To the Lighthouse

By Virginia Woolf

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Every summer, the Ramsays visit their summer home on the beautiful Isle of Skye, surrounded by the excitement and chatter of family and friends, mirroring Virginia Woolf’s own joyful holidays of her youth. But as time passes, and in its wake the First World War, the transience of life becomes ever more apparent through the vignette of the thoughts and observations of the novel’s disparate cast.

A landmark of high modernism and the most autobiographical of Virginia Woolf’s novels, To the Lighthouse explores themes of loss, class structure and the question of perception, in a hauntingly beautiful memorial to the lost but not forgotten.

Chosen by TIME magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Sep 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9780007535323

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf was an English novelist, essayist, short story writer, publisher, critic and member of the Bloomsbury group, as well as being regarded as both a hugely significant modernist and feminist figure. Her most famous works include Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own.

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TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

Virginia Woolf

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Copyright

Harper Press

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This Harper Press paperback edition published 2013

Virginia Woolf asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Life & Times section © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

Fran Fabriczki asserts her moral right as author of the Life & Times section

Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from

Collins English Dictionary

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Source ISBN: 9780007934416

Ebook Edition ISBN: 9780007535323

Version: 2023-05-09

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

History of Collins

Life & Times

Bibliographical Note

Chapter 1: The Window

Chapter 2: Time Passes

Chapter 3: The Lighthouse

Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from the Collins English Dictionary

About the Publisher

History of Collins

In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books, and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.

Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner; however, it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed, and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.

Aged 30, William’s son, William II, took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly ‘Victorian’ in his outlook. He introduced new, up-todate steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and The Pilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases, and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.

In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of ‘books for the millions’ was developed. Affordable editions of classical literature were published, and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel, and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time, and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.

HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics, and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible, and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.

Life & Times

In an early critical essay, Virginia Woolf muses on the possibility of finding future classics among her contemporaries: ‘Here, if we could recognize it, lies some poem, or novel, or history which will stand up and speak with other ages about our age.’ The modern reader can’t help but smile at the dramatic irony, for it would be Woolf herself, decades on, who would become embedded in the canon of English literature, giving testament to her times. Woolf was born at the precipice of a tumultuous age: her life would come to encompass the end of the Victorian era, the suffragette movement and two world wars. Her writing traces the arc of these seismic changes, ranging from early realist novels that tied her to her literary predecessors, to polemical works on the rights of women and war, to the increasing unconventionality of her later works.

Early Years

Her eventual ascent to literary fame is perhaps less surprising when taken in the context of her upbringing. Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, was an eminent Victorian biographer, whose literary connections included icons such as William Makepeace Thackeray, Henry James and Thomas Hardy. Her mother, Julia Prinsep, was a renowned beauty who was photographed and painted by important contemporary artists. Stephen and Prinsep married in 1878, both bringing children from earlier marriages, one and three respectively, and eventually having four more children together. Their family home in Hyde Park bustled with activity, as did their house in Cornwall, which would later become the inspiration for the setting of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). While Woolf’s brothers went to school, she and her sister Vanessa were mostly educated at home (although Woolf later attended classes at King’s College London), where their father’s tastes had a significant influence on their learning. The Stephen children were a precocious bunch with a variety of intellectual and artistic interests. Notably, Vanessa would become a famous artist in her own right, and their younger brother, Adrian, a psychoanalyst. As children they produced a weekly newspaper for their parents, and no doubt imbibed much of the intellectual milieu they grew up in. However, Woolf’s happy childhood was marred by the abuse her elder half-siblings inflicted upon her, of which she writes in her later autobiographical works. Woolf suffered further mental strain when her mother, by her accounts the epicentre of their family life, passed away in 1895 when Virginia was only thirteen. After their mother’s death, their father became a tyrannical figure in the life of the family; nonetheless, when he passed away in 1904, Woolf suffered a second mental breakdown.

New Beginnings in Bloomsbury

Although the death of her father deeply affected Woolf, it was also the last tether tying her to her childhood, and the family’s move to a new home in Bloomsbury brought with it a sense of liberation in many ways. In their new home the family were no longer burdened by the social codes of the previous generation and entertained a wide variety of guests in a casual manner. Woolf’s brother Thoby had gone to Cambridge, where he met the likes of Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, John Maynard Keynes and Leonard Woolf (Virginia’s future husband), who became good friends of the siblings. At their new home Thoby hosted ‘Thursday Evenings’, a series of informal get-togethers where the attendees discussed the intellectual interests of the day. The group that formed in the rooms of 46 Gordon Square would become the stuff of literary legend, with many of them going on to achieve great acclaim in their respective fields and their ever-entangled personal lives continuing to provide fodder for gossip. Although in many ways this was a joyously liberating time for Woolf, it was not without its difficulties. Thoby died of typhoid in 1906 and Vanessa married Clive Bell the year after – thus the siblings’ close life together came to an end.

