Chapter 1
Part 1 of Contemporary Reviews of Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse Mrs. Woolf's New Novel An Unsigned Review from The Times Literary Supplement Thursday, May 5, 1927 Each of Mrs. Woolf'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. Woolf'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 Ramsay children, is thwarted of a visit to the lighthouse. In the next part, much briefer, seawings and caretakers are having their way with the house while one year follows another.
Mrs. Ramsay and her eldest daughter have died, a son is killed in the war and the place is forsaken. In the last part, the house is alive again with the surviving Ramses and two of the former guests. Mr. Ramsay, the philosopher, grimly magnificent, heads an expedition to the lighthouse, and
James, now sixteen, accomplishes his dream, though all the family have a sense of paternal tyranny. Such are the bare bones of the framework, but one feels they are no more like the whole story than the skeleton carved in a medieval tomb is to the robed and cummely effigy above it.
For the book has its own motion, a soft stir and light of perceptions, meeting or crossing, of the gestures and attitudes, the feelings and thoughts of people, of instance in which these are radiant or absurd, have the burden of sadness or of the inexplicable. It is a reflective book, with an ironical or wistful questioning of life and reality. Somehow this steals into the pages whether there is a sunny piece in the garden, or Mrs.
Ramsay is interrupted in a fairy tale, or a couple is late for dinner, so that one is inclined to say that this question of the meaning of things, however masked, is not only the essence, but the real protagonist in the story. One is hardly surprised when it emerges openly now and again towards the end. What was it then?
What did it mean? Could things thrust their hands up and grip one? Could the blade cut? The fist grasp? Was there no safety?
No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air. Could it be even for elderly people that this was life, startling, unexpected, unknown? For one moment she felt that if they both got up, here now on the lawn, and demanded
an explanation, why was it so short, why was it so inexplicable, said it with violence, as two fully equipped human beings from whom nothing should be hid might speak. Then beauty would roll itself up. The space would fill. Those empty flourishes would form into shape.
If they shouted loud enough, Mrs. Ramsay would return. Mrs. Ramsay, she said aloud, Mrs. Ramsay. The tears ran down her face. Perhaps this is one reason why you are less conscious of Mrs. Wolfe's characters than they are of each other.
They have an acute consciousness which reminds you of the people in Henry James, but with a difference. The characters of Henry James are so absorbed in each other that they have no problem beyond the truth or otherwise of their relations, and they are so intensely seen as persons that they are real.
But the people in Mrs. Wolfe's book seem to be looking through each other at some farther question and although they interact vividly, they are not completely real. No doubt, as Lily Briscoe, the painter, thinks in the novel, to know people in outline is one way of knowing them, and they are seen here in the way they are meant to be seen. But the result is that, while you know quite well the kind of people represented in the
story, they lack something as individuals. Mr. Ramsay certainly, masterful and helpless, egotist and hero, does leave a deep mark by the end. His wife, with her calm beauty, her sympathy and swift, decided actions, is more of a type, though her personality is subtly pervasive even when she has ceased to live.
But there is a significant curtness in the parenthesis which, surely with a slip in punctuation, announces her death. Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage, stretched his arms out one dark morning, but Mrs. Ramsay, having died rather suddenly the night before he stretched his arms out, they remained empty. Here Mrs. Wolfe's detachment seems a little strained, and in fact, this transitional part
of the book is not its strongest part. One comes back, however, to the charm and pleasure of her design. It is carried through with a rare subtlety. Every little thread in it, Mr. Ramsay writing a book, Lily Briscoe struggling with her picture, the lights and the bay, the pathos and the absurdity, is woven in one texture which has
piquancy and poetry by turns. A sad book in the main, with all its entertainment, it is one to return to, for it has that power of leaving a vision which is less often found perhaps in novels than in a short story. This springs from a real emotion, best described in the words of Mrs. Wolfe's own. There might be lovers whose gift it was to choose out the elements of things and place
them together, and so, giving them a wholeness not theirs in life, make of some scene or meeting of people, all now gone and separate, one of those globed, compacted things over which thought lingers and love plays. End of part one.
