Virginia Woolf

In 1882, Virginia Woolf was born into a world that was quickly evolving. Her family was split by the
mores of the stifling Victorian era, with her half-siblings firmly on the side of "polite society" and her
own brothers and sisters curious about what lie on the darker side of that society. Woolf's father, the
eminent scholar and biographer Sir Leslie Stephen, was a man of letters and a man of vision,
befriending and encouraging authors who were then unknown, including Henry James and Thomas
Hardy. As much as he encouraged his own daughters to better their minds, higher education, even in
the Stephen household, was reserved for the men of the family-Woolf's brothers Thoby and Adrian.
This was a bitter lesson in inequality that Woolf could never forget, even when she was later offered
honorary degrees from Cambridge and other British universities that, when she was growing up,
didn't even admit women into their ranks.
When Woolf and her sister Vanessa moved out of their posh London neighborhood and into a slightly seedy
neighborhood called Bloomsbury with their brothers, they were on the cusp of something entirely new. They
could either fall backwards into the safe arms of the upper-middle class society in which they grew up, or
they could push forth into the somewhat avant-garde, ultra-intellectual and suspect world of Thoby's
Cambridge friends-Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Desmond MacCarthy, among others. The sisters plunged
headfirst into the Bloomsbury Group.
The Bloomsbury Group started out as a weekly gathering of old college friends. However, as time passed, it
became an intense salon of ideas, philosophy, and theories on art and politics. Woolf and Vanessa were both
important members of the group. For the first time, Woolf was around people who didn't seem to care that
she was a woman, and who expected her to contribute to the group both in conversation and in deed (as in
her novels). Though her old friends were scandalized by the company she was keeping (the Bloomsbury
Group was famous, even in its own time, and its members were considered rude, unkempt and depraved),
Woolf felt at ease among her new friends, and flourished in their company.
With this encouragement, she began writing. First she began publishing short journalistic pieces, and then
longer reviews. Before long she was a regular contributor to a number of London weeklies, and was
privately trying her hand at fiction. After her first novel, The Voyage Out was published to good reviews,
Woolf never looked back and began producing novel after successful and daring novel. Through her often
difficult but nearly always brilliant novels, she became one of the most important Modernist writers, along
with James Joyce and T.S. Eliot.
Modernism was a literary movement in which its practitioners discovered new ways to relate the human
experience in an uncertain, somewhat hopeless time in history. World War One had just demoralized
England and the Continent, and a whole generation of young men and women were, as Gertrude Stein would
later put it, "lost." Changing times demanded different modes of expression. Woolf and James Joyce, for
example, utilized stream-of-consciousness to convey a character's interior monologue and to capture the
irregularities and meanderings of thought.
Despite her successes, Woolf battled mental illness for most of her life. Mental illness was still poorly
understood in the first half of the Twentieth Century, and Woolf–who was likely suffering from manic-
depression–had few tools at her disposal with which to battle her inner demons. She lost weeks of precious
work time due to her bouts with mania or with depression, and she was plagued, during these times of
madness, by voices in her head. However, her devoted husband Leonard shepherded her through these
difficult periods in her life and she seemed to bounce back and produce another great work of literature.
However, on March 28, 1941, as World War II raged on, Woolf left her husband two suicide notes, walked
to the River Ouse, filled her pockets with heavy stones, and drowned herself. With her death, the world lost
one of its most gifted voices. She left a canon of experimental, stunning fiction and a collection of insightful
and incisive nonfiction and criticism. Her belief that women writers face two hindrances-social inferiority
and economic dependence-was a revolutionary stance to take in the twenties when A Room of One's
Own was published. Even more so was her assertion that all women deserved equal opportunity in education
and career. Despite having had no educational opportunity herself, Virginia Woolf became, through her own
efforts, one of the best writers of the twentieth century.

Book summary

To the Lighthouseis divided into three sections: “The Window,” “Time Passes,” and “The Lighthouse.”
Each section is fragmented into stream-of-consciousness contributions from various narrators.