The following years were intellectually formative – Woolf took part in the suffragist movement, had close ties to the Post-Impressionist Exhibition that shocked London society, wrote reviews for the TLS and began to write what would later become The Voyage Out (1915). She continued to suffer from poor mental health, undergoing several weeks of ‘rest cure’ in the countryside.

The Hogarth Press and Partnership with Leonard Woolf

In 1911, Leonard Woolf returned from Ceylon where he was in the Civil Service and renewed his friendship with Virginia’s circle. In 1912, Virginia and Leonard married, beginning a lifelong partnership that was as much intellectual as romantic. The couple moved to Richmond in 1915 and together founded the Hogarth Press. The small publishing house was not only a means of publishing their own work, but an introduction to many formative literary and intellectual figures, such as Katherine Mansfield, whose Prelude (1918) was published by the Hogarth Press, as well as Sigmund Freud, whose works they were the first to publish in English, and who had a great influence on the thinking of many in the Bloomsbury Group. Woolf herself, after having her first two novels published elsewhere, published all subsequent works through the Hogarth Press, thus retaining greater creative control over her work.

Artistic maturity and Mrs Dalloway

The 1920s was an incredibly prolific decade for Woolf, during which she published four of her major novels and a short story collection. These years partly overlapped with her relationship with Vita Sackville-West, an aristocratic writer whom she met through the Bloomsbury Group. Not only was it an important romantic relationship in Woolf’s life, but it was a mutually beneficial friendship, contributing to the fruitful writing careers of both women. Sackville-West published commercially successful novels such as The Edwardians with the Hogarth Press, while Woolf was inspired partly by their relationship to write Orlando.

Her work became increasingly experimental during this decade. In her 1924 essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ she famously claimed that ‘On or about December 1910, human character changed’, thus creating a clear demarcation between herself and her literary predecessors. Indeed, it was her representation of ‘human character’ in the figure of Mrs Dalloway that has marked her out as one of the pre-eminent figures of the modernist literary movement. No doubt partly influenced by her understanding of psychoanalysis; Woolf wanted to present the internal life of her characters in more depth. Through the interwoven stories of Mrs Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, Woolf was able to explore mental health and its treatments, sexual fluidity and the restrictiveness of traditional societal structures, as well as comment on wider socio-political topics such as the effects of the Great War. It is no surprise that the novel was drafted under the title The Hours, as Woolf uses time inventively, with the story taking place over the course of one day. The reflections of various characters shift the perspective back and forth in time, and certain key moments in the novel serve as hinges on which the narrative can shift between characters. It remains one of Woolf’s best-loved novels to this day.

Pushing the limits of form in To the Lighthouse

Her later works of the twenties built and expanded on the daring formal invention of Mrs Dalloway. In 1927 she published To the Lighthouse, which, on the face of it, is an autobiographical novel about her parents and her childhood summers spent in Cornwall (which included a lighthouse within view). Upon closer inspection, the overt biographical reading falls away, as indeed does the concept of the novel form itself. Woolf attempts to transcend what a novel is able to do by pushing stream-of-consciousness to its limits and approaching the text almost as poetry, with symbolism overtaking plot.

The work is presented in three parts, the first of which is ‘The Window’ – broadly, these are the pre-war years of the family’s life, with Mr and Mrs Ramsay’s idealised, patriarchal family model at its centre. The life of the family and the lives of those in their orbit – a newly engaged couple, a painter, Mr Ramsay’s philosophy student, a botanist – revolve around Mrs Ramsay. She cajoles and matchmakes and reassures – the archetypal late Victorian matriarch – but Woolf handles her character with care, showing her strengths just as much as her weaknesses.

In the second part of the novel, ‘Time Passes’, we are removed from individual perspective. This section describes the house itself, and the characters that were important in the first section become almost secondary, relegated to parentheticals. Even as it is addressed more indirectly, the preoccupation with the Great War remains and we catch glimpses of the devastation it has wreaked on the novel’s characters. This unusual interruption to the narrative bewildered some early reviewers, but it remains one of the most enigmatic areas of study for many readers today.

