Chapter 27
Part 27 of Contemporary Reviews of To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Review by V.H.F. in Country Life, 21 May 1927. Mrs. Woolf's own journey has been like one to a lighthouse. In her first novels, up to the time of Jacob's Room, many of us saw nothing but a rudderless
bark on a plunging sea. The bark had left the shore, it seemed to us, unprovisioned except for a number of sky-rockets and was bound for some modern port of nothingness. But in Mrs. Dalloway, suddenly a tall object stood up in the featureless waters and we perceived that it was a lighthouse, a thing once seen by Mrs. Woolf from the shore and thereafter determinately sought. And now in this new novel she is there and out of the darkness of majesty and magic shines
steady pure the light. There is no more a sense of purposelessness or loss of direction. Mrs. Woolf is at the haven where she would be and the voyage has amply justified itself. This, in her own words, is the haven. Phrases came, visions came, beautiful pictures, beautiful phrases. But what she wished to get hold of was that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been made anything.
Get that and start afresh. She has started afresh and she has got that. The book moves surely and with beauty among the deepest most delicate motions of the human heart and spirit. There is no longer any obscurity, any lack of sequence, but there is a printer's edition of a full stop at the top of page 200 that demars one of the most effective sentences in the book, a sentence into which death crashes
with all the desalteriness and shock of life itself. The early admirers of Mrs. Woolf's work were right and this notice is a public confession of previous error. End of part 27
