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I was supposed to read this while I was in the sixth form at school as part of a Twentieth Century Literature enrichment course (I took Science A-levels). Of all the books for the course this was the one I never read; I never even started it. Forty years on ...
I think it's brilliant! Woolf uses the stream of consciousness/ interior monologue which she first used in Mrs Dalloway. This means that we 'overhear' the thoughts of each character, some trivial, some profound, skipping from idea to idea like a goat with the attention span of a butterfly, rather like we really think. Sometimes the characters themselves are bewildered by their own thoughts (evidence, perhaps, for the multiple scripts theory of consciousness explored by Daniel Dennett in Consciousness Explained): after Mrs Ramsay has thought "We are in the hands of the Lord ... instantly she was annoyed with herself for saying that. Who had said it? not she; she had been trapped into saying something that she did not mean." (I:11)
It’s a God’s perspective: we are being asked to believe that we could be privy not just to a single stream of consciousness, as with a protagonist narrator, but to all streams of consciousness. One of the weaknesses in Woolf’s deployment of this technique is that all her characters tend to think with the same rhythm (whereas the three protagonists in Ulysses by James Joyce think in very different ways). This makes them all sound the same. Perhaps this is deliberate. Sometimes, as one narrator hands off to another, it is impossible to see the ‘join’, the thoughts flow seamlessly. Sometimes the characters think the same things. It is as if Woolf is endorsing Jung’s concepts of humanity having a collective unconscious. She goes even further in part two when there are passages that make it seem as if the house, or the environment, is thinking. Perhaps she believed in panpsychism.
The Plot
The story starts with Mrs Ramsay promising her youngest-of-eight child, James (the most sensitive), that they will go to the lighthouse tomorrow. Mr Ramsay pours scorn on this idea, the weather will be poor. At the end of the book we discover that James has neither forgotten nor forgiven his father for this; James hates his father as a tyrant and through the book we see many instances of Mr Ramsay's neediness, needing reassurance and love, and thus becoming a succubus feeding off the love of his wife and children.
The large Ramsay family own a house on the Isle of Skye (wrongly described by an American lecturer as being to the north of Scotland) and have invited loads of house guests including painter Lily, poet Augustus, old friend of Mr Ramsay (and fancier of Mrs Ramsay) William Bankes, Charles Tansley (made sour by his consciousness that he is the poor one among the privileged) and Paul who has gone off on a long walk with Mina where he will probably propose to her if they return safely. The first, longest section of the book ('The Window') is taken up with this day and the interactions within and between the family and the guests.
The next, section, 'Times Passes' is a selection of snapshots like the photos in an album. It is written from the perspective of the empty house; the only character being the cleaner. There are marriages and deaths, including two of the children and Mrs Ramsay herself, but these are almost throwaway comments enclosed always in square brackets.
In 'The Lighthouse', the final section, Mr Ramsay and some of the surviving children and some of the original house guests return to the house after an absence of many years (one of the best sections is from the perspective of the old lady who must make the house ready again after such long neglect). James finally makes it to the lighthouse and the description of the boat journey is beautiful (but at the same time the undercurrents are tremendous). Lily finally paints her masterpiece although she is unaware of the fact, thinking that it will grace a servants' bedroom for a few years before being rolled up and tucked away in an attic.
At the end of the book James is steering the boat to the lighthouse. He hasn't forgotten how his father ridiculed his hopes on page one; he hasn't forgiven; he would still like to kill the tyrant. Oedipus!
The other major character is Lily, the painter. She worries mainly about the difficulties of painting. "Where to begin? ... One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions ... Still the risk must be run; the mark made" although she herself never marries, unable to take that risk. And it is Lily at the end: "It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision."
Lily provides us with a beautiful description of liminality: "Always ... before she exchanged the fluidity of life for the concentration of painting she had a few moments of nakedness when she seemed like an unborn soul, a soul reft of body, hesitating on some windy pinnacle and exposed without protection to all the blasts of doubt."
And Cam, in the boat travelling to the lighthouse, making stories in her head, offers a Deleuze and Guattari moment of smoothness and striation: "all those paths and the lawn, thick and knotted with the lives they had lived there, were gone; were rubbed out; were past; were unreal".