The novel closes with the section entitled ‘The Lighthouse’, with some of the novel’s characters returning to the Ramsay summer home, much changed. Lily Briscoe, the uncertain painter of the first section, is one of these returning characters, and amidst the quiet grief of the household, we see her maturation as an artist. It’s tempting to view the self-assurance in her artistic endeavour as mirroring that of the writer herself, who would go on to write the genre-defying Orlando (1928), next.

Turbulent times

After several years of prolific literary output, in the turbulent decade leading up to the Second World War, Woolf became increasingly politically involved, taking part in several anti-fascist committees, and supporting her husband’s work with the Labour Party. It was during this time that she wrote her polemical work Three Guineas (1938). In a way her writing returned to the roots of her paternal education, as she began to write works of biography, such as Flush (1933) and Roger Fry (1940).

As the Second World War began, the Woolfs were living in Holborn, where Woolf was working on her memoirs, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, and her final novel Between the Acts (1941). On 28 March 1941, after decades of struggle with her mental health, Woolf committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Ouse.

Although in popular culture Woolf is often remembered for the tragic end to her life, as well as the entangled love lives of the Bloomsbury Group, it is her sustained intellectual engagement with the movements of her time, her formally inventive writing and her contributions to the canon of feminist writing that continue to engage her readers, cementing her place among the greats of English literature.

Bibliographical Note

The following is a list of abbreviated titles used in this edition.

MS: To the Lighthouse: The Original Holograph Draft, transcribed and ed. Susan Dick (Toronto University Press, 1982; Hogarth Press, 1983). Square brackets are used to indicate words deleted in original draft.

TL: To the Lighthouse, first British edn (Hogarth Press, 5 May 1927).

Moments of Being: Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings of Virginia Woolf, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (Chatto & Windus, 1976).

Diary: The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5 vols., ed. Anne Olivier Bell (Hogarth Press, 1977; Penguin Books, 1979).

Letters: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols., ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (Hogarth Press, 1975–80).

Essays: The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 3 vols. (to be 6 vols.), ed. Andrew McNeillie (Hogarth Press, 1986).

CE: Collected Essays, 4 vols., ed. Leonard Woolf (Chatto & Windus, 1966, 1967).

Mausoleum: Sir Leslie Stephen’s Mausoleum Book (1895), introduced by Alan Bell (OUP, 1977).

CHAPTER 1

The Window

I

‘Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,’ said Mrs Ramsay. ‘But you’ll have to be up with the lark,’ she added.

To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled the expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night’s darkness and a day’s sail, within touch. Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator as his mother spoke with heavenly bliss. It was fringed with joy. The wheelbarrow, the lawn-mower, the sound of poplar trees, leaves whitening before rain, rooks cawing, brooms knocking, dresses rustling – all these were so coloured and distinguished in his mind that he had already his private code, his secret language, though he appeared the image of stark and uncompromising severity, with his high forehead and his fierce blue eyes, impeccably candid and pure, frowning slightly at the sight of human frailty, so that his mother, watching him guide his scissors neatly round the refrigerator, imagined him all red and ermine on the Bench or directing a stern and momentous enterprise in some crisis of public affairs.

‘But,’ said his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window, ‘it won’t be fine.’

Had there been an axe handy, a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it. Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr Ramsay excited in his children’s breasts by his mere presence; standing, as now, lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one, grinning sarcastically, not only with the pleasure of disillusioning his son and casting ridicule upon his wife, who was ten thousand times better in every way than he was (James thought), but also with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgement. What he said was true. It was always true. He was incapable of untruth; never tampered with a fact; never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all of his own children, who, sprung from his loins, should be aware from childhood that life is difficult; facts uncompromising; and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail barks founder in darkness (here Mr Ramsay would straighten his back and narrow his little blue eyes upon the horizon), one that needs, above all, courage, truth, and the power to endure.

‘But it may be fine – I expect it will be fine,’ said Mrs Ramsay, making some little twist of the reddish-brown stocking she was knitting, impatiently. If she finished it tonight, if they did go to the Lighthouse after all, it was to be given to the Lighthouse keeper for his little boy, who was threatened with a tuberculous hip; together with a pile of old magazines, and some tobacco, indeed whatever she could find lying about, not really wanted, but only littering the room, to give those poor fellows who must be bored to death sitting all day with nothing to do but polish the lamp and trim the wick and rake about on their scrap of garden, something to amuse them. For how would you like to be shut up for a whole month at a time, and possibly more in stormy weather, upon a rock the size of a tennis lawn? she would ask; and to have no letters or newspapers, and to see nobody; if you were married, not to see your wife, not to know how your children were, – if they were ill, if they had fallen down and broken their legs or arms; to see the same dreary waves breaking week after week, and then a dreadful storm coming, and the windows covered with spray, and birds dashed against the lamp, and the whole place rocking, and not be able to put your nose out of doors for fear of being swept into the sea? How would you like that? she asked, addressing herself particularly to her daughters. So she added, rather differently, one must take them whatever comforts one can.

