To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is widely regarded as one of the greatest artistic achievements of the twentieth century.
Recommendations from our site
“When all is said and done, I think it is her greatest novel.I find it still, every single time I read it—and I must have read it more than any other book in my reading life—very moving, tremendously impressive, extremely complicated and interesting in how it’s put together, and approachable in many different kinds of ways. It’s approachable as a love story, as a family story, as a ghost story, as an elegy for the nineteenth century, as a war novel—in an indirect and interesting way—and as an astonishingly ambitious experiment in a completely different way of writing fiction.” Read more...
Hermione Lee, Biographer
“Aristotle tells us that all politics starts in the family, and you really do see that in To the Lighthouse. Woolf always said that there is no symbolism in the lighthouse at all, and I think we should believe her. All the same, I do think that the lighthouse, in a way, is Mrs Ramsay because the lighthouse is there to protect us from harm and from hazards, and Mrs Ramsay is a self-sacrificing, patient mother who attends to everyone’s needs and tends to protect them from hazards. Of course, that was an impossibility for Woolf, because her mother died when she was 13. So she is really trying to recreate her mother and also her father, Mr Ramsay. She’s brought them to life – I wonder what that must have been like for her to write. In Hot Milk, I refer to To the Lighthouse as well as Woolf’s earlier novel The Voyage Out. It seems to Sofia that her mother is a hazard, and she says, later, ‘I’ve been waiting for her to take the voyage out of her gloom, to buy a ticket to a vital life with an extra ticket for me. I’ve been waiting all my life for her to reserve a seat for me.’” Read more...
Deborah Levy on Motherhood in Literature
Deborah Levy, Novelist
The audiobook of To the Lighthouse has been performed separately by two great actors: Australian actress Nicole Kidman and British actress Juliet Stevenson. Listening time: 7-8 hours.