What does it mean?
The lighthouse as the purpose of life?
In part one, section one, fourth paragraph, life is depicted as a journey across water when Mr Ramsay is said to believe that his children “should be aware from childhood that life is difficult; facts uncompromising; and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail barks founder in darkness ... one that needs, above all, courage, truth, and the power to endure.” When, in the final section, he and James and Cam actually travel to the lighthouse, they cross the wreck of a ship where men drowned. So the lighthouse might be regarded as whatever provides a goal in life, a purpose.
Lily Briscoe’s vision
The novel ends with Lily finishing her painting and thinking “It is finished ... I have had my vision.” But what is this vision?
There are two visions referred to in previous sections:
- In section 3.8, Lily remembers that after she had heard of Mrs Ramsay’s death, she had had a vision of her “stepping with her usual quickness across fields among whose folds, purplish and soft, among whose flowers, hyacinths or lilies, she vanished. It was some trick of the painter’s eye. For days after she had heard of her death she had seen her thus, putting her wreath to her forehead and going unquestioningly with her companion, a shadow, across the fields.” This sounds as if Mrs Ramsay is in the Elysian Fields, the Ancient Greek version of heaven, especially since her companion is described as a “shadow”. So is Lily’s vision a realisation that there is life after death?
- But before that, in section 3.4 Lily asks herself “What is the meaning of life?” and thinks that she has never had revealed to her the “great revelation”, the answer to this question. Instead she has had little moments of enlightenment, like “matches struck unexpectedly in the dark”. She is thinking of a memory of being on the beach, skipping stones with Charles Tansley, while Mrs Ramsay writes letters. “Mrs Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere [through her painting] Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent )—this was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves shaking) was struck into stability. Life stand still here, Mrs Ramsay said.” This is described (repeatedly) as a “revelation” (rather than a vision, but aren’t they synonyms?). It’s a vision that there is something permanent underlying the transience of life.
A religious interpretation
In 1854, pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt completed a picture which he called The Light of the World. It shows Jesus, with a lantern, standing outside an old door overgrown with weeds. It became so popular that Arthur Sullivan composed an oratorio by the same name. Holman Hunt then made a copy which went on a world tour before ending up in St Paul's Cathedral from 1908. Could the lighthouse, whose beam is meant to keep people safe (although it failed in the case of the wrecked ship) be symbolic of Jesus?
The first part of this book chronicles the events leading up to a dinner party. Could this be the Last Supper? I’m not quite clear how many are at the table (there were thirteen at the Last Supper: Jesus and his twelve disciples) but there are at least twelve and perhaps fourteen (Mr and Mrs Ramsay, between four and six of their children - James and Cam are in the Nursery - Tansley, Bankes, Lily, Paul and Minta and Mr Carmichael).
The second part of the book is a ten year period of trouble and tribulations. This might symbolise the three days when Christ, crucified, was dead and buried and descended into hell. In this section two of the Ramsay children die, as does Mrs Ramsay, and Paul and Minta marry but the marriage is not a success. There is a storm in the bay where the lighthouse is leading to a shipwreck in which sailors are drowned.
In the third part, James, Cam and Mr Ramsay finally reach the lighthouse. Meanwhile, Lily completes the painting she had started in the first section and has a “vision" which either involves Mrs Ramsay in heaven or involves the “meaning of life” (in which Mrs Ramsay is involved). Lily remembers Mrs Ramsay issuing the command "Life stand still here" (3.4)
When Lily completes the painting, she says to herself "It is finished" (3.14) which are the final words of Jesus on the cross. They are given in the Latin Vulgate version of the Bible as "consummatum est" which might be translated as 'It is consummated' or 'It is completed'.
The name of the Swiss servant is rendered both as "Marie" (1.4) and "Marthe" (1.17): could she represent the sisters Mary and Martha found in the New Testament?
Does this mean Mrs Ramsay is Jesus? Certainly, at the dinner, she doles out the beef stew. However, in the first part of the book, she is repeatedly seen through a window with James, as a sort of madonna and child. Furthermore, she refers to the squabbling that she sees through another window as Joseph and Mary and they seem to represent her husband and herself. This therefore suggests that she is Mary and that James, who harbours violent thoughts towards his father, is Jesus.
