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    To the Lighthouse
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    To the Lighthouse
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    To the Lighthouse
    Ebook247 pages4 hours

    To the Lighthouse

    By Virginia Woolf

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    About this ebook

    To the Lighthouse (5 May 1927) is a novel by Virginia Woolf. A landmark novel of high modernism, the text, centering on the Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920, skillfully manipulates temporality and psychological exploration.
    To the Lighthouse follows and extends the tradition of modernist novelists like Marcel Proust and James Joyce, where the plot is secondary to philosophical introspection, and the prose can be winding and hard to follow. The novel includes little dialogue and almost no action; most of it is written as thoughts and observations. The novel recalls the power of childhood emotions and highlights the impermanence of adult relationships. One of the book's several themes is the ubiquity of transience.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBooklassic
    Release dateJun 10, 2015
    ISBN9789635221578
    Author

    Virginia Woolf

    Virginia Woolf was an English novelist, essayist, short story writer, publisher, critic and member of the Bloomsbury group, as well as being regarded as both a hugely significant modernist and feminist figure. Her most famous works include Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own.

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    Reviews for To the Lighthouse

    4/5

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    • 3/5
      Lily Briscoe is a kindred spirit. She asks a pertinent question at the beginning of the final section: what does it mean then, what can it all mean? I have been asking myself that, often out loud for most of my adult life. A pair of events this weekend illuminated that disposition and likely also besmirched my reading of To The Lighthouse. My Tenth wedding anniversary was followed quickly by the funeral for my uncle Fred. The first event was grand, of course, though it does lend itself to a certain survey, of sorts. The second was simply queer. this was no great tragedy, the man was 85 years old had seven sons and had suffered through terrible health these last few years. I leaned quickly that there are no poets in that section of my family and apparently no Democrats either. It was nice to hug, slap backs and smile at one another, most of the time counting the decades since we last spoke at length. Through the depths of such I ran to the Woolf and read for an odd half hour here and there.

      To the Lighthouse is a tale of caprice and desperation. It is a kaleidoscope of resonance and impressions. Much like life it can be dusty and wind swept on an even manner. I would likely have been great affected were it not for the switchbacks of the weekend.
    • 4/5
      There are books I’ve had on my shelves that I have always meant to read, and that I feel I ought to have read. To The Lighthouse was one of those books, so I took it with me on holiday and read it.But I didn’t really know what it was about, and it’s a strange book to encounter if you have no preconceptions. The first section, with its cloyingly deep analysis of the minutia of life, hundreds of pages where nothing much happens except they go to dinner, all the Meaning trapped in ‘do you think it will be fine enough to go to the Lighthouse tomorrow?’ ‘No, I think it will not be fine’. Marriage and motherhood and thwarted career ambitions and hosting and matchmaking, and the way the smallest thing can hold so much meaning. I found it quite intractable and frustrating at first, and then found a rhythm and a sympathy and settled into it...... when all at once I hit the second part and the book simultaneously broke my brain and my heart. Ten years pass in a flurry of pages. People we had known down to the grain on their fingerprints are casually dispatched in passing in the final sentence of a paragraph. The house slowly decays, the bubble that has been there so clearly is gone, as the dust and mould creep in.And then in the final part we are there again, and are drawn into musing around what fingerprints do we leave on the world, how are we remembered, what is success? Those complex family relationships, so much love and anger tangled up,and all inside, no ripples on the surface. But we paint. And we make it to the Lighthouse.
    • 5/5
      3-2-17
      Tonight I finished Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse.”

