To the Lighthouse

Our minds are associative, easily distracted, and relentless.

And Virginia Woolf does something beautifully similar with To the Lighthouse, published in 1927.

It brings to life a family's visits to Scotland's Isle of Skye, but the way time passes in that book is so strange and fluid.

Woolf's ambition was to capture not just what happens, but how a moment actually feels as it passes.

It's a book that asks more of a rereader than almost anything else because the first read costs you so much emotionally.

Moving from the trauma of history to the interior trauma of a single day, we have Virginia Woolf, specifically To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway.

Virginia Woolf asks her readers to learn an entirely new kind of attention.

She really does.

Let's look at To the Lighthouse.

It's organized fundamentally as a problem of time.

You have part one, which is a single day deferred, a family wanting to go to a lighthouse and failing.

That's brilliant.

Because, you know, in, in literature, there's so much about the kind ... how time is measured.

So in kind of modernism, for example, I mean, the obvious example is Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, the way that, you know, the first section is sort of like a day or something.

It's 100 pages.

And then there's a, a whole b- bit in the middle which is about 10 pages or so, which is over, like, a series of decades.

There are some little lyric poems addressed to the Virgin Mary from, you know, over 1,000 years ago that I find almost heartbreakingly beautiful, and I respond very strongly to them.

There's a novel by Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, from, you know, 19, um, 27, and still I find that that book kind of speaks my language, you know, in a way that no other book across time has ever done.

Um, you know, there's stuff, there's stuff in particular periods that I'm like, "I don't really need to revisit this," uh, as well.

Uh, uh, and then, and then there's this category that I'm super interested in, Will, and I don't know if you've found this.

Because of all the movies and the endless cultural references, it feels like it should be a massive doorstopper, but it's so tightly written.

Then we have Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, which is 159 pages.

The article describes it as a modernist classic about a family's recurring vacation to Scotland's Isle of Skye.

A beautiful, haunting book.

And just as fatal in its own way.

Right.

And then you have Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.

You mentioned earlier that the article calls it a modernist classic.

We did Jacob's Room and The Waves, two of the maybe slightly lesser discussed books.

It's often Orlando, Mrs. Ellery and To The Lighthouse that we here talked about.

Yeah.

Are you happy to do Jacob's Room?

But I think particularly Mrs. Dalloway Into the Nighthouse.

And then I've kind of come back to them...

Occasionally, I mean, I've talked to The Lighthouse several times to sixth formers and really enjoyed that experience.

I've reread Mrs. Dalloway many times.

Right.

It reminded me a little bit of To the Lighthouse where like-

Yeah

... you know, you have the like one day and then like you move quickly through the war, and then you're at another day, but it does that kind of like repeatedly and sometimes within a single paragraph.

So there's no more places in London where Virginia Woolf lived.

But that got me to reading To the Lighthouse, the famous novel of Virginia Woolf that I'm sure many of you have read.

[clears throat] And I really liked it a lot when I read it the first time.

I liked it less this time, but it's, it's still pretty great.

Uh, you know, in most novels things happen, you know? [laughs] You know, people are born, they die.

There's all kinds of conflicts and crises and catastrophes, and people are falling in and out of love, and on and on and on.

But, uh, in To the Lighthouse, nothing happens.

[audience chuckles] That's the greatness of the novel.

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PART I OF CONTEMPORARY REVIEWS OF VIRGINIA WOLF'S TO THE LIGHTHOUSE Mrs. Wolfe's New Novel, an unsigned review from the Times Literary Supplement, Thursday, May 5th, 1927.

Each of Mrs. Wolfe's novels has inspired a lively curiosity as to the next.

One wondered what would follow Mrs. Dalloway, and its successor, with certain points of likeness, is yet a different thing.

It is still more different from most other stories.

a case like mrs wolfe's makes one feel the difficulty of getting a common measure to estimate fiction for her work so adventurous and intellectually imaginative really invites a higher test than is applied to most novels in form to the lighthouse is as elastic as a novel can be it has no plot though it has a scheme and a motive it shows characters in outline rather than in the round and while it depends almost entirely on the passing of time it expands or contracts the time sense very freely The first and longest part of the book is almost stationary and describes a party of people gathered in the summer at a house on the Scottish coast.

James, the youngest of the Ramsey children, is thwarted of a visit to the lighthouse.

In the next part, much briefer, sea-winds and caretakers are having their way with the house while one year follows another.