What I don’t like about the book
I find it difficult to cope with the class snobbery within this book. Mrs Ramsay is portrayed as wonderful because she knits socks for the tuberculous lighthouse-keeper’s son, she investigates poor households in London, she plays Lady Bountiful, accepting her exceptional economic privilege and considerable beauty as correlates of her aristocratic breeding. The awkward house guest is poor boy Tansley, marked out by failing to dress for dinner and by his gaucheness, struggling to make his way in a system where all the cards are stacked against him. The only character who isn’t even deemed worthy of a name is Macalister’s boy who rows the boat when they are becalmed. And the only servant worthy of extensive interior monologue (and so, by implication, the only one capable of thought) is a toothless monstrosity who lurches like a ship at sea, leers, looking askance at everything, is bowed down with weariness (she’s about seventy) and is dismissed as “witless”.
Woolf was herself an inveterate snob. She described Ulysses by James Joyce as “the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating. When one can have cooked flesh, why have the raw?”. (Nevertheless, she copied his Stream of Consciousness technique when she wrote Mrs Dalloway and even, perhaps in subconscious homage to a book set on a day in June in which the hero travels around Dublin, set Mrs D in June and had her heroine travel around London.) Famously, Woolf described Middlemarch as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”; less famously she sneered that its author, George “Eliot - the granddaughter of a carpenter, as she reminds us - is out of her depth when it comes to the depiction of higher social strata.” (Mead 2014 The Road to Middlemarch) page 46. Of course, I mustn’t stoop to Woolf’s level and employ similar ad hominem criticism but it is a limitation when an author cannot empathise with all her characters, whatever their ‘social stratum’.
What I love about this book
Woolf manages to make the reader feel as if they are telepathically tuning in to the thoughts of the characters. Sometimes these thoughts surprise the character themselves, such as when Mrs Ramsay thinks: “We are in the hands of the Lord. But instantly she was annoyed with herself for saying that. Who had said it? not she; she had been trapped into saying something she did not mean.” (1.11)
Sometimes those thinking seem trapped in their own consciousness and misinterpret others. At other times they seem to share thoughts. This happens several times as the narration flows from one consciousness to another, and it might be triggered by something external and common to both of them, or by something one has perceived in the other, but there are other times when the thoughts seem shared. At these moments, one feels that Woolf endorses the Jungian theory of the collective unconscious, the idea that all human beings share archetypal thoughts by virtue of their humanity. But she seems to go even further, all the way to panpsychism (the theory that all creatures and even non-living things have sentience or even consciousness) in part two, when the house and the nature around and within it seem to develop their own interior monologues.
I’m not saying that I believe in these ideas but I admire the way that Woolf has structured her prose so that it flows from consciousness to consciousness with thoughts triggered by perceptions and memories and sometimes simply out of the blue.
To a huge extent, she resists narration. As a result, no-one will ever know how many sit down to dinner. The reader must wait for other information, such as the names of the Ramsay children. This challenges the reader to fill in the gaps, which is how we would work if this was a conversation, and acts as a hook to maintain interest (although it can confuse and this can put some readers off).
Why is part one called ‘The Window’?
At the start of the book the nay-sayers, Charles Tansley and Mr Ramsay, are standing at a window looking out and saying that the weather tomorrow will be too poor for going to the lighthouse.
Mrs Ramsay has a dictum that “windows should be open, and doors shut” (1.5, already hinted at in 1.1)
At the start of the book, Lily is trying to draw a painting of Mrs Ramsay sitting in the window with James beside her. Mr Ramsay too, when he goes out to light his pipe, sees Mrs Ramsay and James sitting together in the window. This must be a Madonna and child reference.
Later, Mrs Ramsay looks out of the window on the landing at two rooks, whom she has nicknamed Joseph and Mary in a very clear Biblical reference, squabbling about which treetop to roost in, in what must be a metaphor for her own family (Jasper her son shoots at starlings, she disapproves and hopes it is just a phase).
At dinner, Lily the painter sees Charles Tansley, the man she both loves and hates, framed by a window. Meanwhile Mrs Ramsay sees the candles reflected in the windows and reflects on stability and change.
