To the Lighthouse

By Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf’s classic modernist novel, To the Lighthouse, draws from her own life and experiences.

Hailed as one of the greatest works of modernist fiction, Virginia Woolf’s semi-autobiographical novel about the Ramsay family explores the themes of perspective, interpersonal relationships, and the complexity of human experience. Woolf’s use of shifting points of view in the narrative highlights how each person sees and experiences events in their own way. As conflict and grief impact the Ramsays throughout their time on Scotland’s Isle of Skye, the reader is pulled into Woolf’s own life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Canterbury Classics
• Release date: Jun 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781667203010

Virginia Woolf

VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882–1941) was one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century. An admired literary critic, she authored many essays, letters, journals, and short stories in addition to her groundbreaking novels, including Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, and Orlando.

Book preview

The Wind

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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 lawnmower, 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, or a poker, 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 to wash a beggar’s dirty foot, when she thus admonished them so very severely about that wretched atheist who had chased them—or, speaking accurately, been invited to stay with them—in the Isles 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—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 after 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 skulls of small birds, while it drew from the long frilled strips of seaweed pinned to the wall a smell of salt and weeds, which was in the towels too, gritty with sand from bathing.

Strife, divisions, difference of opinion, prejudices twisted into the very fibre of being, oh, that they should begin so early, Mrs. Ramsay deplored. They were so critical, her children. They talked such nonsense. She went from the dining-room, holding James by the hand, since he would not go with the others. It seemed to her such nonsense—inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that. The real differences, she thought, standing by the drawing-room window, are enough, quite enough. She had in mind at the moment, rich and poor, high and low; the great in birth receiving from her, some half grudgingly, half respect, for had she not in her veins the blood of that very noble, if slightly mythical, Italian house, whose daughters, scattered about English drawing-rooms in the nineteenth century, had lisped so charmingly, had stormed so wildly, and all her wit and her bearing and her temper came from them, and not from the sluggish English, or the cold Scotch; but more profoundly, she ruminated the other problem, of rich and poor, and the things she saw with her own eyes, weekly, daily, here or in London, when she visited this widow, or that struggling wife in person with a bag on her arm, and a note-book and pencil with which she wrote down in columns carefully ruled for the purpose wages and spendings, employment and unemployment, in the hope that thus she would cease to be a private woman whose charity was half a sop to her own indignation, half a relief to her own curiosity, and become what with her untrained mind she greatly admired, an investigator, elucidating the social problem.

Insoluble questions they were, it seemed to her, standing there, holding James by the hand. He had followed her into the drawing-room, that young man they laughed at; he was standing by the table, fidgeting with something, awkwardly, feeling himself out of things, as she knew without looking round. They had all gone—the children; Minta Doyle and Paul Rayley; Augustus Carmichael; her husband—they had all gone. So she turned with a sigh and said, Would it bore you to come with me, Mr. Tansley?

She had a dull errand in the town; she had a letter or two to write; she would be ten minutes perhaps; she would put on her hat. And, with her basket and her parasol, there she was again, ten minutes later, giving out a sense of being ready, of being equipped for a jaunt, which, however, she must interrupt for a moment, as they passed the tennis lawn, to ask Mr. Carmichael, who was basking with his yellow cat’s eyes ajar, so that like a cat’s they seemed to reflect the branches moving or the clouds passing, but to give no inkling of any inner thoughts or emotion whatsoever, if he wanted anything.

For they were making the great expedition, she said, laughing. They were going to the town. Stamps, writing-paper, tobacco? she suggested, stopping by his side. But no, he wanted nothing. His hands clasped themselves over his capacious paunch, his eyes blinked, as if he would have liked to reply kindly to these blandishments (she was seductive but a little nervous) but could not, sunk as he was in a grey-green somnolence which embraced them all, without need of words, in a vast and benevolent lethargy of well-wishing; all the house; all the world; all the people in it, for he had slipped into his glass at lunch a few drops of something, which accounted, the children thought, for the vivid streak of canary-yellow in moustache and beard that were otherwise milk white. No, nothing, he murmured.

