this gap, however, her major works declare that humanity has influence over time, war, gender differences, society and politics. In the process, Woolf asserted some of the most important cultural claims for the strength of the century.
A feminist of her time
In her landmark statement on feminism, A Room of One's Own, Woolf declared that women not only had a right to be authors but an obligation to speak for the under-represented half of the human race. Women, she asserted, needed to have a voice because the feminine perspective on life was a necessary off-set to the dangerous patriarchal presence that had dominated Western literature, thought and culture. All one needed, she suggested, was 500 pounds per year and a room of one's own.
As a writer, Woolf was fascinated by how the presence of the feminine voice could be recognized and achieved in English literature. Her wonderfully drawn characters, Mrs. Dalloway (from a novel of the same title, 1925) and Mrs. Ramsay from To the Lighthouse (1927), struggle to protect those around them from the perils of a modern world that seemed, at best, a madness that had overcome humanity.
One of the key reasons one reads Woolf's novels today is because they are narratives about how one takes in life, considers and arranges its details, and how one makes living possible through caring, gracefulness and nurturing.
As you read the book
To the Lighthouse is a work that is nostalgic for a serene past of where maternal nurturing was possible, yet it also depicts the destruction of Edwardian innocence both by time and war. It is a novel of dichotomies where characters are presented as alternatives or touchstones to one another, presenting various options for life, and subtly differing perspectives on connected events.
As you read To the Lighthouse, do not look for a heady plot. In a stream of consciousness narrative, Woolf narrates the journeys and machinations of the inner minds of some of her key characters. The novel is broken into three distinct sections — “The Window," “Time Passes," and “The Lighthouse". Each section is dominated by the personal thoughts and reflections of a key character.
Three distinct parts
The first section is predominately seen through the articulate, maternal and organizing mind of the mother of the Ramsay family. This first section takes the reader from the Ramsay's London home to the family's summer home. At the core is Mrs. Ramsay's protective and maternal nature, which is used as a touchstone for the independent, feminine artistic nature that will be expressed by the painter Lily Briscoe in the final section of the novel.
The second section is one of the most poignant pieces of writing in English literature and it deals with the decade-long passage of time between the Ramsay's almost perfect Edwardian summer and the intervening war years.
The third section is the resolution of the themes and images that were expressed in the opening section.
As you read To the Lighthouse, remember that Woolf provides a very precise and articulate view of how individual minds operate. Notice what captivates, fascinates and intrigues these characters. To the Lighthouse is a wonderfully rich study in psychology, and a novel of personalities that all seem to be working toward a sense of resolution.
Interesting links
The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain offers a very useful “URL-ography" of sites and materials concerning Woolf, her life and her writings. http://orlando.jp.org/VWSGB/dat/material.html
Don't be dismayed by the piano music that issues from this site. The Virginia Woolf On Women and Fiction site features some interesting material that may provide useful background to To the Lighthouse, along with some supplementary material.
http://www.cygneis.com/woolf/
This site from The Literature Network features biographical material on Woolf and links to some of her works online.
http://www.online-literature.com/virginia_woolf/
For some background notes to help you through the chapters, visit the Sparks Notes site. It features some useful commentary.
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/lighthouse/
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