Thus windows both reflect the Christian themes of the book (Joseph and Mary, madonna and child) and also acts as frames for pictures, in the same way as Lily frames what she sees.
Other images, if not seen through a window, include those from Mrs Ramsay’s catalogue which James is cutting out from the start of the book.
The Passage of Time
Section two is entitled ‘Time Passes’. But in the third section, part of Lily’s “revelation” is of “Mrs Ramsay saying ‘Life stand still here’; Mrs Ramsay making of the moment something permanent”. The phrase is repeated as if to make it clear that this isn’t a typo; Mrs Ramsay is not suggesting that here in the holiday cottage life stands still but she is using the imperative, commanding life to stand still.
This seems a critical theme of the book. Time passes and brings with it an encroaching wilderness, decay and death. But Mrs Ramsay, and memory, and Lily’s art can make “of the moment something permanent”.
Howards End
E M Forster met Leonard Woolf at King’s College Cambridge (they were both members of the Apostles) as the 19th century became the 20th. In the 1910s and 1920s he was a member of the Bloomsbury Group and presumably, as an already published author with critical success, revered. There is a theory that the Schlegel sisters of Howards End were based on Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa. Perhaps To The Lighthouse incorporated some references to Howards End (published 17 years earlier) as a sort of reciprocal homage. For example:
Charles Tansley loses his umbrella (1.9) as does Leonard Bast in HE. At dinner he feels alienated. He hasn’t dressed for dinner; he doesn’t have dress clothes. He feels the conversation is superficial. (1.17) In many ways this gauche, awkward man who longs to be admitted to the realms of high culture is a dead ringer for Leonard Bast.
One of the women who clean the house in part two is actually called Mrs Bast (2.9). Maybe Leonard’s wife Jackie has moved to Scotland.
Location
The real lighthouse was in Cornwall and the shipwreck mentioned in part three is probably that of HMY Iolaire, wrecked in a storm on New Year’s Day 1919 at the mouth of Stornoway Harbour on the Isle of Lewis, but the fictional setting is the Isle of Skye (1.1).
Violence
There is a lot of violence hidden under what appears to be a tranquil world:
Does this mean Mrs Ramsay is Jesus? Certainly, at the dinner, she doles out the beef stew. However, in the first part of the book, she is repeatedly seen through a window with James, as a sort of madonna and child. Furthermore, she refers to the squabbling that she sees through another window as Joseph and Mary and they seem to represent her husband and herself. This therefore suggests that she is Mary and that James, who harbours violent thoughts towards his father, is Jesus.
What I don’t like about the book
I find it difficult to cope with the class snobbery within this book. Mrs Ramsay is portrayed as wonderful because she knits socks for the tuberculous lighthouse-keeper’s son, she investigates poor households in London, she plays Lady Bountiful, accepting her exceptional economic privilege and considerable beauty as correlates of her aristocratic breeding. The awkward house guest is poor boy Tansley, marked out by failing to dress for dinner and by his gaucheness, struggling to make his way in a system where all the cards are stacked against him. The only character who isn’t even deemed worthy of a name is Macalister’s boy who rows the boat when they are becalmed. And the only servant worthy of extensive interior monologue (and so, by implication, the only one capable of thought) is a toothless monstrosity who lurches like a ship at sea, leers, looking askance at everything, is bowed down with weariness (she’s about seventy) and is dismissed as “witless”.
Woolf was herself an inveterate snob. She described Ulysses by James Joyce as “the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating. When one can have cooked flesh, why have the raw?”. (Nevertheless, she copied his Stream of Consciousness technique when she wrote Mrs Dalloway and even, perhaps in subconscious homage to a book set on a day in June in which the hero travels around Dublin, set Mrs D in June and had her heroine travel around London.) Famously, Woolf described Middlemarch as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”; less famously she sneered that its author, George “Eliot - the granddaughter of a carpenter, as she reminds us - is out of her depth when it comes to the depiction of higher social strata.” (Mead 2014 The Road to Middlemarch) page 46. Of course, I mustn’t stoop to Woolf’s level and employ similar ad hominem criticism but it is a limitation when an author cannot empathise with all her characters, whatever their ‘social stratum’.
