To the Lighthouse (Woolf)

To the Lighthouse 
Virginia Woolf, 1927
~300 pp. (Varies by publisher.)


Summary 
The novel is one of Woolf's most successful and accessible experiments in the modernist mode, including stream-of-consciousness. The three sections of the book take place between 1910 and 1920 and revolve around various members of the Ramsay family and their guests during visits to their summer residence on the Isle of Skye in Scotland.

Section I —"The Window": young James Ramsay fervently hopes to visit the lighthouse on the following day, but while his mother assures him, his father insists they will have to call off the trip due to weather. Various guests and colleagues interact with one another as Mrs. Ramsay attempts to placate all. The story progresses through shifting points of view.

Section II — "Time Passes": an omniscient narrator takes over to inform us about the war and the fates of some of the characters from the first section.

Section III— "The Lighthouse": Mr. Ramsay returns to the family's deserted summer home 10 years after the book's initial events. He and two of his children decide to sail out to visit the lighthouse. While they are gone, Lily Brisco, one of the previous guests, finishes an uncompleted painting. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

---

Author Bio 
• Birth—January 25, 1882 
• Where—London, England, UK 
• Death—March 28, 1941
• Where—near Lewes, East Sussex, England
• Education—home schooling and studies at Cambridge

Born in 1882, the daughter of Julia Jackson Duckworth and Victorian scholar Sir Leslie Stephen, Virginia Stephen settled in 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, in 1904. This house would become the first meeting place of the now-famous Bloomsbury Group—writers, artists, and intellectuals such as E. M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, and Lytton Strachey who, along with Virginia and her sister Vanessa, shared an intense belief in the importance of the arts and a skepticism regarding their society's conventions and restraints.

Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915 and was followed by Night and Day (1919), Jacob's Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), The Waves (1931), and The Years (1937).

Woolf is also admired for her contributions to literary criticism in general and to feminist criticism in particular, with A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1937) reflecting the full range of her intellectual vigor, insight, and compassion for the role cast for female artists in the modern world. Additionally, Woolf s diary and correspondence, published posthumously, provide an invaluable window into her world offer-flung relationships and interests, imaginative depth, and creative method.

The victim of a lifetime of mental illness, Woolf committed suicide in 1941. She left behind her a literary legacy, including The Hogarth Press, established with Leonard in 1917, which published not only Woolf's own work but that of an increasingly influential group of innovative writers—including T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Katherine Mansfield.

More
Virginia Stephen married writer Leonard Woolf in 1912, referring to him during their engagement as a "penniless Jew." The couple shared a close bond; in 1937, Woolf wrote in her diary: "Love-making—after 25 years can’t bear to be separate.... You see it is enormous pleasure being wanted: a wife. And our marriage so complete." The two also collaborated professionally, in 1917 founding the Hogarth Press, which subsequently published Virginia's novels along with works by T.S. Eliot, Laurens van der Post, and others.

The ethos of the Bloomsbury group discouraged sexual exclusivity, and in 1922, Virginia met the writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West, wife of Harold Nicolson. After a tentative start, they began a sexual relationship that lasted through most of the 1920s. In 1928, Woolf presented Sackville-West with Orlando, a fantastical biography in which the eponymous hero's life spans three centuries and both genders. It has been called by Nigel Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West's son, "the longest and most charming love letter in literature."

After their affair ended, the two women remained friends until Woolf's death in 1941. Virginia Woolf also remained close to her surviving siblings, Adrian and Vanessa; Thoby had died of an illness at the age of 26.

After completing the manuscript of her last (posthumously published) novel, Between the Acts, Woolf fell victim to a depression similar to that which she had earlier experienced. The onset of World War II, the destruction of her London home during the Blitz, and the cool reception given to her biography of her late friend Roger Fry all worsened her condition until she was unable to work.

