To the Lighthouse

Rating:
Summary: Excellent modern fiction
Review: Woolf's novel is more like a hundred page poem than anything else, yet she does not skimp on substance at all. Much to be gained from reading this book again and again.

Rating:
Summary: Revolutionary, But Too Much, Too Fast
Review: I am aware of how important Woolf's work is in the context of early 20th century literature. I'm also aware that Woolf is someone who many respect, but whose style they may not necessarily like. I am one of those people. Woolf's experimental style--stream of consciousness--is revolutionary, coming at a time when most writers began to break free of Pre-WWI literary conventions.

However, she remains, to this day, someone who is difficult to read and difficult to comprehend. Reading "To the Lighthouse" was relatively easy. But understanding it was not. To be more vulgar, it was so boring, I lost any sense of awareness of the story and the characters. Some say Mrs. Ramsay's thoughts were complex and ahead of her time; I say they were small and meaningless. And the men were even smaller, even more base. The experiment with the text was successful, but the story's worth can easily be debated.

Rating:
Summary: I hope her other novels are better than this
Review: I find it hard to believe this is one of the best novels ever. Perhaps it's meaning was lost on me.. but I really did not enjoy this novel. I had to struggle to complete it. I was very dissapointed with the author and her over- monotonous, boring style. It seems that this novel could have adequatley been told as a short story and would have only lost it's monotone and repetitive nature. I kept looking for the literary genius buried deep within- but unfortunatley I never found it.

Rating:
Summary: Graceful living
Review: This is definitely one of my favorite books ever. Through the story of the Ramsay family, Woolf delivers an enchanting and intelligent story of domestic life and of the relationships between men and women. By celebrating everyday life, she champions women's traditional roles. Each time I read this novel, I am amazed at the cultural commentary Woolf included, and at its continued relevance to life today. And the ways she shows time passing in this novel are simply magnificent.

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Summary: The Interconnectedness of All Things
Review: Many critics, teachers and readers consider To the Lighthouse to be Virginia Woolf's masterpiece. To the Lighthouse was published in 1927 and its structure is unique, although it does contain elements of the Victorian. Woolf wrote this novel in only one year and did very little rewriting. Both subtle and sharp, the ease with which the book was written is apparent in the flow of both its narrative and its prose. The novel was written during one of the brief peaceful and happy times in Woolf's life. (In 1895, after her mother's death, Woolf became almost continuously depressed and suffered a series of nervous breakdowns, culminating in her suicide by drowning in 1941.)

To the Lighthouse, like Woolf's previous novel, Jacob's Room, is a somewhat disjointed story, possessing numerous characters, points-of-view and conflicts. The overlapping and separation of the characters and their stories seems to result from both intention and oversight and is a product of what Woolf referred to as "all characters boiled down," and the "break of unity in my design."

The story centers around the summer vacation to the Isle of Skye of the Ramsey family, a family Woolf admitted was very much like her own. In fact, Woolf said that writing To the Lighthouse helped her "rub out" the obsessive memory of her own mother. Mrs. Ramsey, like Woolf's own mother, is a woman of decidedly Victorian ideals, choosing to focus on her home, her marriage and her family.

Interacting with Mrs. Ramsey is the character most representative of Woolf, herself, Lily Briscoe, a young girl who is staying in the same beachouse as the Ramseys. Unmarried, Lily draws both disapproval and sympathy from Mrs. Ramsey who firmly believes that "an unmarried woman has missed the best of life."

Mrs. Ramsey and Lily represent the conflict between the Victorian and the Edwardian eras, the age of the woman in the home and the advent of the woman in the workplace. An intelligent young woman, as well as a sensitive and talented artist, Lily is very aware of Mrs. Ramsey's disapproval.

The role of art in the novel deals primarily with Post-Impressionism and the attempt to freeze reality, not on paper or on canvas, but in the mind, and then to paint the very equivalent of this reality. In many ways, To the Lighthouse resembles a painting because of its three distinct images of reality: the summer, the return and the seven years in between.

Woolf was not the only writer to "paint" her novels. In Place in Fiction, Eudora Welty writes of "painting and writing, always the closest two of the 'sister arts.'" Throughout the novel, Lily works on one painting and cannot seem to "connect the mass on the right hand with that on the left...But the danger was that by doing that the unity of the whole might be broken." The need for connection in the painting is much like the need for connection in the narrative. And Lily and Mrs. Ramsey both serve to fulfill the role as unifier.

One of the most startling moments of unification occurs as Mrs. Ramsey is staring at a bowl of fruit she has placed in the middle of the table during a dinner party. Because of her extreme attention to detail, Mrs. Ramsey focuses on the bowl throughout the dinner. She particularly notices the perfection of the arrangement while also fearing its imminent destruction as she catches another guest looking at the fruit, no doubt desirous of it. Mrs. Ramsey thinks, "That was his way of looking, different from her. But looking together united them."

