To The Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf knew – she insisted – that a life spent maintaining a house, throwing dinner parties, and taking children on sailing expeditions was not necessarily, not categorically, a trivial life.

Even a modest, domestic life is still, for the person living it, an epic journey, however ordinary it might appear to the outside observer. Woolf refused to dismiss lives that most male writers ignore or even denigrate.

And you can get lost in her magnificent sentences; no one puts words together as beautifully as Virginia Woolf.

To the Lighthouse is Virginia Woolf’s most autobiographical novel.

Ostensibly set in Scotland, Woolf is describing her own childhood holidays in Talland House, St Ives Cornwall which gave her intense happiness. The story is of the Ramsay family and their friends (who stand in for Woolf’s family) on vacation.

Lily Briscoe, an artist is painting Mrs Ramsay’s portrait which Lily completes after Mrs Ramsay’s sudden death; and Lily has her ‘vision’. Beautifully evocative of Cornish landscape, Woolf captures the inner feelings of characters impressionistically and movingly.

I took Woolf’s Lily Briscoe as my heroine in my novel and depict her… show more.

If you like thinking about moments when we’re able to touch the pulse of reality, Virginia Woolf is your friend. Her novels aim to “go deeper” into the submerged lives of her characters, to imagine what it felt like for them to sit in a room, thinking of someone they used to know, watching a tree’s branches through the window swaying in the storm, all while trying to hold on to a coherent sense of themselves as people in the world. To The Lighthouse is a masterpiece within this bigger project, set largely in just two days in the life… show more.

I remember buying a Penguin paperback of To the Lighthouse at a Boy Scout book fair and being bowled over by the beauty of the prose. This is what a novel should be, I felt— a work of art. Here is a prose writer writing poetic prose of such lyrical beauty and still able to encapsulate the essence of life in something so simple as a protracted holiday visit to a lighthouse. In so doing Woolf captures the longing of a small boy by means of a stream of consciousness of painterly and lilting prose. It also trawls the memories… show more.