To the Lighthouse

By Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is one of the most famous modernist authors of the twentieth century. She is best known for such iconic novels as Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and the semi-autobiographical To the Lighthouse (1927). Her fifth novel, To the Lighthouse, remains one of her most revered works. It is inspired by memories of her childhood spent on the coast of Cornwall and tells the story of the fictional Ramsey family and their guests vacationing in the Hebrides, on the Isle of Skye.


The novel is set in impressionistic technique. The narrative here is centered not on traditional plot composition, not on events, but on the experiences of the characters. The text follows the rhythms of human consciousness: momentary impressions and memories, flowing into each other, a mixture of thoughts, shades of different sensations and impressions. The text is divided into episodes that reproduce the individual stages of the characters' lives, like fragments of memories. Three episodes describe just two days in the lives of the characters, two days separated by a decade.


One of the most interesting aspects of the novel is Wolfe's work with symbols. Symbolism is one of her main artistic devices. It brings together the separate, seemingly unrelated thoughts and feelings of the various characters into a coherent whole. The light and hope-giving beacon, something reliable, unchangeable, a sign of confidence, stability in a changeable stormy world. It is opposed by a restless and destructive sea, whose waves are a reminder of the fragility, weakness of man, the impermanence of his life. Even the moods of the characters the writer often conveys through the behavior of the waves. Significant and symbolic are the household and interior objects surrounding the characters, such as the protecting hen, a symbol of motherhood and family, taking the memories of one of the characters far into the past. Another powerful metaphor is the boar's head on the wall of the children's room, frightening and alluring at the same time, Memento Mori. Wolfe's symbolism makes the characters' emotions realistic, their images three-dimensional, alive. Each word, insignificant in isolation, in context acquires depth and new meanings. This is what it is, stream-of-consciousness literature. Great and beautiful.


In 1998, the Modern Library named To the Lighthouse No. 15 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 2005, the novel was chosen by TIME magazine as one of the one hundred best English-language novels since 1923.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aegitas
• Release date: Jun 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9780369408945

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.

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To the Lighthouse

by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

W18 To the Lighthouse – М.: Aegitas, 2022. – 203 p.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is one of the most famous modernist authors of the twentieth century. She is best known for such iconic novels as Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and the semi-autobiographical To the Lighthouse (1927). Her fifth novel, To the Lighthouse, remains one of her most revered works. It is inspired by memories of her childhood spent on the coast of Cornwall and tells the story of the fictional Ramsey family and their guests vacationing in the Hebrides, on the Isle of Skye.

The novel is set in impressionistic technique. The narrative here is centered not on traditional plot composition, not on events, but on the experiences of the characters. The text follows the rhythms of human consciousness: momentary impressions and memories, flowing into each other, a mixture of thoughts, shades of different sensations and impressions. The text is divided into episodes that reproduce the individual stages of the characters' lives, like fragments of memories. Three episodes describe just two days in the lives of the characters, two days separated by a decade.

In 1998, the Modern Library named To the Lighthouse No. 15 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 2005, the novel was chosen by TIME magazine as one of the one hundred best English-language novels since 1923.

© «Aegitas» publishing house, 2022

© Photo by Todd Trapani on Unsplash

eISBN 978-0-3694-0894-5

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Reader Reactions

From Jim Fonseca

I think this book is Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece, not The Waves as some critics say. What is it about? It’s about life. The first half is about two days of life; the second half, set ten years later, is largely about death. In the Intro by Eudora Welty she says that in the novel reality looms but Love indeed pervades the whole novel.

The lighthouse of the book is Godrevy near St. Ives in Cornwall (where the author actually summered). The main character is a beautiful woman in full, her eight children and husband and guests gathered around her at a summer vacation cottage. Fourteen people in all at dinner, one a scholar friend of her husband who is in love with her, plus cook and maids.

At the dinner she worries Nothing seems to have merged. They all sat separate. And the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her.

She’s hosts a successful dinner despite numerous minor aggravations and interruptions by the cooks and problem with the food. The meal is her masterpiece, the epitome of her happiness. She delights in matchmaking.

Her husband, an academic, is withdrawn, conceited, stingy, in his praise of the children. He holds it over their heads about how the weather will be bad so they won’t be able to take a boat trip to the lighthouse. He’s more concerned with how the future will view his academic work than he is with the present. Yet, with everyone else to take it out on, he seems happier than his wife: Less exposed to human worries…He always had his work to fall back on.

From Luís

That's another magnificent text, which has the disadvantage of burying all the others. After Virginia, they seem to be the work of sluggish jobbers. But, finally, I will get over it.