He should have been a great philosopher, said Mrs. Ramsay, as they went down the road to the fishing village, but he had made an unfortunate marriage. Holding her black parasol very erect, and moving with an indescribable air of expectation, as if she were going to meet some one round the corner, she told the story; an affair at Oxford with some girl; an early marriage; poverty; going to India; translating a little poetry very beautifully, I believe, being willing to teach the boys Persian or Hindustanee, but what really was the use of that?—and then lying, as they saw him, on the lawn.

It flattered him; snubbed as he had been, it soothed him that Mrs. Ramsay should tell him this. Charles Tansley revived. Insinuating, too, as she did the greatness of man’s intellect, even in its decay, the subjection of all wives—not that she blamed the girl, and the marriage had been happy enough, she believed—to their husband’s labours, she made him feel better pleased with himself than he had done yet, and he would have liked, had they taken a cab, for example, to have paid for it. As for her little bag, might he not carry that? No, no, she said, she always carried that herself. She did too. Yes, he felt that in her. He felt many things, something in particular that excited him and disturbed him for reasons which he could not give. He would like her to see him, gowned and hooded, walking in a procession. A fellowship, a professorship, he felt capable of anything and saw himself—but what was she looking at? At a man pasting a bill. The vast flapping sheet flattened itself out, and each shove of the brush revealed fresh legs, hoops, horses, glistening reds and blues, beautifully smooth, until half the wall was covered with the advertisement of a circus; a hundred horsemen, twenty performing seals, lions, tigers … Craning forwards, for she was short-sighted, she read it out . . .will visit this town, she read. It was terribly dangerous work for a one-armed man, she exclaimed, to stand on top of a ladder like that—his left arm had been cut off in a reaping machine two years ago.

Let us all go! she cried, moving on, as if all those riders and horses had filled her with childlike exultation and made her forget her pity.

Let’s go, he said, repeating her words, clicking them out, however, with a self-consciousness that made her wince. Let us go to the circus. No. He could not say it right. He could not feel it right. But why not? she wondered. What was wrong with him then? She liked him warmly, at the moment. Had they not been taken, she asked, to circuses when they were children? Never, he answered, as if she asked the very thing he wanted; had been longing all these days to say, how they did not go to circuses. It was a large family, nine brothers and sisters, and his father was a working man. My father is a chemist, Mrs. Ramsay. He keeps a shop. He himself had paid his own way since he was thirteen. Often he went without a greatcoat in winter. He could never return hospitality (those were his parched stiff words) at college. He had to make things last twice the time other people did; he smoked the cheapest tobacco; shag; the same the old men did in the quays. He worked hard—seven hours a day; his subject was now the influence of something upon somebody—they were walking on and Mrs. Ramsay did not quite catch the meaning, only the words, here and there … dissertation … fellowship … readership … lectureship. She could not follow the ugly academic jargon, that rattled itself off so glibly, but said to herself that she saw now why going to the circus had knocked him off his perch, poor little man, and why he came out, instantly, with all that about his father and mother and brothers and sisters, and she would see to it that they didn’t laugh at him any more; she would tell Prue about it. What he would have liked, she supposed, would have been to say how he had gone not to the circus but to Ibsen with the Ramsays. He was an awful prig—oh yes, an insufferable bore. For, though they had reached the town now and were in the main street, with carts grinding past on the cobbles, still he went on talking, about settlements, and teaching, and working men, and helping our own class, and lectures, till she gathered that he had got back entire self-confidence, had recovered from the circus, and was about (and now again she liked him warmly) to tell her—but here, the houses falling away on both sides, they came out on the quay, and the whole bay spread before them and Mrs. Ramsay could not help exclaiming, Oh, how beautiful! For the great plateful of blue water was before her; the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst; and on the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft low pleats, the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them, which always seemed to be running away into some moon country, uninhabited of men.

That was the view, she said, stopping, growing greyer-eyed, that her husband loved.