Even when not physically present in the story, Mrs. Ramsey continues to exert a strong influence. At the end of the novel, Mr. Ramsey finally takes his two youngest children, James and Cam, to the lighthouse. Both children have changed considerably from the time of their first vacation; Mrs. Ramsey's absence has required that they develop a new independence, yet she was their only tie to their father, the typically restrained and uninvolved Victorian husband.

The children must, however, incorporate the influence of both of their parents on their journey to the lighthouse, a journey that is both literal and figurative. From shore, Lily watches them as she paints their journey, recalling Mrs. Ramsey with both annoyance and love. Lily, like Woolf, herself, has finally come to terms with the connection of all things, the completion of a painting as well as the completion of a journey.

To the Lighthouse is a quiet, reflective and meditative novel and one of the first to display Woolf's unique Impressionistic stream-of-consciousness style.

Rating:
Summary: A Different Kind of Fiction
Review: I chose to read this book for a class when I was sixteen because a friend complained about it and said it was the most boring book in the world. I wondered if perhaps I might see something in it that she was missing.

What a found was a very enjoyable literary style - this was my first exposure to "stream-of-consciousness" writing. I enjoyed the author's complex 3rd person omniscient shifting of perspectives through the various characters in the tale. The style had great affinity with my own very analytical and philosophical yet aesthetic mind at the time. I read this book not for an exciting plot; but, for the beauty in the writing itself. The themes in it were very abstract - such as the subject of being genuine and the like. "To the Lighthouse" has a very reflective quality about it. This book is certainly not for everyone; but, it is beyond a doubt a masterpiece for its kind.

Rating:
Summary: NEWSFLASH:
Review: Virginia Woolf makes all the lesbians scream. This is the perfect book for you if you're a rabid feminist tree-sitter. Screams a plenty.

Rating:
Summary: Still very, very good
Review: I'm not sure I'm supposed to do this but I'll anyway. This is the third time through this novel for me and after I finished my second reading, I posted my comments here (scroll down some).

This reading, I was impressed by the relationship between the Ramsey's. Mr. Ramsey lives in the world of thought, rationality and verbal sword-play. But Mrs. Ramsey lives in the world of the heart; she is a nurturer, the caregiver, very intelligent, but not caught up in the territorial boundary lines that the men fight over with words. Yet Mr. Ramsey, and William Bankes, and Charles Tansley, they all find her beautiful, they admire her immensely. What strikes me is this: Mrs. Ramsey's beauty is an inner beauty of action, peace, harmony, and balance in her world. She brooks no false illusions about her place in the cosmos, she isn't vain, she's thoughtful and diligent. The men rely on her for this quality that they do not have in their own lives.

In my last reveiw here, I thought this novel might fit into the emotional genre of fiction. Now I'm thinking that it might be the kind of literature used in marriage counselling.

So, this is a novel that you can pick up and find something new in the reading. I need to let some time pass, but I'll tell you what I think on my next reading, too.

Rating:
Summary: More than mundane events
Review: If one reads this book as just a slew of events happening in the lives of the various main characters, they are missing much. Woolf uses the seemingly "boring" events of an everyday life to delve the depths of the human psyche. As I read this book and became more intricately involved with the characters, I found my eternal quest for meaning wrapped up in everything Woolf's characters thought. Some may see this as a duldrum account of characters' lives that they can't even begin to relate to; look deeper though and you'll see your own existence being challenged and pulled by the realities of life Woolf presents in this excellent novel.

Rating:
Summary: Stylish . . . but who cares?
Review: Perhaps it's my male mind, or maybe my relative youth (junior in college), but I really can't say I enjoyed the book much. I do agree on one account with the people who gave it five stars: it would take Virginia Woolf's own words to possibly describe how beautifully written the novel is, and how enchanting her prose is.

However, that is the only reason I gave it as many as three stars; it is just boring. The back of the book reads "The subject of this brilliant novel is the daily life of an English family in the Hebrides". And, well, that really is all it's about, and let me tell you, my daily life of lectures and math homework is about as exciting as what happens in this book, people talk, people grow old, time passes. Hmmm....I can get enough of that in my daily life, thank you very much. Lastly, her insights into true human nature (presented in all its actual boringness) goes well beyond any author I've ever read (and I've read quite a lot), but it really didn't tell me anything I didn't know.

To sum, if you want to read a good book to learn or appreciate HOW to write, pick To The Lighthouse up first; if you want to read a good book to learn or appreciate WHAT to write about, go elsewhere, anywhere else.