      Wowzers, it’s really great. This was my first reading of Woolf, and I was really hypnotized by her style. It was an emotional rollercoaster, and I highly recommend you ride it. A very quick read, under 200 pages, and it just flows and flows. Lyrical.
    • 3/5
      Impressionistic rather than descriptive. Divided in three parts. The first, and the longest, serves as an introduction to the setting, the characters, and their interactions. And this part was tough going, especially towards the end, simply because nothing really happens in the first part, and yet it keeps on going, without any real purpose. Characters were kept at a stand-still, just so that the author could paint a detailed picture. My 21st century attention span -- used as it is to snappy, streamlined characterization and world-building -- made me put the book down a few timesThe second and third parts, though, are very much worth the effort of struggling through that lengthy set-up. This is where [To the lighthouse] comes into its own: once you understand what’s going on, the whole thing pays off beautifully.
    • 4/5
      This book reads more like a poem than a novel. Evocative, fragile, nuanced, ephemeral moments of family life set in a gorgeous landscape. It would make a beautiful arthouse movie with long scenes filled with stark seascapes and little action.
    • 3/5
      I feel like I need cliff notes and a college level lecture on this one. There was just so much going on in this...every sentence heavy with meaning and infused with hidden feeling. The inner lives of Edwardians who perhaps grew up in the Victorian era...so repressed and filled with the expectations of society, struggling not to be themselves, but to even find themselves in the first place.
    • 4/5
      a family goes to the same vacation house through the years
    • 4/5
      Zeer moeilijke lectuur, maar met ongelofelijk veel intellectueel genoegen. Gaat over eindigheid en dood, kijken naar het leven. Zeer beeldend. Om te herlezen en herlezen.
    • 5/5
      I read this book in college and while I don't remember the details now, I do remember the feeling of beauty and insight in what may be Woolf's best novel.
    • 4/5
      What struck me about this was how seamlessly the writing moved from one character's perspective to the next. It seemed to flow, and was far from a difficult read (unlike James Joyce, for example, where I didn't have a clue what was going on). The depiction of every character's inner thoughts in immense detail, with all the incongruities and absurdities, was engrossing, even if in one or two places it seemed to me a little overdone. The second interesting thing for me was the depiction of time. The first and last passages of the book are extended descriptions of very short and meaningless events - a dinner, someone completing a painting, a trip to a lighthouse - while the middle part rushes headlong over years of far more important events, including the deaths of several major characters. This seems utterly wrong, but it works. The incredibly detailed snapshots at each end contrast so well that they explain the intervening years better than any conventional description could. And the warping of time reminded me that much of what I consider to be immensely important right now really isn't, while many of the things that seem trivial actually combine to create what I later find to be important. I think my life so far has been shaped more by the 99% of daily occurrences than by the 1% of "big events."
    • 4/5
      Virginia Woolf takes a seemingly insignificant disagreement about tomorrow's weather and turns it into an analysis of human character and relationships. Woolf shifts perspective often, revealing each character's thoughts and feelings through a stream of consciousness technique. The Ramseys and a few guests are at a summer home near the sea, and Woolf uses the sea's movement as a metaphor to describe the thoughts, emotions, and interpersonal relations of the characters. The book is divided into three sections. By the end of the first section, Woolf has given the reader a pretty good idea of how some of the characters influence the others. The middle section provides a bridge to the latter section, where Woolf explores the effects of the absence of characters from the first section on the remaining characters.Although I've read only a handful of stream of consciousness novels, I'm fascinated by the technique. Done well, it really does mirror the activity in my own head. I'm an introvert, so I tend to spend a lot of time there. I'm not sure that this technique will appeal so much to extroverts. I think stream of consciousness novels may be books by introverts for introverts.
    • 3/5
      Story of the Ramsay's starts and ends on the Isle of Skye in Scotland told mostly in stream of consciousness. First we are introduced to the Ramsay's as husband and wife/mother and father. The Ramsay's have a good marriage. Mrs Ramsay is a strong woman in her way and holds the family together. Son James loves his mother but dislikes his father. A trip to the lighthouse cannot happen because of weather. Life is interupted by WWI. Several people die and no one returns to the summer home for 10 years. Finally the family does return and the trip finally occurs. The narration shifts from person to person, started with Mrs Ramsay and ends with Lily Briscoe, an artist and strong independent woman who has not married who achieves her vision. This story is somewhat autobiographical of Virginia Woolf's own life. She is what I would categorize as a "woman's" author.
    • 4/5
      I thought that I would be put off by the writing style - but I actually found the "stream of thought" worked well for me.
      However, as I read this novel, regarded by many as one of the greatest of the 20th century, I had moments where I was jarred by something and it took me a while to understand it. The story, at least at a superficial level, tells the story of a married couple, their eight children, and various hanger-on'ers during a vacation in the North of Scotland. I kept being jarred in the narrative and thought to myself that here is a story about a mother, a father, and some children and I don't think the writer ever had children. A quick check confirmed that she never had children - and so it begs that question; can someone really tell the internal narrative stream-of-thought style of someone raising children when they haven't done it. Once I had decided that, I was jarred the entire rest of the novel and I'm pretty sure that wasn't her intention (there are other more jarring and purposeful bits). At the end, though, I enjoyed it much more than I was expecting. It is more than worthy of a re-read at a future date.
