From the Bookshelf of Reading List Completists…

To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf

Start date: February 1, 2020

Finish date: February 29, 2020

Discussion: Group Reads

Why we're reading this: February 2020 Completist Selection
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What Members Thought

Mar 22, 2020 Chuck rated it it was amazing

Prior to Lighthouse, the only other Woolf I had read was "Mrs. Dalloway". As I dove into Lighthouse it all came back to me how hard Woolf makes you work for your reward. She so brilliantly weaves in massive details of the wide ranging thoughts of her characters, all in the third person, no less. It's so easy to want to dislike most of the characters, after listening to their inner static as they work through longings, conflicts, crises, and intimacy or the avoidance of it. But just like with Mrs Prior to Lighthouse, the only other Woolf I had read was "Mrs. Dalloway". As I dove into Lighthouse it all came back to me how hard Woolf makes you work for your reward. She so brilliantly weaves in massive details of the wide ranging thoughts of her characters, all in the third person, no less. It's so easy to want to dislike most of the characters, after listening to their inner static as they work through longings, conflicts, crises, and intimacy or the avoidance of it. But just like with Mrs. Dalloway, I finally realized that the inside of their heads sounds an awful lot like mine - and I think that's where Woolf hooks us. It's as if we can learn to tolerate the neurotic chatter that others deal with we might then begin to have some compassion for our own experience. Once this clicked in for me, the moments and micro-moments of transcendence are everywhere in Lighthouse as it was in Mrs. Dalloway.

An important difference: Mrs. Dalloway drives a pretty simple linear plot right to its satisfying conclusion. Lighthouse jumps around and seems to be a meditation on the impact of others on us through memory. The first section of the book gives us the Ramsey's and their many children plus other hangers-on who vacation with them in a large house overlooking the coast of the Isle of Skye, where an ominous working lighthouse can be seen. Much of the plot in this section focuses on whether the family will find a safe time to take a boat to visit the lighthouse. One of the regular visitors to there is a struggling artist/painter named Lily. We learn of the deep but difficult bond of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey. Woolf's dissection of their marriage - he being impulsive, harsh, and seemingly impenetrable; she highly social, verbal, accommodating - is wonderful, helping to make all the more powerful when we finally witness what really happens when they are confronted with true intimacy.

A second section is a complete shift that focuses on the years after the Ramsey's have stopped coming to the vacation house. The house, the beach, the ocean, and the lighthouse now are highlighted as major characters. Very cinematically Woolf leads us into the experience of absence, loss, and time passing, with mostly only the memory of people having an impact.

The last section focuses on Mr. Ramsey finally returning to the island with 2 of the children to visit the lighthouse. But fundamentally, this section focuses back on Lily Briscoe, the artist, who is also there visiting and painting. First, a little aside:

Last night I watched the film "Portrait of a Lady on Fire", and it helped me understand this last section of Lighthouse much more than I had. The central character of the "Portrait" is an artist, and the film does an excellent job allowing us to watch an artist visually collect material as she tries to paint the truth on canvas - which then leads to unexpected great personal implications for the artist.

In this final section of Lighthouse, much of the action take place in Lily's (the artist) mind, as she attempts to capture her experience on canvas. What we experience with Lily is how what she is painting is inseparable from her own relationships. Lily's high skills of observation and her desire to capture her experiences at the vacation house drive her to a deeply personal and profound epiphany.

The upshot here is Woolf showing us how the true artist cannot be just a skilled technician but an ongoing distiller of all of life's experiences, no matter how limited the medium being worked with.

...more

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Mar 27, 2021 Sue K H rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 000-classics-grp-read, modern-library-100, woman-authors

Loved this so much. It reminded me a little of my favorite story from Dubliners, 'The Dead', in that it takes a dinner party as a setting to delve into relationships and the meaning of life. This was harder to follow with its multiple points of view and time periods, but the language is so gorgeous that you don't really care. I'm going to try to gather my thoughts and write more later. ...more

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Aug 23, 2012 Janet rated it liked it · review of another edition

Seemed like a dysfunctional, sad family who all felt underappreciated. However, perhaps most people would sound like they did if we could listen to their inner thoughts the way we could with Ms. Woolf's stream of consciousness writing. I really liked the technical ability of Virginia Woolf but I did not relate to any of the characters on an emotional level so I gave it 3 stars instead of the 4 stars the style probably deserved. ...more

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Jan 08, 2013 Simone rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

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Sep 25, 2022 Naga Sravika Bodapati rated it really liked it

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Apr 23, 2020 Taz Shaikh-Shenk rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-these-first, abandoned

I don’t know why people love this one. I’ve tried. I’ve tried but I couldn’t get into it. I finally decided it’s time to abandon it. The reason I finally abandoned it because I read life is too short to be reading books that you don’t enjoy.

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