Product Description

This novel is an extraordinarily poignant evocation of a lost happiness that lives on in the memory. For years now the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever.

In this, her most autobiographical novel, Virginia Woolf captures the intensity of childhood longing and delight, and the shifting complexity of adult relationships. From an acute awareness of transcience, she creates an enduring work of art.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1971 in Books
• Published on: 1994-02-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Synopsis
This book is with an introduction and notes by Dr Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading. "To the Lighthouse" is the most autobiographical of Virginia Woolf's novels. It is based on her own early experiences, and while it touches on childhood and children's perceptions and desires, it is at its most trenchant when exploring adult relationships, marriage and the changing class-structure in the period spanning the Great War.

From the Publisher
With introductions by Eavan Boland and Maud Ellmann

About the Author
Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography. From 1915, when she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf maintained an astonishing output of fiction, literary criticism, essays and biography. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, and in 1917 they founded The Hogarth Press. Virginia Woolf suffered a series of mental breakdowns throughout her life, and on 28 March 1941 she committed suicide.

Customer Reviews

Woolf's Greatest Elegy?
'One sees a fin passing far out. What image can I reach to convey what I mean? Really there is none, I think.'

Woolf writing in her diary of 1925 reveals her life long concern with the problematic representation of experience. Her sense of reality's ineffability haunted all her major novels and in To the Lighthouse perhaps her art found its greatest expression.

The novel begins with a promise, a promise made by a mother to her small child that he can go and visit the lighthouse near where the large family holiday each year. It ends with the Lighthouse being reached finally years later after the mother's death. The process that takes us from a casual promise to its manifestation is for me one of the most magical journeys in literature. I'll be braver- one of the most magical journeys of my life! For like Proust, Woolf is preoccupied with remembrance, with ways in which the past is never finished with and recurs.
Questioning the exact generic title for her 'novel' Woolf wrote:

'I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant 'novel'. A new - by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?'

An elegy is exactly what To the Lighthouse turns out to be. It takes place before and after the First World War and the 'elegy' understatedly suggests the complex processes of mourning that individuals experienced in the aftermath of the Great War. The brilliance of Woolf lies in her fluid, suggestive style which captures often in parenthesis, the seemingly insubstantial moments of experience and renders them extraordinary.

'With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta's arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.'

Woolf's protagonist Mrs Ramsay poises quite literally at a 'threshold' between reflection and conjecture. Her 'moment of being' exists for her outside of linear 'lived time' and communicates her sudden awareness of the miracle of spatial, 'outside' time. The complexity of this realisation is mirrored in the intricacy of the sentence itself, with its welter of subordinate clauses. The sentence hesitates as the experience is experienced and this halting of the 'flow' of the sentence proves revelatory .

The careless tenderness of the reference to 'Minta's arm' coalesces the intensely private thoughts of Mrs Ramsay, with her public role as hostess, and engenders a poignancy that haunts the rest of the novel. For this is a farewell, and ironically it is a farewell to Mrs Ramsay which will remain unappeased until the last scene of the narrative.
The final scene of the text shows the artist Lily Briscoe searching for a means to complete her picture, a picture begun years before, in the early stages of the novel. Suddenly she is is 'visited' by Mrs Ramsay once again and acknowledges her dead friend's haunting centrality; and her extraordinary gift of love.

'With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue. I have had my vision.'

Fabulous!

An extraordinary edition of a classic
Woolf's mastery of the stream of consciousness technique certainly is something to be admired, but that being said, I still find the novel rather boring and written (deliberately, I believe) in a way not particularly easy to read. Just like this sentence, actually.

I really wanted to write this review, however, to praise this particular edition (Oxforld World's Classics) for including the most ingenious notes I have ever seen. They are obviously very painstakingly researched, incredibly detailed and astonishingly pointless. When a character looks at a picture of Vesuvius exploding, an asterisk encourages the reader to read the appropriate note which is a comprehensive list of all Vesuvius eruptions from 1850 to 1920 (pointing out the most likely one). Upon Mr Ramsey being likened to a walrus, the note helpfully identifies (by name!) a walrus Virginia Woolf could have seen in the London Zoo, complete with his dates of birth and death. Sometimes the note directs you to a relevant passage elsewhere in the book; in one case, this relevant passage (quoted in full in the note, by the way) is as far as three lines away. And the list could go on and on.

Either the notes are an elaborate joke or a clear proof that Oxford professors are rather curious people. Either way, they are hilarious. I never thought I would laugh out loud reading a Woolf novel.

Great minds against themselves conspire
Why anybody talks about a storyline when reviewing Woolf is beyond me. TTL doesn't dress up its themes in a storyline. The book is a reflection on those things in life (both tragic and miraculous) which are on the lowest plain of being yet on a higher plane of detection (if that makes any sense to anyone else!).

The middle section is amazingly beautiful. Her insight into life was like reading what I had been trying to put into words for so long. She gives life to those things I couldn't pin down before.

I really can't praise this book enough. It was my first venture into Woolf and it's not as difficult to read as people make out; just plow on through it and everything will come together as you go.

This is also a good edition as the notes are very concise and give a better overall feel for the background of the novel.

Just read it.