‘It’s due west,’ said the atheist Tansley, holding his bony fingers spread so that the wind blew through them, for he was sharing Mr Ramsay’s evening walk up and down, up and down the terrace. That is to say, the wind blew from the worst possible direction for landing at the Lighthouse. Yes, he did say disagreeable things, Mrs Ramsay admitted; it was odious of him to rub this in, and make James still more disappointed; but at the same time, she would not let them laugh at him. ‘The atheist’, they called him; ‘the little atheist’. Rose mocked him; Prue mocked him; Andrew, Jasper, Roger mocked him; even old Badger without a tooth in his head had bit him, for being (as Nancy put it) the hundred and tenth young man to chase them all the way up to the Hebrides when it was ever so much nicer to be alone.

‘Nonsense,’ said Mrs Ramsay, with great severity. Apart from the habit of exaggeration which they had from her, and from the implication (which was true) that she asked too many people to stay, and had to lodge some in the town, she could not bear incivility to her guests, to young men in particular, who were poor as church mice, ‘exceptionally able’, her husband said, his great admirers, and come there for a holiday. Indeed, she had the whole of the other sex under her protection; for reasons she could not explain, for their chivalry and valour, for the fact that they negotiated treaties, ruled India, controlled finance; finally for an attitude towards herself which no woman could fail to feel or to find agreeable, something trustful, childlike, reverential; which an old woman could take from a young man without loss of dignity, and woe betide the girl – pray Heaven it was none of her daughters! – who did not feel the worth of it, and all that it implied, to the marrow of her bones.

She turned with severity upon Nancy. He had not chased them, she said. He had been asked.

They must find a way out of it all. There might be some simpler way, some less laborious way, she sighed. When she looked in the glass and saw her hair grey, her cheek sunk, at fifty, she thought, possibly she might have managed things better – her husband; money; his books. But for her own part she would never for a single second regret her decision, evade difficulties, or slur over duties. She was now formidable to behold, and it was only in silence, looking up from their plates, after she had spoken so severely about Charles Tansley, that her daughters – Prue, Nancy, Rose – could sport with infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves of a life different from hers; in Paris, perhaps; a wilder life; not always taking care of some man or other; for there was in all their minds a mute questioning of deference and chivalry, of the Bank of England and the Indian Empire, of ringed fingers and lace, though to them all there was something in this of the essence of beauty, which called out the manliness in their girlish hearts, and made them, as they sat at table beneath their mother’s eyes, honour her strange severity, her extreme courtesy, like a Queen’s raising from the mud a beggar’s dirty foot and washing it, when she thus admonished them so very severely about that wretched atheist who had chased them to – or, speaking accurately, been invited to stay with them in – the Isle of Skye.

‘There’ll be no landing at the Lighthouse tomorrow,’ said Charles Tansley, clapping his hands together as he stood at the window with her husband. Surely, he had said enough. She wished they would both leave her and James alone and go on talking. She looked at him. He was such a miserable specimen, the children said, all humps and hollows. He couldn’t play cricket; he poked; he shuffled. He was a sarcastic brute, Andrew said. They knew what he liked best – to be for ever walking up and down, up and down, with Mr Ramsay, and saying who had won this, who had won that, who was a ‘first-rate man’ at Latin verses, who was ‘brilliant but I think fundamentally unsound’, who was undoubtedly the ‘ablest fellow in Balliol’, who had buried his light temporarily at Bristol or Bedford, but was bound to be heard of later when his Prolegomena, of which Mr Tansley had the first pages in proof with him if Mr Ramsay would like to see them, to some branch of mathematics or philosophy saw the light of day. That was what they talked about.

She could not help laughing herself sometimes. She said, the other day, something about ‘waves mountains high’. Yes, said Charles Tansley, it was a little rough. ‘Aren’t you drenched to the skin?’ she had said. ‘Damp, not wet through,’ said Mr Tansley, pinching his sleeve, feeling his socks.

