Chapter 15
15. Contemporary Reviews of To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. From Notes on Recent Books by Elizabeth Brown Cutting North American Review June to August 1927 Genius in this most recent novel of Mrs. Virginia Woolf finds us in a different case altogether.
Here one parts with Miss Drew's view, certainly, for there is scope in this novel to the lighthouse as wide as the sea itself, which beats its listless chime all through the pages and makes the rhythm of this strangely moving story. The Ramsey Family Live by the Sea James Ramsey, aged six, the youngest of eight children is promised by his beautiful mother that the next day they will go to the lighthouse,
a day's sail away. The father, a sort of male Cassandra, says it will rain. This is his view about everything except his own books on metaphysics. Two thirds of the book is given over to the evening, already spoiled for James by that insistence about rain, wherein one learns by most delicate tracers of this family of Ramses and their guests.
The next part, time has passed, changes have come, the family have not been back to the sea. At the end, some of them do come. James, indeed, now a lad of sixteen, sails his father to the lighthouse. Scarcely more than this, out of which Virginia Woolf with stroke after stroke has fashioned such a fragment of beauty. At random one could choose passages that are like bits of still life.
Now eight candles were stood down the table, and after the first stoop the flames stood upright and drew with them into visibility the long table entire, and in the middle a yellow and purple dish of fruit. What had she done with it? Mrs. Ramsey wondered, for Rose's arrangement of the grapes and pears, of the horny pink-lined shell of the bananas made her think of a trophy fetched from the
bottom of the sea, of Neptune's banquet, of the bunch that hangs with vine leaves over the shoulder of Bacchus in some picture, among the leopard skins and the torches lolloping red and gold. In the Common Reader we learned of Mrs. Woolf's critical gift. In Mrs. Dalloway, as well as into the lighthouse, we find that proper use of the economy of means which, however, in
the hands of some novelists so easily becomes parsimony in literature. Mrs. Woolf is an artist and a rarely gifted one. End of Part 15
