| To the Lighthouse (Annotated) | 
 enlarge | Author: Virginia Woolf
Creator: Mark Hussey
Publisher: Harvest Books
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
Buy New: $4.06
You Save: $10.94 (73%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  168 reviews
Sales Rank: 22749
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 312
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.4 x 1
ISBN: 0156030470
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.912
EAN: 9780156030472
ASIN: 0156030470
Publication Date: August 1, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Book is new and unread, shows some shelf wear
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| Customer Reviews:
 Big Bad Woolf August 31, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Ah, "To the Lighthouse." I've never been a fan of it. This coming from an English major... I just don't like the stream of consciousness writing style. You know, there are many that give huge kudos to Woolf for her writing. I do enjoy her grasp on imagery and description, and she has a wonderful understanding of the human experience. This doesn't mean that the book was really all that enjoyable to me either of the two times I've read this now for classes.
 Simply Brilliant - A Must Read July 22, 2007
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941) was a well known writer, critic, feminist, and publisher. This was her fifth novel.
As background information, I read her first novel "The Voyage Out" published in 1915, skipped her second novel - which is considered to be a flop, Night and Day from 1919 - and then read "Jacob's Room," her third, then went on and read "Mrs. Dalloway," her fourth, and next read "To The Lighthouse," etc. Also, I read some of Woolf's non-fiction.
"The Voyage Out" is simple and straightforward work and it might remind the reader of a Jane Austen novel, but it set on a ship and then at a remote location. It is over 400 pages long, and has an Austen theme. After her second novel - which did not do very well - Woolf decided to be more risky and creative with the next book. She changed her style and approach to the novel and Woolf uses the stream of consciousness technique to bring a sense of the chaos and shortness of a young man's life around the time of World War I, Jacob's life, i.e.: from the pandemonium of Jacob's life as portrayed by Woolf through the use of the stream of the consciousness technique, we eventually have clarity in the novel. She carries this writing style on into the similarly chaotic story in the novel "Mrs. Dalloway."
This is her third novel using her stream of consciousness technique and she does it in a very dramatic fashion. The story is centered on the life of Mrs. Ramsay, a beautiful woman in her early fifties, and her older husband, and their eight children, plus other guests and neighbors and domestic help all at a beach house somewhere in Scotland on a warm summer day. Her husband is an academic and a bit remote. Mrs. Ramsay is more down to earth and mostly loved and admired by all.
As in the novel "Jacob's Room" the reader is left dangling as Woolf moves from character to character, giving the reader glimpses of their inner emotions. It is hard to determine what Woolf is doing and where she is going. But what she seems to be doing is celebrating a moment in a life. This is done very effectively with the stream of consciousness technique, and very dramatically as the story proceeds. The prose is brilliant and awe inspiring in some spots, and we see the genius of Woolf.
To say a lot more would ruin the story for the reader, but most will appreciate the way the story unfolds, and it unfolds very dramatically after a seemingly slow and complex start. The change has an effect on the reader - or so I found. Some think that it is Woolf's finest work and it would be hard to find fault with that assessment. She takes her ideas from "Jacob's Room" and applies them to a more complicated and dramatic setting at a family get together at a beach house, and it works.
This is a must read novel.
Brilliant and Entertaining July 22, 2007
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941) was a well known writer, critic, feminist, and publisher. This was her fifth novel.
As background information, I read her first novel "The Voyage Out" published in 1915, skipped her second novel - which is considered to be a flop, Night and Day from 1919 - and then read "Jacob's Room," her third, then went on and read "Mrs. Dalloway," her fourth, and next read "To The Lighthouse," etc. Also, I read some of Woolf's non-fiction.
"The Voyage Out" is simple and straightforward work and it might remind the reader of a Jane Austen novel, but it set on a ship and then at a remote location. It is over 400 pages long, and has an Austen theme. After her second novel - which did not do very well - Woolf decided to be more risky and creative with the next book. She changed her style and approach to the novel and Woolf uses the stream of consciousness technique to bring a sense of the chaos and shortness of a young man's life around the time of World War I, Jacob's life, i.e.: from the pandemonium of Jacob's life as portrayed by Woolf through the use of the stream of the consciousness technique, we eventually have clarity in the novel. She carries this writing style on into the similarly chaotic story in the novel "Mrs. Dalloway."
This is her third novel using her stream of consciousness technique and she does it in a very dramatic fashion. The story is centered on the life of Mrs. Ramsay, a beautiful woman in her early fifties, and her older husband, and their eight children, plus other guests and neighbors and domestic help all at a beach house somewhere in Scotland on a warm summer day. Her husband is an academic and a bit remote. Mrs. Ramsay is more down to earth, and she is mostly loved and admired by all.
As in the novel "Jacob's Room" the reader is left dangling as Woolf moves from character to character, giving the reader glimpses of their inner emotions. It is hard to determine what Woolf is doing and where she is going. But what she seems to be doing is celebrating a moment in a life. This is done very effectively with the stream of consciousness technique, and very dramatically as the story proceeds. The prose is brilliant and awe inspiring in some spots, and we see the genius of Woolf.
To say a lot more would ruin the story for the reader, but most will appreciate the way the story unfolds, and it unfolds very dramatically after a seemingly slow and complex start. The change has an effect on the reader - or so I found. Some think that it is Woolf's finest work and it would be hard to find fault with that assessment. She takes her ideas from "Jacob's Room" and applies them to a more complicated and dramatic setting at a family get together at a beach house, and it works.