But it was not that they minded, the children said. It was not his face; it was not his manners. It was him – his point of view. When they talked about something interesting, people, music, history, anything, even said it was a fine evening so why not sit out of doors, then what they complained of about Charles Tansley was that until he had turned the whole thing round and made it somehow reflect himself and disparage them, put them all on edge somehow with his acid way of peeling the flesh and blood off everything, he was not satisfied. And he would go to picture galleries, they said, and he would ask one, did one like his tie? God knows, said Rose, one did not.

Disappearing as stealthily as stags from the dinner-table directly the meal was over, the eight sons and daughters of Mr and Mrs Ramsay sought their bedrooms, their fastnesses in a house where there was no other privacy to debate anything, everything; Tansley’s tie; the passing of the Reform Bill; sea-birds and butterflies; people; while the sun poured into those attics, which a plank alone separated from each other so that every footstep could be plainly heard and the Swiss girl sobbing for her father who was dying of cancer in a valley of the Grisons, and lit up bats, flannels, straw hats, ink-pots, paint-pots, beetles, and the

Reviews for To the Lighthouse

[jonfaith · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Lily Briscoe is a kindred spirit. She asks a pertinent question at the beginning of the final section: what does it mean then, what can it all mean? I have been asking myself that, often out loud for most of my adult life. A pair of events this weekend illuminated that disposition and likely also besmirched my reading of To The Lighthouse. My Tenth wedding anniversary was followed quickly by the funeral for my uncle Fred. The first event was grand, of course, though it does lend itself to a certain survey, of sorts. The second was simply queer. this was no great tragedy, the man was 85 years old had seven sons and had suffered through terrible health these last few years. I leaned quickly that there are no poets in that section of my family and apparently no Democrats either. It was nice to hug, slap backs and smile at one another, most of the time counting the decades since we last spoke at length. Through the depths of such I ran to the Woolf and read for an odd half hour here and there.

To the Lighthouse is a tale of caprice and desperation. It is a kaleidoscope of resonance and impressions. Much like life it can be dusty and wind swept on an even manner. I would likely have been great affected were it not for the switchbacks of the weekend.

[atreic · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

There are books I’ve had on my shelves that I have always meant to read, and that I feel I ought to have read. To The Lighthouse was one of those books, so I took it with me on holiday and read it.But I didn’t really know what it was about, and it’s a strange book to encounter if you have no preconceptions. The first section, with its cloyingly deep analysis of the minutia of life, hundreds of pages where nothing much happens except they go to dinner, all the Meaning trapped in ‘do you think it will be fine enough to go to the Lighthouse tomorrow?’ ‘No, I think it will not be fine’. Marriage and motherhood and thwarted career ambitions and hosting and matchmaking, and the way the smallest thing can hold so much meaning. I found it quite intractable and frustrating at first, and then found a rhythm and a sympathy and settled into it...... when all at once I hit the second part and the book simultaneously broke my brain and my heart. Ten years pass in a flurry of pages. People we had known down to the grain on their fingerprints are casually dispatched in passing in the final sentence of a paragraph. The house slowly decays, the bubble that has been there so clearly is gone, as the dust and mould creep in.And then in the final part we are there again, and are drawn into musing around what fingerprints do we leave on the world, how are we remembered, what is success? Those complex family relationships, so much love and anger tangled up,and all inside, no ripples on the surface. But we paint. And we make it to the Lighthouse.

[solitaryfossil · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

3-2-17
Tonight I finished Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse.”

Wowzers, it’s really great. This was my first reading of Woolf, and I was really hypnotized by her style. It was an emotional rollercoaster, and I highly recommend you ride it. A very quick read, under 200 pages, and it just flows and flows. Lyrical.

[firewild · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book reads more like a poem than a novel. Evocative, fragile, nuanced, ephemeral moments of family life set in a gorgeous landscape. It would make a beautiful arthouse movie with long scenes filled with stark seascapes and little action.

[petroglyph_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Impressionistic rather than descriptive. Divided in three parts. The first, and the longest, serves as an introduction to the setting, the characters, and their interactions. And this part was tough going, especially towards the end, simply because nothing really happens in the first part, and yet it keeps on going, without any real purpose. Characters were kept at a stand-still, just so that the author could paint a detailed picture. My 21st century attention span -- used as it is to snappy, streamlined characterization and world-building -- made me put the book down a few timesThe second and third parts, though, are very much worth the effort of struggling through that lengthy set-up. This is where [To the lighthouse] comes into its own: once you understand what’s going on, the whole thing pays off beautifully.

