Chapter 11
Part XI of Contemporary Reviews Up to the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Unsigned Review from the New Age, 8th September 1927. Mrs. Woolf takes such a long time to reach her blooming lighthouse, she herself has to
divide the pilgrimage into the getting there and the being there, that we soon lost patience with her carefully drawn, gold-as-greenish wanderers on the shore. It gives such a handle to the there-you-are-then type of literary tradesman to have to confess that conscientious and high-minded authors like these latter-day Hogarths of ours never seem to get anywhere but take up all the time talking about it.
There is after all such a thing as a reader's magna-charter, one of the clauses in which is that something ought to happen at some time in a book, or we ought to get our money back. With all due respect, it must be said that it is lucky there are not more publishers with a mission than the Cacoithes Scribendi.
They can be, mind you they're not as a rule heaven forbid, just as bad in their way as the rotgut merchants of Patan Australia who hope to recoup in some blind lucky swipe all the money they lose every year on the grisly rubbish they try to sell by fishing in the broad stream of pornography. But how terrible that the contemplation of such a decent and deficient person as Mrs.
Wolf should lead us to any such reflections. End of part 11