She paused a moment. But now, she said, artists had come here. There indeed, only a few paces off, stood one of them, in Panama hat and yellow boots, seriously, softly, absorbedly, for all that he was watched by ten little boys, with an air of profound contentment on his round red face gazing, and then, when he had gazed, dipping; imbuing the tip of his brush in some soft mound of green or pink. Since Mr. Paunceforte had been there, three years before, all the pictures were like that, she said, green and grey, with lemon-coloured sailing-boats, and pink women on the beach.

But her grandmother’s friends, she said, glancing discreetly as they passed, took the greatest pains; first they mixed their

Reviews for To the Lighthouse

[thegalaxygirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I have read this before, centuries ago in a college English class. Then, I was unable to rhapsodize but only struggle to turn the pages and keep my attention on the prose. I say 'prose' because there is no story, not in the classic sense. I have now read it again, and as I was ill I had nothing else pressing but to distract myself from my symptoms, I was able to immerse myself in the rhythm of Woolf's language, not sprint to the finish, but just consume the words, make pictures in my mind, go back and forth across the page. This is a work about the inner lives of several people and how those people intersect with and mold one another. Woolf is painting a group portrait with words, and the words inevitably fail to show all the facets she wants to show, but that failure is part of the story. It is impossible to comprehend the complexities and emotional tides of other people. Just as Lily, the spinster artist in the group, both fails and succeeds in completing her painting, Woolf has also 'had her vision' and it is enough to have had it, whether or not she is entirely successful in her endeavor.The impressionistic cover to my version of this book is perfect, because the narrative itself is very impressionistic, showing us brushstrokes and colors and the occasional exquisite detail, but the whole is necessarily without hard edges or even borders. When I rate books, I try to judge them as what they are, rather than what I want them to be. This book isn't a page turner, isn't a thriller, isn't even really a story. It's one woman's attempt to do something different, to push the boundaries of literature. And because I think she succeeded, I'm giving her five stars.

[castlelass · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Published in 1927, To the Lighthouse is one of Woolf’s most well-known and widely read books. I finished Mrs. Dalloway earlier this year and enjoyed it immensely once I got immersed into the writing style. I did not feel quite as immersed in this one, but she definitely has a unique voice. We basically spend lots of time in the minutia of the characters’ thoughts as they look at and evaluate people and the world around them.

I normally love books with deeply drawn characters, but I must admit, even I need a tiny bit more structure than what is depicted here. I enjoyed the observations about life, death, and the passage of time. It is a lyrically written psychological study that ebbs and flows fluidly, as thoughts tend to do. While I understand the literary merit of this work, I did not find it a particularly pleasant reading experience.

One of my favorite quotes from the book provides a sense of that special feeling when everything feels “just right,” a scene from a dinner that has had its issues, but which the guests will remember fondly years later:

“It partook, she felt, . . . of eternity . . . there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that remains forever after.”

[bauernfeind · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I'm sorry but of the thousands of books I've read in my lifetime (I'm 74) this book, despite it being placed on a top 100 must-read books list, is in my opinion, unreadable. It just does not flow; there's no link between characters and actions. I'm obviously missing the big picture here and if so, please tell me what it is.

[browner56 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In To the Lighthouse, we spend two days, spaced ten years apart, with the Ramsays and their guests at the family’s summer home on the Isle of Skye. On the first visit, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay quarrel over whether the next day will bring weather nice enough to take six-year old James, one of their eight children, on a sailboat ride to a nearby off-shore lighthouse. The family and their friends—including the young painter Lily Briscoe, the old poet Augustus Carmichael, and the sycophantic academic Charles Tansley, then suffer through an extremely tense dinner. Ten years later, following World War I, much has changed for the Ramsay clan, most notably the untimely deaths of three of its members. Nevertheless, the remaining family and many of the same friends gather once again at the island retreat and this time the long-awaited boat trip to the lighthouse is accomplished.If that strikes you as a story in which very little external action occurs, you would not be wrong. Of course, the fame and lasting legacy of this novel comes from what happens inside; that is, inside the heads of the main characters. Virginia Woolf, extending the tradition of other modernist writers like James Joyce, makes it clear early on that this is a novel of interior monologues and personal introspection rather one where the plot is placed front and center. The book is divided into three parts: 'The Window' tells of the family’s first pre-war day on the island, mainly through Mrs. Ramsay’s interior thoughts; 'Time Passes' tells of the deaths that happened during the ten years surrounding the war in a terse and almost clinical fashion; and 'The Lighthouse' tells of the second post-war island trip, with shifting focus on the thoughts of Lily, James, and another of the Ramsay children.I will happily concede that this is an Important Work in literary annals, both for its innovative, complex structure as well as the author’s deep exploration of human thought and relationships. (By the way, it is also considered an important feminist work, mainly I would guess because of Lily’s decision that she would rather remain single and working as an artist than married and unhappy.) It was not, however, a particularly interesting or enjoyable book to read. In fact, despite the occasional sublime passage, most of the prose is dense and turgid as the central characters try to work out their various emotional complaints (wives against husbands, children against parents, friends against friends) and angst-ridden issues within the space of their own heads. This made for some very long, wandering sentences that were not redeemed by whatever brooding self-discovery the protagonist in question ultimately made. So, while I am happy to have read a book that several notable lists rate a classic, it was not an altogether pleasant experience.

