To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

This may have been the first novel by Virginia Woolf I read, or attempted to read, I should say. I can’t remember whether this novel was assigned to be read in a class I took at University, or whether it was recommended to me by a friend there who loved Virginia Woolf. Eventually I came to love Woolf myself and I’ve read many of her novels, and essays and short pieces, but this novel frustrated me on first go. On this reading I found it enjoyable and easy to read. I read it on a journey of my own: on a plane ride, out and back, to visit my father in North Carolina.

The problem is the title. The title sets up the expectation that the novel will be about an expedition: a voyage by boat to a lighthouse. Indeed, a trip to a lighthouse is mentioned in the opening sentences of the novel as a boy, age six or so, James Ramsay, one summer afternoon, is assured by his mother, Mrs. Ramsay, that they will sail to the lighthouse the next day, “If it’s fine tomorrow.” But this opening section, titled “The Window” never gets as far as tomorrow, so there’s no trip to the lighthouse. And when the trip to the lighthouse finally occurs, and it does, under very different circumstances, ten years have passed and 142 pages. That was too much for me, forty years ago. I carried the anxiety of waiting for the novel to just get on with it already into my reading when this novel really demands a very different relationship between text and reader. Funnily, as I was reading on the plane, Jim asked me if they’d gotten to the lighthouse yet, and I had to laugh because they hadn’t, and Jim’s natural expectation of what a novel with that title would be about had been exactly mine, and my problem with it forty years earlier.

The novel, in terms of its action, what little action there is anyway, covers two days, separated by ten years, with the Ramsay family and several extended friends and associates on holiday at a vacation home the Ramsay’s own on an island in Scotland. From the house it’s a quick walk down to the beach. The lighthouse is visible in the distance, several hours away by sailboat. There are three sections: the first day, the ten years passing, and the second day, titled: The Window, Time Passes, and The Lighthouse. Each section is further divided into several numbered chapters, none long and a few no more than a few sentences.

The first section is dominated by the main character of the novel: Mrs. Ramsay. She is the mother of eight children. The older children, young adults and teenagers, are three boys: Andrew, Jasper, Roger, and three girls: Nancy, Prue, Rose. The two younger children are Camilla, called Cam, and James. Mrs. Ramsay, around age fifty, is described as beautiful. She is the emotional heart of the family, loved by the others, but a somewhat fearsome presence, too, with her strength and control of the household. Mr. Ramsay is a minor philosopher. He’s insensitive to the point of cruelty, prideful but fragile in his need for praise and sympathy. The others in the house are Charles Tansley, a student of Mr. Ramsay’s; older male friends of the family: Augustus Carmichael, a poet, and Mr. Barnes a widower; a young woman, a painter named Lily Briscoe; and two young people, friends of the older children: Paul Rayley, and Minta Doyle. There’s also the help: Marthe, the cook, Ellen a maid, Mildred a nanny, and a caretaker for the house when the family isn’t using it named Mrs. McNab.

The novel is written in third person, but with an authorial voice like a spirit the slips easily into and out of the consciousness of the other characters and speaks only their thoughts. Mrs. Ramsay predominates in the first section, but the point of view is constantly moving, within chapters, within paragraphs, even within sentences. There’s very little spoken dialogue, it’s almost all interior thoughts, indeed the reluctance of the characters to speak their thoughts is one of the repeated themes of the novel. Instead, in silence, they rely on their gestures and glances and pauses to communicate what they fear words would not. They think about each other, sometimes with the extravagant thoughts that we’re allowed to feel only because we know we won’t act on them or say them aloud, but even when the feelings are benign or would be helpful if shared, the characters say nothing.

The first day, and the novel, begins in the afternoon after lunch. The narration proceeds, slowly, chronologically. Mrs. Ramsay is sitting in the house with James by a window that looks out to the garden. She is knitting a pair of socks that she intends to give to the son of the lighthouse keeper. James entertains himself by cutting pictures out of a catalogue. James hopes to visit the lighthouse. Mrs. Ramsay encourages him. Mr. Ramsay and Roger Tansley dash his hopes, which irritates Mrs. Ramsay. Lily Briscoe is in the garden with her easel working on a painting of the house and garden, including what she sees of Mrs. Ramsay through the window. (I found it surprising that she wouldn’t turn her easel the other way ’round and paint the sea and the lighthouse, a more natural subject.) Nancy, Andrew, Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle take a walk to the beach where Minta accepts Paul’s proposal of marriage, off stage. (We discover them post-proposal behind a rock, kissing.) Charles Tansley accompanies Mrs. Ramsey when she takes a walk into the village on some errands. The day ends with an extended scene of dinner. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay sit at opposite ends of the table. James and Cam are upstairs in the nursery with Mildred, the Nanny. Nancy, Andrew, Paul and Minta, arrive late to dinner because they went back down to the beach to look for a brooch that Minta was wearing and lost.

The second section, Time Passes, begins for its first two short chapters that same evening as the characters go to bed and a storm comes up. But the third chapter begins to leap ahead, no longer moving hour by hour but years passing. The text stays fixed on the house, now closed. The housekeeper, Mrs. McNab, comes in occasionally to clean, but she cannot keep up with the pace of the house’s decline. Mrs. McNab plus a helper who comes in later named Mrs. Bast, are the only characters that appear in this section but we learn through parenthetical notes in the text that Mrs. Ramsey has died, suddenly, that Prue had married but died less than a year later due to an illness related to childbirth, that Andrew has died in the war, in France, from an exploded shell. (This would be the First World War. The novel was published in 1927, her fifth, after Mrs. Dalloway) We learn that Augustus Carmichael, the poet, who we thought was rather a failure in the first section, has become an unexpected success. “The war, people said, had revived their interest in poetry” (p. 119). Because of the lack of characters in the empty house, in this section the third person narration becomes more generically omniscient. At the end of this short section Mrs. McNab receives an instruction to prepare the house for visitors because the family has decided to return.

