Chapter 22
Part 22 of Contemporary Reviews of To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Unsigned Review from Punch, 20th July 1927. Again in To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf pursues her desperately analytical fourth-dimensional manner which needs more concentration in the reader than most of us are perhaps willing or able to bring.
The Ramsey family and their guests propose to visit a lighthouse. They don't because it rains. Ten years after, a war intervening and the beautiful Mrs Ramsey having meanwhile died in one of the author's most casual parentheses. The widower and two of his children make the voyage.
And that is all the story. The rest is a hunt for and delicate exposure of the springs of action and the wayward thoughts of a baker's dozen of characters. It all betrays a fine intelligence and keen perceptions but it is more subtle than lucid and it is extremely easy to wander down one of the dark avenues of Mrs Woolf's terrific sentences
and get completely lost unless you have a Bloomsbury intelligence. The portraits of the lovely middle-aged Mrs Ramsey and her distinguished, vain, impetuous husband are extremely well embroidered on the vague background. The general pattern emerges as they do in a jigsaw puzzle. Undoubtedly an interesting, if an exacting, method.
End of part 22.
