Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

Our second August discussion focused on a book I recommended because it is my favorite novel by Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse (1927). 

While it is less than half the length of The Stone Diaries, it is a lyric and non linear novel, an early example of a stream of consciousness narrative. After completing  Carol Shield’s fictional account of the multiple decades of Daisy Goodwill’s life, we read Virginia Woolf’s fictional account of the Ramsays based closely on her parents, particularly Julia Stephens, in which the life is squeezed into an account of a single day, a death recorded in parentheses, and a rendering of the ways in which Mrs. Ramsay’s legacy lingers in Lily’s mind. Both novels confront the reader with those not so simple questions:  What is the meaning of a life? And what does it mean to “know” another person?

To the Lighthouse is a book in three parts, in three movements. All of it is laid at the Summer home of an English family named Ramsay in the Hebrides, the first portion occupying an afternoon and evening, the second portion constituting an interlude of ten years during which the house remains unoccupied, the third portion occupying a morning at the end of these ten years. The Ramsays are a middle-aged couple, when the book opens, with eight children, who have with them at their Summer place about half a dozen friends including the young unmarried artist Lily Briscoe. Woolf uses the figures of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay as the archetypal marriage, and the eccentric unmarried artist, Lily Briscoe, to engage ideas about gender relations, marriage, war, home, meaning, truth. Woolf uses stream of consciousness—a style of writing meant to mimic the way thoughts flow through people’s minds.

Most of the books we choose are plot driven, moving through time in a linear fashion, chapter by chapter, often with one point of view, or sometimes a sequence of chapters is narrated by separate characters. In contrast, Woolf’s stream of consciousness moves inside and outside characters’ heads, forward and backward in time, and the vivid prose and imagery is similar to that of poetry. 

I began receiving emails from members who were struggling to finish the novel. I shared notes from my teaching days, introducing stream of consciousness and some critical reflections on  the novel, hoping to convince everyone to love one of my favorite books. While I did not convert everyone to Woolf, the discussion was animated, and we all appreciated hearing each person’s remarks. 

Coming away from the novel, we were left with its essential question:  What is the meaning of life? Mrs. Ramsay repeatedly asks the question in Part I, and in Part III, trying to finish her painting of Mrs. Ramsay, Lily echoes it:  

What is the meaning of life? ‘That was all–a  simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark;…Mrs. Ramsay saying, “Life stand still here”….In the midst of chaos there was hope; this eternal passing and flowing.

As Lily ponders the impossibility of ever really knowing another person, she thinks of the habit we all have of making up scenes about others based on bits and pieces  “what we call knowing people,” and realizes there are no guides to answer the question about life’s meaning, but rather that “so much depends upon distance: whether people are near us or far from us….” 

As Lily continues and eventually completes her painting, her vision of Mrs. Ramsay, she thinks:  “One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with…Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with” and as Lily finishes her canvas with a single brush stroke, Woolf ends the novel with Lily’s words “I have had my vision.”