What I love about this book
Woolf manages to make the reader feel as if they are telepathically tuning in to the thoughts of the characters. Sometimes these thoughts surprise the character themselves, such as when Mrs Ramsay thinks: “We are in the hands of the Lord. But instantly she was annoyed with herself for saying that. Who had said it? not she; she had been trapped into saying something she did not mean.” (1.11)
Sometimes those thinking seem trapped in their own consciousness and misinterpret others. At other times they seem to share thoughts. This happens several times as the narration flows from one consciousness to another, and it might be triggered by something external and common to both of them, or by something one has perceived in the other, but there are other times when the thoughts seem shared. At these moments, one feels that Woolf endorses the Jungian theory of the collective unconscious, the idea that all human beings share archetypal thoughts by virtue of their humanity. But she seems to go even further, all the way to panpsychism (the theory that all creatures and even non-living things have sentience or even consciousness) in part two, when the house and the nature around and within it seem to develop their own interior monologues.
I’m not saying that I believe in these ideas but I admire the way that Woolf has structured her prose so that it flows from consciousness to consciousness with thoughts triggered by perceptions and memories and sometimes simply out of the blue.
To a huge extent, she resists narration. As a result, no-one will ever know how many sit down to dinner. The reader must wait for other information, such as the names of the Ramsay children. This challenges the reader to fill in the gaps, which is how we would work if this was a conversation, and acts as a hook to maintain interest (although it can confuse and this can put some readers off).
Why is part one called ‘The Window’?
At the start of the book the nay-sayers, Charles Tansley and Mr Ramsay, are standing at a window looking out and saying that the weather tomorrow will be too poor for going to the lighthouse.
Mrs Ramsay has a dictum that “windows should be open, and doors shut” (1.5, already hinted at in 1.1)
At the start of the book, Lily is trying to draw a painting of Mrs Ramsay sitting in the window with James beside her. Mr Ramsay too, when he goes out to light his pipe, sees Mrs Ramsay and James sitting together in the window. This must be a Madonna and child reference.
Later, Mrs Ramsay looks out of the window on the landing at two rooks, whom she has nicknamed Joseph and Mary in a very clear Biblical reference, squabbling about which treetop to roost in, in what must be a metaphor for her own family (Jasper her son shoots at starlings, she disapproves and hopes it is just a phase).
At dinner, Lily the painter sees Charles Tansley, the man she both loves and hates, framed by a window. Meanwhile Mrs Ramsay sees the candles reflected in the windows and reflects on stability and change.
Thus windows both reflect the Christian themes of the book (Joseph and Mary, madonna and child) and also acts as frames for pictures, in the same way as Lily frames what she sees.
Other images, if not seen through a window, include those from Mrs Ramsay’s catalogue which James is cutting out from the start of the book.
The Passage of Time
Section two is entitled ‘Time Passes’. But in the third section, part of Lily’s “revelation” is of “Mrs Ramsay saying ‘Life stand still here’; Mrs Ramsay making of the moment something permanent”. The phrase is repeated as if to make it clear that this isn’t a typo; Mrs Ramsay is not suggesting that here in the holiday cottage life stands still but she is using the imperative, commanding life to stand still.
This seems a critical theme of the book. Time passes and brings with it an encroaching wilderness, decay and death. But Mrs Ramsay, and memory, and Lily’s art can make “of the moment something permanent”.
Howards End
E M Forster met Leonard Woolf at King’s College Cambridge (they were both members of the Apostles) as the 19th century became the 20th. In the 1910s and 1920s he was a member of the Bloomsbury Group and presumably, as an already published author with critical success, revered. There is a theory that the Schlegel sisters of Howards End were based on Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa. Perhaps To The Lighthouse incorporated some references to Howards End (published 17 years earlier) as a sort of reciprocal homage. For example:
Charles Tansley loses his umbrella (1.9) as does Leonard Bast in HE. At dinner he feels alienated. He hasn’t dressed for dinner; he doesn’t have dress clothes. He feels the conversation is superficial. (1.17) In many ways this gauche, awkward man who longs to be admitted to the realms of high culture is a dead ringer for Leonard Bast.
One of the women who clean the house in part two is actually called Mrs Bast (2.9). Maybe Leonard’s wife Jackie has moved to Scotland.
