To the Lighthouse
A house, a mother, and the ten years after her death compressed into a few pages. Mourning that will not resolve.
It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.
The Ramsays keep a summer house on the Isle of Skye, filled with children and visiting friends. A boy wants to sail out to the lighthouse; the weather and his father refuse him, and the trip is put off. Around a long dinner and an afternoon of painting, the family and its guests move through ordinary hours that Woolf holds open at length. Then a second movement lets a decade, a war, and several losses pass almost in an aside, and the survivors come back to the same rooms.
For a clinician the interest lies in how Mrs Ramsay keeps arranging the scene after she is gone. Her way of holding people together sets the terms others still answer to, in the son's crossing to the lighthouse and in Lily Briscoe's return to an unfinished canvas. Woolf lets grief find no clean settlement; it is carried, set down, and taken up again through a picture and a postponed voyage that reach completion together.
About the author
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf (1882 to 1941) was an English modernist writer known for her attention to interior consciousness and the movement of time. Her novels include Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, both of which trace the inner lives of their characters across the hours and years. A central figure of the Bloomsbury group, she wrote fiction, essays and criticism. With her husband Leonard she founded the Hogarth Press, which published her novels.
Details
- 1927