This is a must read novel.
Painted lives June 1, 2007
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
An extraordinary book, at once light as air and dense with meaning. From the smallest happenings (a family gathered at a seaside house) seen in two brief glimpses (a long summer afternoon before the first world war, and a single morning ten years later), Virginia Woolf distils a profound meditation on love and loss, hope and disappointment, and human relationships, especially the precarious and limiting balance between men and women. But it is impossible to summarize in a sentence what Woolf achieves in two hundred pages, so let me just pick on three specifics: art, thought, and time.
ART. The Harcourt Harvest Book paperback edition has a beautiful cover, apparently a tinted turn-of-the century photograph of a beach with the sea and a lighthouse beyond. It is a perfect evocation of the period and of lazy summers by the sea. Yet the credits say it is adapted from a photo by a much later artist, Herbert List; presumably the period air and the uncanny overtones of Seurat's "Grande Jatte" are the work of the designer, Liz Demeter. I mention this partly because a book's cover is like incidental music; it creates the context in which you start reading, and this is perfect. But also because visual art also plays an important part in the book. One of the guests of the owners of the house, the Ramsays, is Lily Briscoe, an unmarried woman in her thirties. We first see her as she is painting in the garden: "Lily's picture! Mrs. Ramsay smiled. With her little Chinese eyes and her puckered-up face, she would never marry; one could not take her painting very seriously." So of course we take her for a mere amateur; and Lily similarly puts herself down, conditioned by a climate which denied creativity to women except as wives and mothers. But when we get to look closer at Lily's picture we see that it is extremely advanced for its time, and her thought processes are as rigorous as anything we hear from the paterfamilias Mr. Ramsay, a once-celebrated philosopher. Indeed in the glorious closing chapters of the book, it is Lily, struggling to express balance and feeling in paint, who comes closest to giving meaning and permanency to the whole family history. One recalls that one of Virginia Woolf's closest friends in the Bloomsbury Group was the art critic Roger Fry, who coined the term post-impressionism. Lily, far from being a minor character, stands as the alter ego of Woolf herself, achieving in touches of paint a very close analogy to what the author manages so marvelously in words.
THOUGHT. But fine as Virginia Woolf's visual descriptions are, her main medium is not sight but thought. The two days at the seaside are described entirely through the minds of various individual members of the family and their guests. There is occasional dialogue, but no third-person narrator. A paragraph may start with the thoughts of one person about another, switch smoothly to the mind of that other person, and then return to the first again. And often the thoughts of the first character will change significantly between one moment and the next. Affection can switch suddenly to anger and back again; Woolf knows that most emotions, especially given the complex ties that bind families, can seldom be contained by a single label; through her apparent contradictions, she builds up a truth that is richer than could have been attained by consistency alone. Again, I think of the visual arts and the multiple viewpoints of cubism, but though a modern writer, Woolf is not a modern-ist; her technique is concealed, not flaunted; she is not a "difficult" writer in the sense that Joyce or even Faulkner are. As a results, her portraits come through with great warmth, especially that of Mrs. Ramsay, willingly adopting a supporting role to her curmudgeonly husband (or almost willingly -- with Woolf that is important), but blessed with a radiance of personality that illuminates the entire book, even when she is not at the center of it.
TIME. Most novels tell a story that unfolds gradually over the course of time; this doesn't. The outer sections of the book take place virtually in real time; the action happens at about the same speed as it takes to read about it. But for all intents and purposes, these sections are static compared to the ten-year duration of the narrative as a whole. Only one thing happens in either of the outer sections that could really be called an event, and that involves two minor characters whose relationship to the Ramsays is never clearly specified. But that does not mean lack of movement. The rapidly shifting juxtapositions and viewpoints build up a dense texture of relationships and feelings that reach a certain stability at the close of the first (and longest) section, but leave you wanting more. In painting terms again, one might call this opening a still life -- except that the various figures in it are now linked by quasi-electrical charges, so that the balance between them is not static but dynamic, presently in equilibrium but capable of further motion. In effect, you could close the book at this moment and write your own narrative. Instead, Virginia Woolf does something quite extraordinary. In the ten short chapters of the twenty-page interlude entitled "Time Passes," she takes on the role of narrator for the first time, and tells what happens in the next few minutes, the remainder of that night, the ensuing nights, the changing seasons, the course of the War, and the passage of years. She writes of impersonal things -- the house, the garden, the wind, the sea -- throwing in small nuggets of personal information almost as afterthoughts. When the Ramsays finally return, much has changed, and the former golden days seem tarnished. But by the end of this marvelous novel, Virginia Woolf has burnished them to a new shine, less brilliant perhaps, but deeper and more lasting.
To the Lighthouse May 31, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The book is a poetic third person narration, that takes place on the Isle of Skye around WWI. The book begins as Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay take a summer trip to the Isle, along with their bevy of children. So, begins the story of a lives entwined,and told at a pace of varying rhythms and point of views. One might say that the pages hold a search for meaning in a world of chaos. Life cycles are central, to the themes of preservation and life. The ligthouse itself, sometimes seeming mysterious and ellusive, transitions by the story's end. James, taking note of the contrast in perspective recognizes that "nothing is one thing". In this story, even the wind and furnishings are given a haunting voice. As the house is being packed and cleared , the wind asks "Will you fade? will you perish?" The objects answer, "We will remain."
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