On 28 March 1941, Woolf committed suicide. She put on her overcoat, filled its pockets with stones, then walked into the River Ouse near her home and drowned herself. Woolf's body was not found until 18 April. Her husband buried her cremated remains under a tree in the garden of their house in Rodmell, Sussex. In her last note to her husband she wrote:

I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. (Author bio from Wikipedia and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.)

---

Book Reviews 
Characters and their individual perception are what intrigue Woolf, not plot—and in Lighthouse she gives full rein to her modernist ideas: reality is subjective, life is transient, truth and certainty are unattainable. It is only art that offers an antidote to an ever changing, death-threatening world. What's the significance of the lighthouse? Good question.
A LitLovers LitPick (Oct '08)

Virginia Woolf stands as the chief figure of modernism in England and must be included with Joyce and Proust in the realization of experiments that have completely broken with tradition.
The New York Times

There are dozens of passages in which the secret revelations of men and women, especialy women, to the trifling events of life are rendered with convincing and elaborate subtlety. To have written them is to have surpassed...almost every contemporary novelist.
Saturday Review

(Audio version.) It's wondrous to listen to a fine reading of a long-loved novel. Leishman makes masterly use of volume, timbre and resonance to distinguish between characters and draw us into the emotional swings and vibrations of the internal musings of each. She creates not a new but a more nuanced reading, following the interwoven streams of consciousness in a British English that lends authenticity to each voice. Leishman swims smoothly through Woolf's sentences that ebb and flow with numerous parenthetical thoughts and fresh images. These passages are interspersed with quick, sharp, simple sentences that gain strength in contrast. Leishman also draws our attention to Woolf's poetic prose: her rhythms and images, her use of hard consonants in monosyllabic words in counterpoint to long, soft, dreamy words and phrases. To The Lighthouse plays back and forth between telescopic and microscopic views of nature and human nature. Mrs. Ramsey is both trapped in and pleased in her roles as wife, mother and hostess. The introspective Mr. Ramsey is consumed with his legacy of long-since-published abstract philosophy. This is a book that cannot be read—or heard—too often.
Publishers Weekly

---

Discussion Questions 
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for To the Lighthouse:

1. Woolf explores the ways in which people perceive or come to know the world: through intellect and facts or through intuition and feelings. Talk about how the different characters fall into those categories, especially Mrs. Ramsey and Mr. Ramsey; Charles Tansley and Lilly Briscoe. Where do you fall along these lines?

2. Mrs. Ramsey desires unity in her life over fragmentation. How does she express this desire. (Think about her knitting....) At her dinner party that evening, the guests are fractious, their individual desires keeping them separate. How, eventually, does the gathering finally achieve coherence and peace?

3. There is also a desire for permanence, for things to be "immune from change." How is this expressed in the book? Think of what Mrs. Ramsey wishes for, think of bowl of fruit on the dining table, the sea eating away at the land, the night air floating through the house, the change of seasons, Mr. Ramsey's wish for his books, and so on. (Remember that To the Lighthouse was written after World War I, so that author and her readers, even back then, were aware of the horrific change that would take place 4 years after the events in this book. Does that knowledge create a sense of fate...or doom?)

4. What do you think of Mr. Ramsey? Mrs. Ramsey? Why can't or won't Mrs. Ramsey tell her husband she loves him?

5. James yearns to visit the lighthouse—and his parents respond differently to his desiring something so specific. How do they respond...and what do their responses say about them?

6. Ten years later, James sees his lighthouse, but it's not the same. He wonders which vision is the correct one and realizes both are correct. How can that be? What conclusion does he reach?

7. Lily's painting is an attempt to fix the flux of time onto a canvas, to offer a sort of restoration of what is lost through time. How does that play out in this work? Consider memory, as well. Lily, like Mr. Ramsay and his books, is insecure about her painting. How does that change at the end? Why does the book end with Lily and her painting?

8. How do gender roles evidence themselves in this work? How, for instance, does Mrs. Ramsay, in particular, view women's roles vis-a-vis men?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)