    • 2/5
      Typical Woolf. Long sentences. Inner dialogues showing way too much overthinking. Way too much detail over little nothings. Tiring. Nothing exactly happens in the the book. Things happen between chapters, then characters start the next chapter thinking about what happened. But we never see what happens.But poor James spent 10 years waiting to get his visit to the lighthouse. Which we don't actually get to see or hear about, because the book ends as they begin getting out of the book.Glad it's done. Glad it was short.
    • 3/5
      Well, now I can cross Virginia Woolf off my life list. That's the good news. The writing seems frigid, unwilling to tackle difficult feelings and conflicts directly. It's only at the end that some outright hostility comes to light (the son wanting to kill his father). Otherwise, the whole thing is bloodless and cerebral. I disagree that this is "stream of consciousness," at least in the Faulknerian mode. It's more a novel made up almost completely of characters' inner thoughts. This was probably quite radical in 1920. Almost 100 years later, it's dull as dirt. Note to want-to-be writers: don't write like this, or you will never get published. A two-hundred page book in which almost nothing happens, and people die off-stage for no reason...a good example of what NOT to do. Just realized I finished this and Confederacy of Dunces on the same day. Two books by suicides. I need to break this trend quick!
    • 4/5
      This was my first Virginia Woolf novel. I found it initially to be somewhat of a "difficult" read, though not as much as say Faulkner or Joyce. Yet as the novel progressed I seemed to become more comfortable with the author's writing style. I ended up enjoying the book very much.
    • 5/5
      Absolutely breathtaking literature.
    • 5/5
      It should be read and read again...no one can quite say she or he understands Virginia's mind but it's quite worth trying.
    • 5/5
      A book should always be permitted a good soak in one’s intellectual juices before being reviewed. That’s one of my personal “Review Rules.” Too often I feel overwhelmed upon finishing a book or swept away by an ending or the prospect of parting from a close friend, and that leaves me gushing about a book rather than looking at it critically and really assessing its value as an addition to the world’s literature library. I’m breaking all the rules with Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. A cold eye and heart would strip this book of its power. And if you want that kind of assessment, there’s an excellent one by Julia Briggs in the introduction to the Everyman’s Edition of this novel. To the Lighthouse is a book that’s meant to be felt, not simply read. The rhythm of its narrative needs to wash over and pull you down into it. Once submerged, what might have begun as a “difficult read” becomes second nature. I became so lost in each character. One moment I despised them and found dinner interminable, the next I was loving Charles for feeling so angry at their small talk, and so lonely all at the same time. I’ve soooo been there are dinner parties – not getting the drifts, but wanting to be there in the middle anyway. There were pieces of myself that I was finding in Lily and Mrs. Ramsey and Charles and James and Mr. Ramsey, in all of the characters, and I knew them all as much, or as little, as I know myself. The “Time Passes” section is so brilliant in structure and how it carries us through the difficult times, like the boat that in the end brings us to the lighthouse. I can’t wait to re-read this book – because I must. I know that I will find something completely different to love about it next time.
    • 5/5
      The language is so beautifully evocative. The careful echoing of the longer first section, which allows the reader to meet and understand the Ramseys and Lily Briscoe in particular, with the concluding section where Lily (the artist) is forced to come to terms with what it all means is balanced by the much briefer middle part. That section is where we learn of the events of the painful period of Mrs. Ramsey's death, World War II and the passage of time. It functions as a sort of intercession for both the reader and Lily, allowing us to gain perspective (almost without realizing it) on how "we perish, each alone." Such a very powerful book.
    • 5/5
      It’s a masterful novel. Apart from the beautiful and lyrical narration that focuses on the inner life of characters- exchanges, inner dialogue, pervasive thoughts, and all that has been since labeled the stream of consciousness, I found the proportions of the novel extremely interesting. The structure of the plot has what seems inverted proportions. In a traditional plot structure, events, especially those life-changing or dramatic, would be given prominence in the plot, and the lesser events or no events really if we think of the inner life of the characters on an perfectly ordinary day, would occupy proportionally less space. Yet, here what we would take for the most dramatic events are mere en passant mentions and the inner life of the characters takes over the plot. Within those inner dialogues is the best rendering of a wordless exchange between a husband and a wife I have ever read.
    • 4/5
      Rife with uncertainty, complexity in relationships, actions, and gestures; futility, entropy, battles to stake out identity and meaning amidst it, indefinable hope, and so on. Me likey.
    • 3/5
      I read this book less than two years ago, but I barely remember it- the sole scene I can pluck from my mind is of a character describing an impressionist style painting. I've looked at the books I read around when I read this one and every one has stuck with me to a greater degree than To The Lighthouse, even the books I didn't much care for are present more vividly than this one.

