To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf
Harcourt, Inc.
1927
Ms. Hen read this novel twice many years ago, and she didn’t like it either time. She had heard that a lot of writers love this book, and she didn’t understand why because she thought it was boring. She found it at a Little Free Library in her neighborhood recently, and she decided to give it another chance. She’s glad she did.
Ms. Hen believes the reason she didn’t like it before was because she was an uneducated reader, and didn’t understand that plot is not supposed to be the most important aspect of this novel. She was frustrated that the characters talk about going to the lighthouse, and then at the end of the book they go to the lighthouse. But that is not the whole story.
This novel is about a family, the Ramsays, and their summer house off the coast of Scotland. They have people stay with them, and they are on break from ordinary life. Mrs. Ramsay is a beautiful fifty-year old woman with eight children, and she likes to take care of people. Mr. Ramsay is a philosopher, and is cantankerous. One of their guests, Lily Briscoe, is an unmarried woman who Mrs. Ramsay hopes will marry soon. James, their son, is a young boy who wants to go to the lighthouse, and is crushed when his father says they cannot go in the first part of the novel.
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE consists of up the different points of view of the characters. The reader gets to go into each character’s head and find out what each is thinking. Everyone is pondering something different, and the thoughts are not linear, one thought bounces to the next in a realistic fashion, the way people think and not usually the way things are written. This is Modernist writing.
This novel is about the passing of time, and dealing with loss. Grief hurts, but as time goes by it gets easier for some people, for others, the ache never disappears. Ms. Hen could not understand that the first two times she read this novel, but she does now. Grief is something that stays with you, but you can hide it, or do things to help ease the feeling.
This is a subtle novel full of complexities and nuances. The characters suffer, especially the women. This novel is about how difficult life is, especially for women, either married or unmarried. Ms. Hen realized that this novel was published almost one hundred years ago, and it’s about situations that would have occurred about a hundred years ago. It makes her think of how much the world has changed since then, especially for women. Lily Briscoe was an unmarried woman, and she had to deal with that; these days, if she was not married at her age, her life would not be as marked, and not as ostracized. The world changes, and it does not, and time marches on, and people live and die, and in between we struggle to survive.
Ms. Woolf writes in elongated sentences that have multiple commas and semicolons. Ms. Hen has read several of her other books, and she always wonders if she writes such long thoughts because she was a person with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, and she wasn’t on medication. She wonders if she was on medication that her ideas would be shorter. The world will never know. Ms. Woolf wrote an enormous amount for the period of time she was writing.
This might not be her favorite novel that Ms. Hen has read, but it is one that makes a person think a lot about life and the world and the passing of time. The writing is beautiful, and it is not a fast read, but it is a good book to read at the end of the summer, possibly by the ocean, but Ms. Hen did not do that. She did read some of it by a river on her lunch break, the water tossing at the edge, similar to the characters' trip to the lighthouse.
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