[sheila1957 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Ramsays are at their summer residence with guests. Mrs. Ramsay keeps promising her youngest child they will go to the lighthouse the next day, but her husband says they won't because of bad weather. Unfortunately, tragedy happens before they can go to the lighthouse. When they do go to the lighthouse, the youngest son is now a teenager. It is a reunion of sorts from that time 10 years earlier.This was not my cup of tea. I found the beginning boring. Quotation marks would have helped when characters were having conversations or thoughts. I often had to re-read passages to understand what was happening as well as who it was happening to. The book is in three parts. The first part is the basic story as in the above synopsis. The second part is what happens after the tragedy. The third part is 10 years later with the return of the Ramsays to the island. The third part I find interesting. It is a stream of consciousness by different people. Some interesting thoughts occur. Some rebellious ones. Some on how to change others' responses to one. There are recriminations and anger in the thoughts. There is sorrow in remembrance. These people are flawed. I just had a problem making a connection to any of them. Fortunately, I borrowed this from the library for book club. It is not a keeper for me.

[carltonc_5 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Luckily I was in the mood to immerse myself in these word pictures, these impressions and suggestions of characters, because this is a very literary book, with little narrative drive. You have to be prepared to read this slowly and uninterruptedly.However, allowing for these demands, it is wonderful experiment with language, difficult to explain without surrendering to the hypnotic prose, elegaic. The middle section, Time Passes, is like an epiphany (or was when I was reading it).

[lethalmauve · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment."Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse is different and brilliantly so. It demands your full attention and each of your emotion. It knocks on your door, persuades you to let a room to it in your mind, set a comfortable bed, and welcome its stay then embrace its hovering presence once it decides to leave. It is a wonderfully-crafted introspection that broods and muses within different lives link — the comings and goings of the ideas, the rushing and disappearing of the waves by the shore — by a Lighthouse (Woolf wrote the word 'Lighthouse' as a proper noun), by a woman who seemingly serves the same purpose: to guide, to enlighten, to comfort.The wrath and peace of perception tear this novel apart and put it back together. Memories and thoughts are hives the characters protect and destruct their selves in over and over again. The ordinary is extraordinary, the extraordinary is ordinary. There is no lesson here. Death does not change anything although it changes everything. Life continues to flow, to happen and it is grief and absence that painstakingly, persistently impact these characters, these people we may find a common ground with. Nothing is left out with Woolf be it a glance, a touch, a gesture, a sigh; their weight is conspicuous; they lose, contradict, and fight themselves in this eminent passage of time."She had a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of everything, as she helped the soup, as if there was an eddy — there — and one could be in it, or one could be out of it, and she was out of it." (p94)There is no doubt that the mind flies inside the paragraphs of To The Lighthouse, it traverses every nook and corner, sweeps its every floor of thought and opens a window to an array of interpretation. It lingers on regret, yearning, anger, and affinity. Here, nothing happens yet everything does. It is a loyal servant of mood rather than a narrative pleaser. It is a food for thought, a home for sentiments. It nudges to question and to ponder on women's societal roles, demands of marriage, a sense of career failure and dissatisfaction, and most importantly life's purpose whilst stimulating the smell of childhood and sketching the complexities of adult relationships accompanied by a bleak summer backdrop.After closing this book at once, I knew that it doesn't end there. It will show itself, every now and then, on empty plates, busy harbours, passing empty moments, words on random book pages, some thoughts I thread, some thoughts that insist, and some people I part with and encounter."Sitting alone (for Nancy went out again) among the clean cups at the long table she felt cut off from other people, and able only to go on watching asking, wondering. The house, the place, the morning, all seemed strangers to her. She had no attachment here, she felt, no relations with it, anything might happen, and whatever did happen, a step outside, a voice calling ('It's not in the cupboard, it's on the landing,' someone cried), was a question, as if the link that usually bound things together had been cut, and they floated up here, down there, off, anyhow. How aimless it was, how chaotic, how unreal it was, she thought, looking at her empty coffee cup."