      So for better or worse my assessment of this book is that it is almost completely forgettable.
    • 4/5
      This novel really covers just 2 days in the life of the Ramsay family at their vacation home in the Hebrides on the Isle of Skye. On the first day, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay and their 8 children have invited an eclectic set of guests to their home for vacation. Everyone is hoping to make a trip to the lighthouse the next day, but the weather is looking ominous and the trip will most likely be cancelled. Nothing earth shattering happens on this day - very little action - but the novel shifts among the thoughts of the different people in the story. The central character is Mrs. Ramsay, who is the glue who holds the family together. She is always watching out for her children, guests, and her intellectual husband. There is an interlude - a chapter titled 'Time Passes' in which several years elapse and the house lies empty. The final section is a day when the family returns to the house and a small group finally make the expedition to the lighthouse. But during the years in between many changes have occurred - the children have grown up, one dies in the war, one dies in childbirth and surprisingly, Mrs. Ramsay, the heart of the family, also has died.

      I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this story, given that really there is no real plot. But I loved the wandering thoughts of the different characters and I really enjoyed discovering the personality and essence of Mrs. Ramsay - not only through her thoughts, but through the thoughts of her children and guests. A great book if you're in a quiet introspective mood.
    • 5/5
      A novel that deserves and demands the full attention of the reader, it is hardly surprising that To the Lighthouse might be described as a novel of and about attention. As the narration flits between Mrs Ramsay and her husband, their eight children, and their numerous guests all gathered at the Ramsay summer house on a Hebridean island, one thought leads to another, one observation spills into the next, one emotion peaks and subsides as another peaks and subsides like the waves endlessly rolling in upon the shore. And then there is the question of lighthouse on a crag of rock across the bay, whose light pierces the summer house and its inhabitants, ceaselessly. Will James, the youngest Ramsay, be taken to the lighthouse the following day?If Mrs Dalloway is the quintessential stream-of-consciousness novel, then Woolf’s next novel, To the Lighthouse, must surely be the start of something new, something even more intense, more challenging. Attention, or perhaps perception would be a better term, or even, as Lily Briscoe terms it “vision”, is the challenge. For it seems clear that it is almost impossible to really see someone, anyone. Even Mrs Ramsay, who is as much the centre of all that is as anyone could be, even for her, Lily thinks, it would take at least fifty pairs of eyes. And yet, the wonder of it is, that for some—the poet Augustus Carmichael, the painter Lily Briscoe, even the still beautiful wife and mother, Mrs Ramsay—the thing itself can be achieved. And it is an achievement when it comes. Even though it may disappear as quickly as it came.If you are willing to engage with this novel fully, if you can focus your attention sufficiently (don’t be surprised if you find you need to read it in small chunks), if you let the consciousness of the novel guide you as it sparkles across the minds of those characters arrayed before you, then this novel will repay your effort manifold. If not, then set it aside for a few years and try again later. It’s worth it. Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      I am definitely not a Virginia Woolf enthusiast, but my pursuit of the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die keeps forcing me to sample different novels. "To The Lighthouse" was my fifth by Woolf and definitely one of the more enjoyable ones (second to "The Years" which is probably her most traditional narrative structure.) Told in stream of consciousness style, "To The Lighthouse" explores relationships and legacy by focusing on the The Ramsey family as they stay in their vacation home in Scotland, along with a group of friends. The story definitely wasn't as challenging as others by Woolf -- so much centers on simple disagreement about the weather -- and the psychological insights into the family dynamics were interesting. This is surely one of Woolf's more accessible novels (at least of the ones I've read anyway.)