The Lighthouse, the third section, begins in the morning at the house, then alternates between scenes at the house with Lily Briscoe painting again at her easel in the garden as Augustus Carmichael naps in a chair, and Mr. Ramsay, James, and Cam sailing (at last!) to the lighthouse, along with two local sailors father and son named Macalister. Jasper and Nancy are also mentioned, but slightly. Lily and her thoughts and her painting are the main focus of the scenes at the house. James and Cam are the center of the boat scenes. All three of them spend much of their thoughts on Mr. Ramsay, his person and personality dominating the other characters the way that Mrs. Ramsay did in the first section. Lily’s thoughts fill us in on the whereabouts of the other characters: Charles Tansley is married. Paul and Minta’s marriage went bad quickly and Paul has taken a lover. Lily’s work of painting, taking up the same subject that she failed to complete ten years earlier but now minus Mrs. Ramsay in the window, matches the progress of the boat sailing to the lighthouse, so the boat reaches the lighthouse in the final pages about mid-day just as Lily adds a final stroke to her painting and, “she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue. I have had my vision” (p. 183).

Clearly, the novel isn’t about the little bit of plot. Woolf is interested in the running thoughts of her characters as they think about themselves and each other, and about the challenge of catching those running thoughts in prose. The characters are well delineated. The setting seems real, including the way that many minor characters circle about the central ones.

Lily Briscoe frequently quotes Charles Tansley who at one point told her that “Women can’t paint, women can’t write… (p. 43 and elsewhere), which tells you much about Charles Tansley. But putting those two activities together invites the reader to equate Lily Briscoe’s painting with Virginia Woolf’s writing. Lily struggles throughout the first section to get the composition of her painting right, to correctly capture the scene: the garden, Mrs. Ramsay in the window, etc and the balance required for a successful painting. During the dinner scene she has an inspiration that if she moved a tree more toward the center of the painting it would solve the problem. She finally succeeds ten years later, in the final words of the novel. That dual work or reflecting the real world in art seems to be Woolf’s intention also, to capture a scene, including the people in it, while finding a way to be true both to the “reality” of the subject as well as to create a harmonious whole that makes beauty in itself. So she blends material at hand: in this case, childhood memories of Woolf’s actual father and mother and a vacation house her family used to visit, with fictional elements, additional characters, imaginings of interior thoughts, etc. to create a successful novel.

Comparing my own imaginings of what might be the interior thoughts of others to Woolf’s, I had the frequent sense that this was a very feminine understanding of human psychology. Her characters spend much more time thinking about others than I do. Her characters are concerned with relationships. They fret about feelings. They wonder at their own feelings, and whether they should be feeling what they are feeling. They worry about others. They worry about what others might be thinking about them. Past incidents are turned over and over and over. Lily Briscoe, even ten years later in the closing section is still bothered by Charles Tansley’s judgment against the talents of women. This quality of endless re-examination, along with the lack of action, probably also contributed to my feeling at first read that I wished the novel would get on with it already.

Just because I like the way that one novel leads to others, I enjoyed that the characters mention other novels here and there. Minta Doyle reflects on a conversation with Mr. Ramsay when he spoke to her about George Elliot and she was frightened because “she had left the third volume of Middlemarch in the train and she never knew what happened in the end” (p. 87). At dinner the group talks of Tolstoi. Paul Rayley can’t recall the name of the novel but he remembers the name Vronsky because he always thought Vronsky was a good name for a villain. Mrs. Ramsay supplies the name: Anna Karenina. It feels significant (for Woolf) that Paul remembers the name of the man but not the name of the woman that gives the novel its title. And yes, speaking of George Elliot, women can write! They also talk of the Waverly novels of Walter Scott, which I haven’t read.

And throughout the novel there are lines of poetry. Augustus Carmichael is a poet himself, although he never recites any of his own poetry. But the other characters and Augustus remember lines here and there of others: William Cowper, “But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he.” William Browne, “Steer, hither steer your winged pines, All beaten mariners!” and lines from a song titled “Luriana, Lurilee” by Charles Elton. Mrs. Ramsay reads Shakespeare’s Sonnet 98 and Woolf quotes the final lines, “Yet seem’d it winter still, and, you away, As with your shadow I with these did play.” Earlier, Mr. Ramsay, concerned about the impermanence of his own reputation after he dies chooses to denigrate Shakespeare. “If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today?” (p. 38). Woolf’s intention throughout the novel is to explore the thoughts of others. Poems and other published writings are the carefully worked and re-worked thoughts of others, not the casual thoughts that Woolf is interested in, but reading what others write seems to be the closest means we have of communing with another conscious.

I’ve been meaning for some time to try again with this novel. I’m glad I did. I got to it now because I had received a gift certificate for $15 from the Red Cross as a thank you for donating blood a month ago. I spent my gift at Barnes and Noble buying both this novel and Madame Bovary, $9.99 each. Quite the bargain.

I write a diary entry like this after every book I read, mostly novels, mostly the best of nineteenth and twentieth century literature.  To see what else is on my reading list click here.