To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

This simple and haunting story captures the transience of life and its surrounding emotions. To the Lighthouse is the most autobiographical of Virginia Woolf’s novels. It is based on her own early experiences, and while it touches on childhood and children’s perceptions and desires, it is at its most trenchant when exploring the adult relationships, marriage and the changing class-structure in the period spanning the Great War.

This is true Virginia Woolf. Much of the book is written in her famous ‘stream of thought’ style, with long sections uninterrupted by paragraph breaks. Woolf dives into the conscious and subconscious thoughts, fears and observations of her characters, unattached to any of them and recounting the diverging inner narratives of her characters.

The book depicts the Ramsay family visiting the Isle of Skye at various times over a decade. It begins with Mrs Ramsay and one of her sons planning a trip to the nearby lighthouse the following morning. Mr Ramsay is dismissive of their plans, saying that the impending poor weather will mean that they cannot go.

Various other seemingly mundane events are depicted throughout the book but the focus for the reader is how this makes the characters feel. We are all familiar with feeling childish pangs of injustice at events which are on the surface trivial, reasoning with ourselves and as a result not expressing our feelings outwardly. Woolf, on the other hand, engages with those initial emotional reactions to events, even when her characters deal with them silently.

To the Lighthouse highlights the depth of the characters’ thoughts and how little of this is expressed externally. This leads to misunderstandings or miscommunications, as it does in real life. Woolf expresses completely what one character is thinking, before expressing completely what a different character is thinking, demonstrating to the reader how differently the same thing – including the relationship between those two characters – can be interpreted by each of them.

The book is semi-autobiographical, and the eponymous lighthouse is inspired by Godrevy Lighthouse in Cornwall.