    • 5/5
      I loved this, and thought it was fascinating. I have never been able to get my book club to read anything by Woolf, to my chagrin.
    • 4/5
      This one has been too long waiting, like the children for their trip to the lighthouse. And, like the children, when they finally got to go, I approached it with mixed feelings and a little reluctance. It's one thing to love, love, love a difficult work you've known for 40 years and read multiple times with increasing understanding and appreciation. It's another to take on a new one, by a relatively unfamiliar (to me) author, and find an affinity. Virginia Woolf has lingered in the background of my literary experience, a bit of an intimidating presence, but no one ever forced me to reach out and take her hand. I'm quite glad that I have now done so, but I wasn't wrong to be trepidatious. Some scholar has probably counted the number of point-of-view shifts in this book; they come, usually, just as the reader is settling into one character's mind, and starting to feel comfortable there. The book is mainly about impressions, perceptions, images, and imaginings. There is virtually no plot. A few major life events are given parenthetical nods ("you need to know this happens, but you don't need to see it happen"). The setting is compelling--an island in the Hebrides, a shabby house, lawns, gardens and vistas of the open sea. The people are quite ordinary, with a few oddities among them, just like the people you know. The whole is a sum of the parts...a rather unexpected, but absolutely correct sum. This is a novel I am sure to return to, as there is simply too much to take in in a single reading.Reviewed January 28, 2014
    • 5/5
      I don't just throw 5-star ratings around like nothing...this book was great..extremely satisfying. When describing the book, it sounds like it would be horrible- wealthy family with a vacation home on an island, plus wealthy house guests and dinner parties (usually) equals boring pretentious tripe. To The Lighthouse, however, tells its story through the thoughts of the various characters...however neurotic that may be sometimes. The men are all intelligent, but emotionally reserved. The women ar...more I don't just throw 5-star ratings around like nothing...this book was great..extremely satisfying. When describing the book, it sounds like it would be horrible- wealthy family with a vacation home on an island, plus wealthy house guests and dinner parties (usually) equals boring pretentious tripe. To The Lighthouse, however, tells its story through the thoughts of the various characters...however neurotic that may be sometimes. The men are all intelligent, but emotionally reserved. The women are charming and witty if sometimes frivolous. And while they are bourgeoisis, you end up liking them anyway...their struggles with finding success in life; the need for praise from one generation to another; and worrying about the fates of those around them. Just read it. I haven't enjoyed a book this much in quite a while.
    • 5/5
      To the Lighthouse is a book without a plot. There is no action, hardly any dialogue, and it is so full of characters and points-of-view it is very hard to follow. But these strange elements also make the book astonishing. The book is a microscopic view of what “goes on in peoples’ heads.” It illustrates how thoughts often conflict with words and actions. On top of that, Woolf makes a heartbreaking point about relationships and time. So much is wasted; so much is taken for granted and if people cared more and worried less, it might not end up that way.