152 To the Lighthouse: Introduction
by Alix Hawley
Why read To the Lighthouse? What is it? A novel? A painting with words? A fairy tale? A feminist manifesto? An autobiography? A declaration of war? An “elegy,” as Virginia Woolf put it?[1] If so, for what?
In a way, this book is without a plot. What story there is can be summarized quickly: Mr. Ramsay, a philosopher, and his wife, a famous beauty, both in middle age, are staying with their eight children and various guests at their summer holiday home in the Hebrides, islands off Scotland. Conflicts arise and fall in Part One, especially between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, but also within individual characters’ minds. We see the shifting flow of thought and relationships from various points of view. The day culminates in a dinner in which union is triumphantly achieved, at least for a moment. In Part Two, things fall apart; time ravages the house, and we learn in passing that Mrs. Ramsay has shockingly died. Moreover, a daughter, Prue, has died in childbirth, and a son, Andrew, has been killed in First World War. Blackness and chaos lift at last as the housekeepers get to work on the dilapidated house and discuss the family’s coming return. Part Three is a revisiting of Part One; now Mr. Ramsay is back at the holiday house with some of the remaining children and original guests, including the artist Lily Briscoe. Mrs. Ramsay’s absence is enormous, as is the question of how to find union again, and the living characters struggle with both. In the end, a tenuous connection is made once more between the characters, and between past and present.
To the Lighthouse, then, is no racing page-turner. The important events tend to happen in the background: Mrs. Ramsay’s death is the most obvious case. But the book carries readers onward with its rhythm and patterns. Of Woolf’s books, it is probably the most accessible, and at the same time, the most innovative. It looks back, but is unlike anything before it. It is all of the genres listed above. Like a painting, it asks us to look closely at the author’s technique to see how it has been made. Like a fairy tale, it manages to transform the everyday into something magical and extraordinary. Like a feminist manifesto, it exposes and challenges traditional gender roles. Like an autobiography, it recalls the intensity of childhood feelings. Like a declaration of war, it promises to fight the wrongs of the past. Like an elegy, it mourns the dead and lays them to rest so life can move on. The book’s major achievement is the way it manages to make something new and permanent out of passing moments and feelings. As Woolf’s artist character Lily Briscoe thinks of her painting, it must be like “a butterfly’s wing,” but “clamped together with bolts of iron.”[2] To the Lighthouse does this in two ways: through its structure and its conflicts.
The story’s structure is a reaction to Woolf’s Victorian past. By the time she published To the Lighthouse in 1927, she had famously sa