To the Lighthouse

This is quite simply, the most beautiful, illuminating, and period-defining book I have ever read. The prose is smooth and fluid, and if you let it carry you into the book, it will completely absorb you. I understand how stream-of-consciousness can be difficult, but rather than fighting the stream in an attempt to understand every sentence, I recommend 'going with the flow' for the first few pages and letting your visceral reactions to the emotions and ideas in the book guide you.

This is a book about transitions; from childhood to adulthood, from an era of clearly defined roles to one of liberation; it is a book about the things people need from each other but have difficulty communicating; it is a book about the impossibility of communication and the other subtle ways we attempt to bridge the divide between ourselves and other people. I doubt these topics will ever be addressed as elegantly.

Many critics, teachers and readers consider To the Lighthouse to be Virginia Woolf's masterpiece. To the Lighthouse was published in 1927 and its structure is unique, although it does contain elements of the Victorian. Woolf wrote this novel in only one year and did very little rewriting. Both subtle and sharp, the ease with which the book was written is apparent in the flow of both its narrative and its prose. The novel was written during one of the brief peaceful and happy times in Woolf's life. (In 1895, after her mother's death, Woolf became almost continuously depressed and suffered a series of nervous breakdowns, culminating in her suicide by drowning in 1941.)

To the Lighthouse, like Woolf's previous novel, Jacob's Room, is a somewhat disjointed story, possessing numerous characters, points-of-view and conflicts. The overlapping and separation of the characters and their stories seems to result from both intention and oversight and is a product of what Woolf referred to as "all characters boiled down," and the "break of unity in my design."

The story centers around the summer vacation to the Isle of Skye of the Ramsey family, a family Woolf admitted was very much like her own. In fact, Woolf said that writing To the Lighthouse helped her "rub out" the obsessive memory of her own mother. Mrs. Ramsey, like Woolf's own mother, is a woman of decidedly Victorian ideals, choosing to focus on her home, her marriage and her family.

Interacting with Mrs. Ramsey is the character most representative of Woolf, herself, Lily Briscoe, a young girl who is staying in the same beachouse as the Ramseys. Unmarried, Lily draws both disapproval and sympathy from Mrs. Ramsey who firmly believes that "an unmarried woman has missed the best of life."

Mrs. Ramsey and Lily represent the conflict between the Victorian and the Edwardian eras, the age of the woman in the home and the advent of the woman in the workplace. An intelligent young woman, as well as a sensitive and talented artist, Lily is very aware of Mrs. Ramsey's disapproval.

The role of art in the novel deals primarily with Post-Impressionism and the attempt to freeze reality, not on paper or on canvas, but in the mind, and then to paint the very equivalent of this reality. In many ways, To the Lighthouse resembles a painting because of its three distinct images of reality: the summer, the return and the seven years in between.

Woolf was not the only writer to "paint" her novels. In Place in Fiction, Eudora Welty writes of "painting and writing, always the closest two of the 'sister arts.'" Throughout the novel, Lily works on one painting and cannot seem to "connect the mass on the right hand with that on the left...But the danger was that by doing that the unity of the whole might be broken." The need for connection in the painting is much like the need for connection in the narrative. And Lily and Mrs. Ramsey both serve to fulfill the role as unifier.

One of the most startling moments of unification occurs as Mrs. Ramsey is staring at a bowl of fruit she has placed in the middle of the table during a dinner party. Because of her extreme attention to detail, Mrs. Ramsey focuses on the bowl throughout the dinner. She particularly notices the perfection of the arrangement while also fearing its imminent destruction as she catches another guest looking at the fruit, no doubt desirous of it. Mrs. Ramsey thinks, "That was his way of looking, different from her. But looking together united them."

Even when not physically present in the story, Mrs. Ramsey continues to exert a strong influence. At the end of the novel, Mr. Ramsey finally takes his two youngest children, James and Cam, to the lighthouse. Both children have changed considerably from the time of their first vacation; Mrs. Ramsey's absence has required that they develop a new independence, yet she was their only tie to their father, the typically restrained and uninvolved Victorian husband.

The children must, however, incorporate the influence of both of their parents on their journey to the lighthouse, a journey that is both literal and figurative. From shore, Lily watches them as she paints their journey, recalling Mrs. Ramsey with both annoyance and love. Lily, like Woolf, herself, has finally come to terms with the connection of all things, the completion of a painting as well as the completion of a journey.

To the Lighthouse is a quiet, reflective and meditative novel and one of the first to display Woolf's unique Impressionistic stream-of-consciousness style.

Art of such consequence as this makes demands on its audience, but the return is colossal. This is an extraordinary book. It is at least as much poem as tale, as much music as prose. It will certainly change your idea about limitations of expression. For readers who require signposts of plot to trigger their perception of information, and who don't find it easy to appreciate the subtle flavours of words, be warned: you will need to depend very heavily on your inner ear, to allow some of the more exquisite sensations of language to wash in of their own accord. (Other reviewers have hinted here at the role of reading skills in our understanding.) It is possible though, by such openess, to develop a reliable method of perceiving and pulling ideas which is not at all the way we are so used to guzzling and then spitting them out, in our late 20th century consumerist addiction to news media sensation. A good book makes you want to write and speak, to learn how language can serve you. Woolf gently turns the relationship between events in time and the play of human feeling on its head in the search for universal truth. I read it the first go in two or three bites because it's flavours are so rich and I did not want to miss anything by failing to savour them properly. I'll always revisit it to learn and feel more and to be enriched further. This is not an Oprah book.

Art of such consequence as this makes demands on its audience, but the return is colossal. This is an extraordinary book. It is at least as much poem as tale, as much music as prose. It will certainly change your idea about limitations of expression. For readers who require signposts of plot to trigger their perception of information, and who don't find it easy to appreciate the subtle flavours of words, be warned: you will need to depend very heavily on your inner ear, to allow some of the more exquisite sensations of language to wash in of their own accord. (Other reviewers have hinted here at the role of reading skills in our understanding.) It is possible though, by such openess, to develop a reliable method of perceiving and pulling ideas which is not at all the way we are so used to guzzling and then spitting them out, in our late 20th century consumerist addiction to news media sensation. A good book makes you want to write and speak, to learn how language will work for you. Woolf gently turns the relationship between events in time and the play of human feeling on its head in the search for universal truth. I read it the first go in two or three bites because it's flavours are so rich and I did not want to miss anything by failing to savour them properly. I'll always revisit it to learn and feel more and to be enriched further. This is not an Oprah book.

I haven't read To the Lighthouse since college, a time at which I understood very little about it, but was still greatly moved. Two things struck me about the experience of re-reading it. One is that while I can't claim full understanding, I no longer found myself struggling with the form in order to read the book. The second is how much more resonant the book became for me now that I'm older and can identify more with Mrs. Ramsey instead of seeing the book only through the character of Lily Briscoe.

To the Lighthouse centers around the Ramsey family and the people they bring in their wake to their home on the Isle of Skye. Families in the world of this book are fragile things. The first half creates the Ramsey family group so well that when the second half is without it, the reader is constantly aware of the ghost images standing in the empty spaces. Meanwhile, Lily tries to understand the world she's in and make her painting by meditating about the Ramseys and how much has changed in the world around them.

The book is tremendously beautiful and sad. I'll look forward to re-reading it again in another ten years.