[pharmacdon · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I am not sure that I finished it because everyone was talking, or I should say thinking, all at once. I got confused. I got lost. I finished it. I think.
Kudos to those who liked it and gave 5-star reviews.
Reading this book is a little like riding a bronco. You either manage to ride it to the end or, like me, keep falling off.

[carrie_etter · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I want to read this book over and over for the rest of my life. Its insights into the (Western) psyche are tremendous.

[kohrmanmj · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Many of the themes and motifs were poignant, thought-provoking, and extremely relevant to my current phase in life. I enjoyed the depth of thought and meaning buried within the text, but I did not enjoy Woolf's verbose and clause-laden style (it was difficult to follow). I may have enjoyed the book more with a bit more plot or "action", but the most interesting pieces of the story are glossed over (intentionally). I "get" it. But I didn't enjoy it.

[bobbybslax · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Woolf's strange use of time was effective in result albeit uninteresting. Her characters are similar, in that their psychologies are (sporadically) interesting even if they aren't. Perhaps this isn't my kind of book; I got very little out of it.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[patsymurray · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The language is so beautifully evocative. The careful echoing of the longer first section, which allows the reader to meet and understand the Ramseys and Lily Briscoe in particular, with the concluding section where Lily (the artist) is forced to come to terms with what it all means is balanced by the much briefer middle part. That section is where we learn of the events of the painful period of Mrs. Ramsey's death, World War II and the passage of time. It functions as a sort of intercession for both the reader and Lily, allowing us to gain perspective (almost without realizing it) on how "we perish, each alone." Such a very powerful book.

[margaretfield · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

a family goes to the same vacation house through the years

[meditationesmartini · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

There are moments of great crystalline beauty here, seamless amalgam of little sharp perceptions and language their vehicle, and I won't forget this family, in particular the two parents, in whom I see so much of archetype, of my parents and my friends' parents transfigured and ennobled by, well, class, I suppose. Mrs Ramsey regal and anxious, Mr Ramsey needy and forbidding, which is almost another (male) way of saying the same thing. But a sprawling family deserved a sprawling novel that would let the modernist psychological superstructure unfold at a less compressed pace. I feel like that pressure relief would have led to fewer "But what is it all? And what does it all mean? And what are ... WE???"-type eruptions. Sure am glad James made it to the Lighthouse and had a moment with his dad though.(On class: the last gasps of compulsive Victorian world-building as well as Victorian formality are on display here, and it's affecting to watch that world list and capsize and the hard-won homeliness of it convert into something more twentieth-century and atomized. But I guess that made the proscribed lighthouse trip possible?)

[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.

[electrascaife · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I had close to the same feeling about these characters as I had to the ones in The Age of Innocence, which is to say, close to none. The writing here, however, was much better, as it seems to me, so there's that.

[charlie68_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Not much of a plot in this work of dreamy prose. But still worth a read, if just to suck from the marrow of these sentences. Being a short work one, can read it over and over again.,

[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.