[bobnolin · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Well, now I can cross Virginia Woolf off my life list. That's the good news. The writing seems frigid, unwilling to tackle difficult feelings and conflicts directly. It's only at the end that some outright hostility comes to light (the son wanting to kill his father). Otherwise, the whole thing is bloodless and cerebral. I disagree that this is "stream of consciousness," at least in the Faulknerian mode. It's more a novel made up almost completely of characters' inner thoughts. This was probably quite radical in 1920. Almost 100 years later, it's dull as dirt. Note to want-to-be writers: don't write like this, or you will never get published. A two-hundred page book in which almost nothing happens, and people die off-stage for no reason...a good example of what NOT to do. Just realized I finished this and Confederacy of Dunces on the same day. Two books by suicides. I need to break this trend quick!

[rayski_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A slow start, but once you're in then you're locked in. My book club chose this book because it was to be a review of the difference of the sexes. I read it to be more about the significance of importance we put on our lives or how we get so wound up in the moment and missing everything that really is important.Woolf shows the time wasted on such thoughts and missed opportunities to breath in the moment, really enjoying what you have and where you are. She does an amazing job of getting this point across in the second part where she moves 10 years across the pages, where the people are gone but the objects, possessions and mother nature remain. Then again in the 3rd passage where Cam looks from the boat and sees the cottage and its isle off the horizon getting smaller and smaller while the sea seems to engulf the little island and making it all look so insignificant to the overall horizon. Woolf does gives us some significance as she describes scenes of people past still being forever part of a place or moment that lives on in the rest of us. Upon finishing it, I immediately went back to re-read the first passage because initially I struggled to get through it. To the Lighthouse is a book that is better each time you read it.

[beentsy_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

You know as you go through your day you have a million little thoughts about a million little things? Almost like a noise in the back of your head, all the time. Every single thought clammering for your attention. Of course you filter the thoughts and control the noise, you have to. Right?

This story is like that, every thought of every character in turn demanding attention. There is no filter, no respite. If you don't hear everything you won't get the full story, so you have to read it all.

I personally found that exhausting and not a particularly joyful reading experience. I feel bad that I didn't like it more as there were some truly beautifully written sections, but hey. That's okay.

[cbl_tn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Virginia Woolf takes a seemingly insignificant disagreement about tomorrow's weather and turns it into an analysis of human character and relationships. Woolf shifts perspective often, revealing each character's thoughts and feelings through a stream of consciousness technique. The Ramseys and a few guests are at a summer home near the sea, and Woolf uses the sea's movement as a metaphor to describe the thoughts, emotions, and interpersonal relations of the characters. The book is divided into three sections. By the end of the first section, Woolf has given the reader a pretty good idea of how some of the characters influence the others. The middle section provides a bridge to the latter section, where Woolf explores the effects of the absence of characters from the first section on the remaining characters.Although I've read only a handful of stream of consciousness novels, I'm fascinated by the technique. Done well, it really does mirror the activity in my own head. I'm an introvert, so I tend to spend a lot of time there. I'm not sure that this technique will appeal so much to extroverts. I think stream of consciousness novels may be books by introverts for introverts.

[lissabeth21 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I feel like I need cliff notes and a college level lecture on this one. There was just so much going on in this...every sentence heavy with meaning and infused with hidden feeling. The inner lives of Edwardians who perhaps grew up in the Victorian era...so repressed and filled with the expectations of society, struggling not to be themselves, but to even find themselves in the first place.

[margaretfield · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

a family goes to the same vacation house through the years

[dreesie-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Typical Woolf. Long sentences. Inner dialogues showing way too much overthinking. Way too much detail over little nothings. Tiring. Nothing exactly happens in the the book. Things happen between chapters, then characters start the next chapter thinking about what happened. But we never see what happens.But poor James spent 10 years waiting to get his visit to the lighthouse. Which we don't actually get to see or hear about, because the book ends as they begin getting out of the book.Glad it's done. Glad it was short.

[bookomaniac-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Zeer moeilijke lectuur, maar met ongelofelijk veel intellectueel genoegen. Gaat over eindigheid en dood, kijken naar het leven. Zeer beeldend. Om te herlezen en herlezen.

[othemts · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I read this book in college and while I don't remember the details now, I do remember the feeling of beauty and insight in what may be Woolf's best novel.

