To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf’s most daring expression of modernism continued her experiments in finding a distinctly female voice and writing style to stand against the male-dominated literary canon. Like ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ before it, which is more well known and less cerebral, the book is written entirely in a stream-of-consciousness style, the long-winded sentences striving to evoke each character’s thought process as their minds flit from one topic to another, and back and forth through their lives. Despite being her preferred means to find the feminine voice, contrasting against more usual rigid sentence structures she saw as typical of male phallic domination, the ...  Read the complete review

I had really very few expectations when I began this book. I read Mrs Dalloway some time ago, but couldn’t really remember what her writing style was like, except that it wasn’t particularly straightforward. I chose to read To the Lighthouse simply because I have recently been to the Isle of Skye and the story described in this book is based on Skye. However, if I hadn’t read this on the back cover, I would not have known where the book was set – apart from the fact that it was set on an island. I was certainly not expecting the writing style that I was faced with and was tempted to put it down after just a few pages. However, I persevered and I am glad that I did so. I ...  Read the complete review

Well, they reach the Lighthouse, these people, this family, but only at the very end of the book, and with a great deal of time, personality, social interrelation and character in between. Oh, and with a fair bit of symbolism and vision, too, just in case you were wondering. Anyway, the 'journey' starts when a young boy, James, who is cutting out bits of paper and pasting them in his scrapbook wishes to visit the place. His Mother, Mrs Ramsay, says that, if the weather is fine, he can go. His Father, Mr Ramsay, states that the weather cannot be fine, and that he shall not be able to go. This is pretty boring, admittedly, but 'To the ...  Read the complete review

It is one of the peculiarities of the stream-of consciousness novels that they have no real plot. Plot always refers to action, it indicates the special arrangement of its elements. In the stream-of-consciousness novels, however, there very rarely is any action at all, the few things that happen in the world around the characters are mostly only devices to influence the mental processes of the characters. These mental processes are the theme proper. In Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse” the theme is, roughly speaking, Mrs Ramsay’s personality and its influence on other people. Mrs Ramsay, the wife of a philosopher, ...  Read the complete review

"To the Lighthouse", probably Virginia Woolf's most known novel, deals with the experiences of a family while spending their time in their holiday home in Cornwall. Concentrating in particular on the thoughts and emotions of the female protagonist Mrs Ramsay (who dies in the course of the book), the narrator introduces us to a world very different from our own - the world inside somebody else's head, shown with the help of the stream-of-consciousness technique which turned into a special part of Woolf's literature with the publication of her other novels such as "Mrs Dalloway" and which was perfected by later writers such as James Joyce in ...  Read the complete review