To talk about it is to diminish it. To seek its meaning and symbolism is to reduce it. Like Rimbaud's Illuminations, you have to read it and let a thousand images, feelings, and gigantic or tiny sensations that are described flourish in you. Everything mingles and intertwines around a thin thread, a couple, a holiday home, an island of Scotland, the sea, a lighthouse, a garden, a window, people, children, words spoken or not, and secret thoughts.

One can still say: that a woman, Mrs. Ramsay, is, feels, is perhaps, the center of gravity of a family of eight children, a husband, and friends on vacation. The youngest, James, wants to go to the lighthouse by boat. His mother tells him they will go the next day, but his father declares it will be wrong; the wind is blowing from the west. So the day goes by, and, as in Mrs. Dalloway, she condenses the central part of the characters. The fluid mind narrator moves from one psyche to another, and the characters, like the tide's ebb and flow, let themselves permeate with all their movements. Mrs. Ramsay and her husband, who devours her excellent, fascinating painter Lily Briscoe, try to paint her from the garden. Behind her window, mother to the child with his son James, the young Charles Tansey, looking for his place, disagreeable, fascinated too. William Bankes, Ramsay's friend, resists the charm of Mrs. Ramsay, Paul and Minta, whom she wants to marry, and the children who venerate. Dinner, beef stew, bedtime, end of the day, storm. Unlike Mrs. Dalloway, however, the story starts again, Time passes and The Lighthouse constitute an unfortunate and melancholy sequel to the glorious summer day of the first part.

There, I've said too much. There is much more to it. It is enlightenment.

From soleil

Wow....

This book has put into words what I never thought was possible. Those little interior moments of thought and feeling that slip so swiftly away that I always felt like I could never capture them. But Virginia Woolf could.

I am just so amazed!! This book was like being sucked into a dream, with all the repetition, and shared consciousness, and multiple perspectives! And yet it was seamless. It didn't feel like it was trying too hard like it was 'artsy' or trying to be 'high literature.' It felt like I was gaining a view into real peoples' thoughts and prejudices. I liked especially how the reader could see how impressions of a person are ever-changing. Hate and love are so complicated! I LOVED the discussions on art and legacy, and I honestly can't believe I put off finishing this book for so long.

Also, it was really cool for me to see Proust's influence on Woolf, since I know she wrote about feeling like she would never be as good of a writer as him. I want to say, girl, you are in a whole realm of your own!! Proust is spectacular, but I don't think he could've written this like you could!

From Richard

It took me a long time to get around to reading this, and in a way I'm glad. It's a pleasure to realize there are enough great books out there to last me a lifetime. This is a beautifully wrought evocation of two days, years apart, in the life of a family at an island vacation house in Scotland. As a friend of mine used to say about certain books, Nothing happens, but everything happens. Guided by an omniscient narrative voice, we flit in and out of the minds of various characters as they go about their daily activities, accruing tiny details that allow us to piece together the complete tapestries of their lives. The language is poetic yet concrete. You're lulled by the swaying rhythms of the sentences, then suddenly find yourself in darker territory. It's a gentle book that jolts you. A real trick to pull off. I learned things here I can use in my own writing, and that's always satisfying. There are some astoundingly gorgeous descriptions of nature, and one section, the transitional middle section, Time Passes, is one of the most perfect bits of writing I've ever read. It'll stick with me forever as an example of true greatness.

From Lizbeth

My copy of To The Lighthouse is old and worn. It was new when I bought it. Yet this was the first time I ever read this novel and I daresay, it won’t be the last.

I’m with Margaret Atwood on this one: some books you have to be ready for. I first attempted to read To the Lighthouse when I was 20 and didn’t make it passed the first chapter. I didn’t understand any of it at the time. Woolf’s words sailed passed my eyes and right out of my brain without sticking.

I’ve always found Virginia Woolf to be a challenging author. She makes you work for it, but she always rewards your labor. This book in particular is difficult because it flows between the consciousnesses of several characters seamlessly, which is confusing at first. This book is also difficult because it deals with grand concepts like existence and loss that require enough experience with both to comprehend. I know that even now, much of the artistry of this novel has gone over my head, but I also caught enough to realize that Woolf has done something incredible with this piece of literature.

She has captured life on the page, the actual experience of a person existing in a moment and how the thoughts in their head flow and interact with their environment. She has captured the certainties and confusion when people interact with each other. She has captured how people can be tied to each other for life and how they inevitably damage each other by that tie.

Someday, I will read To The Lighthouse again. I know when I do, I will gain even more from it than I already did now.

I

THE WINDOW

1

'Yes, of course, if it's fine to-morrow,' 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 crystallize 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, 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 judgment. 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 to-night, 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 to-morrow,' 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 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