[andrewblackman · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What struck me about this was how seamlessly the writing moved from one character's perspective to the next. It seemed to flow, and was far from a difficult read (unlike James Joyce, for example, where I didn't have a clue what was going on). The depiction of every character's inner thoughts in immense detail, with all the incongruities and absurdities, was engrossing, even if in one or two places it seemed to me a little overdone. The second interesting thing for me was the depiction of time. The first and last passages of the book are extended descriptions of very short and meaningless events - a dinner, someone completing a painting, a trip to a lighthouse - while the middle part rushes headlong over years of far more important events, including the deaths of several major characters. This seems utterly wrong, but it works. The incredibly detailed snapshots at each end contrast so well that they explain the intervening years better than any conventional description could. And the warping of time reminded me that much of what I consider to be immensely important right now really isn't, while many of the things that seem trivial actually combine to create what I later find to be important. I think my life so far has been shaped more by the 99% of daily occurrences than by the 1% of "big events."

[lecari_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Her style is strange - it took me a while to get into. I've been trying to read 'the Waves' and I've found it very difficult, too 'arty' and a lot of the time I don't know who is being talked about or what's going on. I wanted to like it but I found this very difficult to enjoy, it felt like hard work the whole time.

[kristelh_15 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Story of the Ramsay's starts and ends on the Isle of Skye in Scotland told mostly in stream of consciousness. First we are introduced to the Ramsay's as husband and wife/mother and father. The Ramsay's have a good marriage. Mrs Ramsay is a strong woman in her way and holds the family together. Son James loves his mother but dislikes his father. A trip to the lighthouse cannot happen because of weather. Life is interupted by WWI. Several people die and no one returns to the summer home for 10 years. Finally the family does return and the trip finally occurs. The narration shifts from person to person, started with Mrs Ramsay and ends with Lily Briscoe, an artist and strong independent woman who has not married who achieves her vision. This story is somewhat autobiographical of Virginia Woolf's own life. She is what I would categorize as a "woman's" author.

[stuart10er_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I thought that I would be put off by the writing style - but I actually found the "stream of thought" worked well for me.
However, as I read this novel, regarded by many as one of the greatest of the 20th century, I had moments where I was jarred by something and it took me a while to understand it. The story, at least at a superficial level, tells the story of a married couple, their eight children, and various hanger-on'ers during a vacation in the North of Scotland. I kept being jarred in the narrative and thought to myself that here is a story about a mother, a father, and some children and I don't think the writer ever had children. A quick check confirmed that she never had children - and so it begs that question; can someone really tell the internal narrative stream-of-thought style of someone raising children when they haven't done it. Once I had decided that, I was jarred the entire rest of the novel and I'm pretty sure that wasn't her intention (there are other more jarring and purposeful bits). At the end, though, I enjoyed it much more than I was expecting. It is more than worthy of a re-read at a future date.

[alantheazn · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

For the first 180 pages I was asking myself, "What's the point?" But then everything came together at the end. Woolf is genius in that she writes about incredibly deep themes in concise and simple (not to mention beautiful) narratives.

[karinlib-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Although I think I like Mrs. Dalloway better, this wasn't bad.

[caanderson-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a treat to read a masterpiece. I love the way Virginia Woolf writes weaving the story through the thoughts of each character. The silence of her characters held by unspoken rules and expectations they live their lives on the edge of what’s expected of them and what they want to question.

[rontyler-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

3-2-17
Tonight I finished Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse.”

Wowzers, it’s really great. This was my first reading of Woolf, and I was really hypnotized by her style. It was an emotional rollercoaster, and I highly recommend you ride it. A very quick read, under 200 pages, and it just flows and flows. Lyrical.

[qarik-1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

It was a chore to get through. I truly do not understand why she is considered such a great author. My theory is the phenomonon of "If I don't get it, it must be good". Kinda Like Felini or David Lynch. I have never enjoyed writing styles that did not make sense. Woolf does not make sense. Nor do I like subject matter the dwells on human neurosis which this book mainly consists of. It's like an intellectualized "Ally McBeal" or "Grey's Anatomy". Some might say I am a caveman and afraid of complexity. Not true. I appreciate complexity. I doubly appreciate complexity when it can related in simpler terms.

[darkwater_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The epitome of subjectivity in writing. At first, this makes for a very difficult read if you're not used to this stream of consciousness style (and I was not), but by the end of the book, you may wish every novel was written in this form. I have encountered few books that have so well invited me into the minds of its characters. Truly a journey to "the self", the spotlight of consciousness. A striking read.

[ginnywoolf · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Good though uneven. I liked the first and second part much more than the third. Also, it was not very accessible. I feel stupid saying that, but I did not find it as impressive as Mrs. Dalloway.

