Chapter 16
Part 16 of Contemporary Reviews of To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. From Mr. Chesterton and others by Gerald Gould, The Observer, 15th May 1927. Mrs. Woolf is never dull. She has to an extraordinary degree the power to make ordinary incidents and atmosphere
exciting. In her latest novel she presents a household which her description of it renders thrilling. The famous but difficult husband, the beautiful middle-aged wife, the eight restless children, the visitors incongruous and inept. She catches them on holiday and for about two thirds of the volume displays them in
tiny domestic scenes touching off their varying moods ironically and beautifully. Then in a few pages she scrambles through ten years, kills the beautiful mother, kills a son in the war and a daughter in child bed and then again thirdly takes her family diminished in numbers and vitality to the scene of the original holiday and dispatches some of them on that visit to the lighthouse which was planned ten years before.
The insight into character is amazing and yet perhaps it is insight into mood rather than into the permanent character that suffers the mood. The story is a series of brilliant pictures, some more brilliant, some less. It does not compose into a unity and perhaps the something wrong here is a style that frequently defeats its own natural beauty on a theory, a style that goes tumbling from comma to comma,
from semicolon to semicolon in a hopeless attempt to keep pace with flying time. The story remains memorable almost as much for its defects as for its charms. It is full of exquisite touches. I like particularly the thought of Mrs. Ramsey presiding with immutable calm over destinies which she completely failed to understand.