Location
The real lighthouse was in Cornwall and the shipwreck mentioned in part three is probably that of HMY Iolaire, wrecked in a storm on New Year’s Day 1919 at the mouth of Stornoway Harbour on the Isle of Lewis, but the fictional setting is the Isle of Skye (1.1).
Violence
There is a lot of violence hidden under what appears to be a tranquil world:
- In part two, Andrew is killed by an exploding shell while serving in World War One.
- Also in part two, there is a shipwreck. The expedition to the lighthouse in part three crosses the graves of the drowned sailors.
- In part one, Jasper shoots at starlings. Mrs Ramsay does not like it but tells herself that it is only a phase through which all boys grow. Nevertheless, she confronts Jasper about it, asking: “Don’t you think they mind ... having their wings broken?” (1.16) She transfers her concern from the starlings to the rooks whom she has nicknamed Joseph and Mary and who seem to stand for Mr Ramsay and herself.
- James is almost psychopathic in the intensity of his violent hatred for his father. He’s only six at the start of the novel when his father disappoints his hopes of going to the lighthouse tomorrow and his response is murderous: “Had there been an axe handy, a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it." (1.1) In part three, now 16, he responds to an expectation that his father will do or say something unreasonable by thinking: “if he does ... I shall take a knife and strike him to the heart.” (3.9)
- In 1.3, Mr Ramsay is remembering the poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” which commemorates a moment during the Battle of Balaklava in the Crimean War when a troop of British cavalry rode at Russian gun emplacements and sustained severe loss of life. One of the lines he remembers is “Stormed at with shot and shell”
- The word “explode” or “exploded” or “explosion” is used several times to describe the intensity of thoughts and anger.
- Charles Tansley feels that “these mild cultivated people, who would be blown sky high” by the “gunpowder” in him. (1.17)
- “Books, she thought, grew of themselves. She never had time to read them.” (1.5)
- “The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.” (1.6)
- “into this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare” (1.7) OTT or what?
- “Possibly the greatest good requires the existence of a slave class.” (1.7)
- “there could be no disputing this: an unmarried woman (she lightly took her hand for a moment), an unmarried woman has missed the best of life.” (1.9)
- “All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness.” (1.11)
- “The lights of the town and of the harbour and of the boats seemed like a phantom net floating there to mark something which had sunk.” (1.12)
- “As they came out on the hill and saw the lights of the town beneath them, the lights coming out suddenly one by one seemed like things that were going to happen to him—his marriage, his children, his house” (1.14)
- “Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.” (1.17)
- “She need not marry, thank Heaven: she need not undergo that degradation. She was saved from that dilution.” (1.17)
- “Love ... is the stupidest, the most barbaric of human passions, and turns a nice young man with a profile like a gem ... into a bully with a crowbar” (1.17)
- “she righted herself after the shock of the event, and quite unconsciously and incongruously, used the branches of the elm trees outside to help her to stabilize her position. Her world was changing: they were still.” (1.18)
- “The whole of life did not consist in going to bed with a woman, he thought, returning to Scott and Balzac, to the English novel and the French novel.” (1.19)
- “One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. ... Still the risk must be run; the mark made.” (3.4)
- “Why ... did she do it? ... It would be hung in the servants’ bedrooms. It would be rolled up and stuffed under a sofa. What was the good of doing it then, and she heard some voice saying she couldn’t paint.” (3.4)
- “This making up scenes about them, is what we call ‘knowing’ people, ‘thinking’ of them, ‘being fond’ of them! Not a word of it was true; she had made it up; but it was what she knew them by all the same.” (3.6)
Selected by Time magazine as one of the best 100 novels since Time began (1923)
First reviewed in February 2016; 154 pages
Also by Virginia Woolf
I reread the book and rewrote the review in September 2025.
- The Voyage Out (1915)
- Jacob's Room (1922)
- Mrs Dalloway (1925)
- To the Lighthouse (1927)
- Orlando: A Biography (1928)
- The Waves (1931): This is a much more difficult book. It also uses stream of consciousness and six characters whose life stories interweave but there is no narrator's voice to tell us what is happening. In some ways it is a much more interesting book and in other ways much more frustrating. Not for beginners!
- The Years (1937)
- Between the Acts (1941)
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