[maowangvater · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay their eight children and their friends are gathered at their summer home. Six-year-old James hopes for a sail out to the lighthouse across the bay are dashed by his father’s sudden announcement that the weather will be bad and they will not go. He not only pronounces this with a sarcastic grin “but also with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgement.” With this scene Woolf begins her lyrical psychological portrait of family dynamics, life, death, and loss told through the thoughts of her characters. The Ramsays are upper middle class English vacationing in Scotland before the outbreak of the Great War. Mr. Ramsay is a tyrannical and insecure academic with little care or feeling for how his behavior affects others. It is up to the beautiful and sensitive Mrs. Ramsay to make and preserve the peace. When, a decade later, the family gathers again at the house she is gone, and they must cope without her and come to terms with their own sense of loss and the impermanence of life. Implicit in the novel is Woolf’s sharp critique of traditional male and female sex roles.

[hera_7 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This novel exasperated me. Rather than be stuck at home doing housewifely things, I'd have rowed the boat myself. End. Of. Book.

[chancemaree · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Virigina Woolf published To the Lighthouse, her most autobiographical novel, in 1927. She is said to have written it as a way of "understanding and dealing with unresolved issues concerning both her parents." Woolf's husband aptly coined this masterpiece, a "psychological poem."

Like Woolfe's The Waves, TTL is stream of consciousness with concentration on introspection rather than speech or action. Its power soars in small gestures. Large events occur only as an aside, in brackets. Woolf avoids raw emotion, for the most part, dwelling more on interrelationships and qualities of mind and manners.

Part I of the novel describes an afternoon and evening from one of the Ramsay family's visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland around 1920. Descriptions were certainly inspired by Woolf's family rental of Talland House in St. Ives. In Part II, ten years pass and the Ramsay's home goes to ruin. This image mirrors the death of Woolf's mother when Virginia was thirteen. In Part III, over the course of a single morning, members of the Ramsay family revisit the house and travel to the lighthouse, just as Virginia had visited Talland House after WWI and her father's death.

I was amazed by the weaving and rhythmn of the poetry pose and its ability to absorb the flow of my thoughts into the novel's scenes with much the same result as I experience while sitting, say, in a botanical garden. The meditation settles deep, expressing qualities, subtle and indirect, so gently they permeate rather than shout their illumination.

Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are middle-aged parents of eight children. While love has lost its bloom, they love one another in a needy and appreciative way. Mrs. Ramsay is beautiful, and is at once liked and disliked by others. Her children love her. The father is interesting, brooding, complex and disliked by his children, in general. The dynamic changes as the novel progresses, showing the intransience of relationships, and houses.

My favorite sections belong to Mrs. Ramsay, and to the description of the house in ruins. The poetry and complexity wooed me beyond mere entertainment, and although I've given entertaining books 5 stars, I give TTL 4.75 stars because I use a different scale for magnificant, literay works such as this. The novel was close to perfection, but not quite. The last note, or fragrance, seemed off, a collaspe of an ending when I wanted, expected, something else. Perhaps life is like that. I look forward to reading Mrs. Dalloway in the near future.

P.S. On a different note, I felt a bit sensitive to Woolf's portrayal of women's minds as vague and less capable than men's in areas such as serious thought, spatical relations, navigations, etc. Her female characters recognized some of their strenghts, but they held their accomplishments a peg or two below men. Bram Stoker's Dracula female characters were self-effacing in much the same way, as low in confidence as children. Such were the beliefs of the time, and it is little wonder that breaking out of limiting mentalties was and is so difficult for both men and women.

[csweder · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Dear Goodreads, please let us give books a 'half' star!!! This is 2.5.

As an experienced reader, every now and then, I come across a book that is complex and difficult to read. This is that book. I felt like I think my students feel when they read and then tell me "I don't get it." Usually I tell them that they weren't paying enough attention, but, after reading several reviews of this book, in which most people say "I had to re-read several parts to understand." I don't feel upset that it was confusing. I myself felt no need to re read anything in this novel.

[dlsmithies · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I've read this and Mrs Dalloway, and I've fallen in love with Woolf and her distinctive style - the way her narrative flits between characters like a fly on the wall that can see inside people's minds is so absorbing. I especially liked the dinner scene for that reason. There was also lots of musing about time, sort of Proust-lite (very lite!), and also lots of division, mainly between male and female perspectives but I think it was a general motif - which called to mind E M Forster, all of whose novels seem to be about some sort of irreconcilable diametric opposite. And Woolf's prose is just gorgeous - I love the rhythm and the interruptions and repetitions. Thumbs up from me!