Chapter 9
Part 9 of Contemporary Reviews of To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. From the editor recommends The Bookman, July 1927. Of Virginia Woolf, much has been written, and rightly too. When the chaff of this century's writing blows away,
we shall probably find that her contribution to the development of the novel is far greater than we at present realise. To the Lighthouse is in some ways a simpler and more beautiful book than Mrs Dalloway. Its flights of imaginative writing strike me as more vivid. I didn't enjoy it so well, and I'm blessed if I know why. Perhaps I shall discover a year from now on a re-reading, and it doesn't matter much anyhow,
since it is a fine and a readable book. I should like to quote a paragraph as an example of this exquisite and distinguished style. But what, after all, is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens like a turning leaf in the hollow of the wave.
Night, however, succeeds tonight. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen, they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness. The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags,
kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves, where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle, and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands. The autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labor,
and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the shore. End of part nine.
