Book Review: To The Lighthouse
This is my first foray into the fiction of Virginia Woolf, but the second book of hers that I have read. It is more of a philosophical book rather than a book where there is plot, dialogue and action to drive the story. Instead, thoughts, observations, and ideas are what we read. It focuses on the life of a family spread across the years between 1910 and 1920. The work takes place on the Isle of Skye at the Ramsey family holiday home. While there is very little plot, the work is introspective it is less about what happens and more about how the relatively normal events of a day can impact anyone. There is what happens and our interpretation of it, and this is shown throughout the novel through the family’s various perspectives over time.
When we first open the novel, we are at the height of Edwardian England in the years before the First World War, the world is optimistic, and despite the setting being Scotland, the weather is fine, and the family have all gathered, healthy, happy, alive and hopeful. This is reflected in the hopes of visiting the lighthouse and Mrs Ramsey’s hopes of marriage for her children because it is what is expected. And engagement seemed to be the natural course of action for a young couple where Victorian sensibilities are still rife. Mrs Ramsey’s hope is met by the fine weather and the general hopeful and happy atmosphere of the opening. However, when we enter the minds of the engaged couple, we are met with stifled Victorian repression; it is somewhat bleak in the minds of the young couple. New ideas are brewing, and old sensibilities, while stifling, seem to be on the verge of change, which is a very typical theme within Woolf’s writing.
After time has passed, the War has happened, and Mrs Ramsey, the real lighthouse of the novel, has died, and the summer house has fallen into disrepair. The family is fractured and unsure. Out with the old and in with the new. The atmosphere is less hopeful, more cynical and murky. A trip to the lighthouse is being planned, but will it happen? So much has changed, and the air is filled with death. This part of the novel seems a little more sour. While Mr Ramsey had always established himself as the head of the household, we see that the real driving force was Mrs Ramsey, as Mr Ramsey stumbles around without Mrs Ramsey’s reassurance. It is a heavily gendered book, with a lot of the focus on Mrs Ramsey being the ideal female figurehead; a light, hopeful and esteemed picture of beautiful motherhood that is quintessentially Victorian. When time passes, Mr Ramsey does not have anyone to soothe his mind, a small but significant nod to how the War has changed society and that the younger generation is moving forward with new ideas and new sensibilities.
What I find most interesting is that Woolf drew several pieces of her life into this novel, and while nothing really happens except the passing of time, we come to understand that this was Woolf’s way of trying to understand her mother and the meaning of ‘motherhood’ in her life. The concept has irrevocably changed with the passage of time, and the fact that Edwardian and Victorian sensibilities had drastically changed or been pretty much disregarded with the advent and closure of the First World War. One of the more interesting books I’ve read this year, it was definitely a change of pace.