[toddsherman · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Took me a while to finally get around to reading a Virginia Woolf book. Not sure why. Maybe it was her trashing of James Joyce ("the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating."). Maybe since she was critical of a book that had far more originality and seamlessly woven psychology in its prose than in her offerings--and she once had let this slip in a diary entry that her attempts were “probably being better done by Mr. Joyce.” But since "To the Lighthouse" seems regarded as an exemplar of stream of consciousness, it was only a matter of time before I dug into it. I found beautiful phrases warring with each other in the same sentence, strangled by punctuation, cordoned from the rest of the paragraph in endless parenthetical digressions. The second part had me interested with its jump in time and smashing of a plodding expectation. And then the third part took control of the reins with some truly great moments of uninterrupted thought-flow, only rarely sliding into the ruts with the irksome "he thought/she thought" or needless diversion or mixed metaphor. I know it was supposed to resemble thought, but at times it felt more like grasping at a style. And, as I’ve said, it had already been done better.In any case, those brilliant passages deserve their time in the sun, planted beside the stalwart side of a lighthouse that seems to alternate between unattainability and naked shivering reality."So some random light directing them from an uncovered star, or wandering ship, or the Lighthouse even, with its pale footfall upon stair and mat, the little airs mounted the staircase and nosed round bedroom doors. But here surely, they must cease. Whatever else may perish and disappear what lies here is steadfast. Here one might say to those sliding lights, those fumbling airs, that breathe and bend over the bed itself, here you can neither touch nor destroy. Upon which, wearily, ghostlily, as if they had feather-light fingers and the light persistency of feathers, they would look, once, on the shut eyes and the loosely clasping fingers, and fold their garments wearily and disappear.""So much depends then, thought Lily Briscoe, looking at the sea which had scarcely a stain on it, which was so soft that the sails and the clouds seemed set in its blue, so much depends, she thought, upon distance . . ."

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

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

[wagner5sarah35 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have mixed feelings about this book. On one hand, I found it frustrating to read, as little actually occurred in the book, with the content made up almost entirely of the leisurely musings of the English upper-class. On the other, I enjoyed the thoughts on art and I liked seeing the character of Lily grow into a more confident artist. I had some inner laughs at Mr. Ramsay, who in the second half of the novel finds himself in a difficult place without his wife to consistently praise him and his work. I did find the style in which this book was written, the focus on perception without much dialogue or action, difficult to read and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who is wary of those writing styles.

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

This was my second Woolf book and I'm no closer to being a fan of this author than at any other time of my life. Lighthouse was much more enjoyable than Waves, but I won't be rereading either of them any time soon.

[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.

[thebookjunky · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was an unrelenting richness that I could enjoy only in small segments before feeling overwhelmed.
I should very much like to see Lily Briscoe's painting.

[toobusyreading · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The audio unabridged version, read by Nicole Kidman, was very well performed. As a first reading for me, I found it interesting in a vague, historical way, but I wouldn't want a steady diet of novels like this one. There isn't much plot; it's more a story of relationships and thoughts. Not all the characters were likable, but the reader is shown what they are thinking, whether the reader cares or not.For a family with eight children, most of them played little part in the story. The novel is full of disappointment and resentment. It goes largely unspoken, especially by the females. The males are a good deal less reticent about their opinions, and are quit fond of telling everyone else what they should do and how they fail. I hated the bit about the fish.While I am glad I listened to this book, and while it is a remarkable book in many ways, I am also glad I don't have a steady reading diet of books like this one.

[amerynth · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I am definitely not a Virginia Woolf enthusiast, but my pursuit of the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die keeps forcing me to sample different novels. "To The Lighthouse" was my fifth by Woolf and definitely one of the more enjoyable ones (second to "The Years" which is probably her most traditional narrative structure.) Told in stream of consciousness style, "To The Lighthouse" explores relationships and legacy by focusing on the The Ramsey family as they stay in their vacation home in Scotland, along with a group of friends. The story definitely wasn't as challenging as others by Woolf -- so much centers on simple disagreement about the weather -- and the psychological insights into the family dynamics were interesting. This is surely one of Woolf's more accessible novels (at least of the ones I've read anyway.)

[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.