To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf
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Book Summary Information
Author: Virginia WoolfIntroduction: Eudora Welty
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1989-12-27
ISBN: 0156907399
Number of pages: 209
Publisher: Harvest Books
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780156907392
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of To the Lighthouse
Book Review: Painted lives
Summary: 5 Stars
An extraordinary book, at once light as air and dense with meaning. From the smallest happenings (a family gathered at a seaside house) seen in two brief glimpses (a long summer afternoon before the first world war, and a single morning ten years later), Virginia Woolf distils a profound meditation on love and loss, hope and disappointment, and human relationships, especially the precarious and limiting balance between men and women. But it is impossible to summarize in a sentence what Woolf achieves in two hundred pages, so let me just pick on three specifics: art, thought, and time.
ART. The Harcourt Harvest Book paperback edition has a beautiful cover, apparently a tinted turn-of-the century photograph of a beach with the sea and a lighthouse beyond. It is a perfect evocation of the period and of lazy summers by the sea. Yet the credits say it is adapted from a photo by a much later artist, Herbert List; presumably the period air and the uncanny overtones of Seurat's "Grande Jatte" are the work of the designer, Liz Demeter. I mention this partly because a book's cover is like incidental music; it creates the context in which you start reading, and this is perfect. But also because visual art also plays an important part in the book. One of the guests of the owners of the house, the Ramsays, is Lily Briscoe, an unmarried woman in her thirties. We first see her as she is painting in the garden: "Lily's picture! Mrs. Ramsay smiled. With her little Chinese eyes and her puckered-up face, she would never marry; one could not take her painting very seriously." So of course we take her for a mere amateur; and Lily similarly puts herself down, conditioned by a climate which denied creativity to women except as wives and mothers. But when we get to look closer at Lily's picture we see that it is extremely advanced for its time, and her thought processes are as rigorous as anything we hear from the paterfamilias Mr. Ramsay, a once-celebrated philosopher. Indeed in the glorious closing chapters of the book, it is Lily, struggling to express balance and feeling in paint, who comes closest to giving meaning and permanency to the whole family history. One recalls that one of Virginia Woolf's closest friends in the Bloomsbury Group was the art critic Roger Fry, who coined the term post-impressionism. Lily, far from being a minor character, stands as the alter ego of Woolf herself, achieving in touches of paint a very close analogy to what the author manages so marvelously in words.
THOUGHT. But fine as Virginia Woolf's visual descriptions are, her main medium is not sight but thought. The two days at the seaside are described entirely through the minds of various individual members of the family and their guests. There is occasional dialogue, but no third-person narrator. A paragraph may start with the thoughts of one person about another, switch smoothly to the mind of that other person, and then return to the first again. And often the thoughts of the first character will change significantly between one moment and the next. Affection can switch suddenly to anger and back again; Woolf knows that most emotions, especially given the complex ties that bind families, can seldom be contained by a single label; through her apparent contradictions, she builds up a truth that is richer than could have been attained by consistency alone. Again, I think of the visual arts and the multiple viewpoints of cubism, but though a modern writer, Woolf is not a modern-ist; her technique is concealed, not flaunted; she is not a "difficult" writer in the sense that Joyce or even Faulkner are. As a results, her portraits come through with great warmth, especially that of Mrs. Ramsay, willingly adopting a supporting role to her curmudgeonly husband (or almost willingly -- with Woolf that is important), but blessed with a radiance of personality that illuminates the entire book, even when she is not at the center of it.
TIME. Most novels tell a story that unfolds gradually over the course of time; this doesn't. The outer sections of the book take place virtually in real time; the action happens at about the same speed as it takes to read about it. But for all intents and purposes, these sections are static compared to the ten-year duration of the narrative as a whole. Only one thing happens in either of the outer sections that could really be called an event, and that involves two minor characters whose relationship to the Ramsays is never clearly specified. But that does not mean lack of movement. The rapidly shifting juxtapositions and viewpoints build up a dense texture of relationships and feelings that reach a certain stability at the close of the first (and longest) section, but leave you wanting more. In painting terms again, one might call this opening a still life -- except that the various figures in it are now linked by quasi-electrical charges, so that the balance between them is not static but dynamic, presently in equilibrium but capable of further motion. In effect, you could close the book at this moment and write your own narrative. Instead, Virginia Woolf does something quite extraordinary. In the ten short chapters of the twenty-page interlude entitled "Time Passes," she takes on the role of narrator for the first time, and tells what happens in the next few minutes, the remainder of that night, the ensuing nights, the changing seasons, the course of the War, and the passage of years. She writes of impersonal things -- the house, the garden, the wind, the sea -- throwing in small nuggets of personal information almost as afterthoughts. When the Ramsays finally return, much has changed, and the former golden days seem tarnished. But by the end of this marvelous novel, Virginia Woolf has burnished them to a new shine, less brilliant perhaps, but deeper and more lasting.
Summary of To the Lighthouse
?Radiant as [To the Lighthouse] is in its beauty, there could never be a mistake about it: here is a novel to the last degree severe and uncompromising. I think that beyond being about the very nature of reality, it is itself a vision of reality.??Eudora Welty, from the Introduction
The serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, and their children and assorted guests are on holiday on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Woolf constructs a remarkable, moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life and the conflict between men and women.
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