“The Window” opens just before the start of World War I. Mr. Ramsay and Mrs. Ramsay bring their eight
children to their summer home in the Hebrides (a group of islands west of Scotland). Across the bay from
their house stands a large lighthouse. Six-year-old James Ramsay wants desperately to go to the lighthouse,
and Mrs. Ramsay tells him that they will go the next day if the weather permits. James reacts gleefully, but
Mr. Ramsay tells him coldly that the weather looks to be foul. James resents his father and believes that he
enjoys being cruel to James and his siblings.

The Ramsays host a number of guests, including the dour Charles Tansley, who admires Mr. Ramsay’s work
as a metaphysical philosopher. Also at the house is Lily Briscoe, a young painter who begins a portrait of
Mrs. Ramsay. Mrs. Ramsay wants Lily to marry William Bankes, an old friend of the Ramsays, but Lily
resolves to remain single. Mrs. Ramsay does manage to arrange another marriage, however, between Paul
Rayley and Minta Doyle, two of their acquaintances.

During the course of the afternoon, Paul proposes to Minta, Lily begins her painting, Mrs. Ramsay soothes
the resentful James, and Mr. Ramsay frets over his shortcomings as a philosopher, periodically turning to
Mrs. Ramsay for comfort. That evening, the Ramsays host a seemingly ill-fated dinner party. Paul and Minta
are late returning from their walk on the beach with two of the Ramsays’ children. Lily bristles at outspoken
comments made by Charles Tansley, who suggests that women can neither paint nor write. Mr. Ramsay
reacts rudely when Augustus Carmichael, a poet, asks for a second plate of soup. As the night draws on,
however, these missteps right themselves, and the guests come together to make a memorable evening.

The joy, however, like the party itself, cannot last, and as Mrs. Ramsay leaves her guests in the dining room,
she reflects that the event has already slipped into the past. Later, she joins her husband in the parlor. The
couple sits quietly together, until Mr. Ramsay’s characteristic insecurities interrupt their peace. He wants his
wife to tell him that she loves him. Mrs. Ramsay is not one to make such pronouncements, but she concedes
to his point made earlier in the day that the weather will be too rough for a trip to the lighthouse the next
day. Mr. Ramsay thus knows that Mrs. Ramsay loves him. Night falls, and one night quickly becomes
another.

Time passes more quickly as the novel enters the “Time Passes” segment. War breaks out across Europe.
Mrs. Ramsay dies suddenly one night. Andrew Ramsay, her oldest son, is killed in battle, and his sister Prue
dies from an illness related to childbirth. The family no longer vacations at its summerhouse, which falls
into a state of disrepair: weeds take over the garden and spiders nest in the house. Ten years pass before the
family returns. Mrs. McNab, the housekeeper, employs a few other women to help set the house in order.
They rescue the house from oblivion and decay, and everything is in order when Lily Briscoe returns.

In “The Lighthouse” section, time returns to the slow detail of shifting points of view, similar in style to
“The Window.” Mr. Ramsay declares that he and James and Cam, one of his daughters, will journey to the
lighthouse. On the morning of the voyage, delays throw him into a fit of temper. He appeals to Lily for
sympathy, but, unlike Mrs. Ramsay, she is unable to provide him with what he needs. The Ramsays set off,
and Lily takes her place on the lawn, determined to complete a painting she started but abandoned on her
last visit. James and Cam bristle at their father’s blustery behavior and are embarrassed by his constant self-
pity. Still, as the boat reaches its destination, the children feel a fondness for him. Even James, whose skill
as a sailor Mr. Ramsay praises, experiences a moment of connection with his father, though James so
willfully resents him. Across the bay, Lily puts the finishing touch on her painting. She makes a definitive
stroke on the canvas and puts her brush down, finally having achieved her vision.

Indepth Facts:

NarratorThe narrator is anonymous.

Point Of ViewThe narrator speaks in the third person and describes the characters and actions subjectively,
giving us insight into the characters’ feelings. The narrative switches constantly from the perceptions of one
character to those of the next.
ToneElegiac, poetic, rhythmic, imaginative
TensePast
Setting (Time)The years immediately preceding and following World War I
Setting (Place)The Isle of Skye, in the Hebrides (a group of islands west of Scotland)
ProtagonistAlthough Mrs. Ramsay is the central focus of the beginning of To the Lighthouse, the novel
traces the development of Lily Briscoe to the end, making it more accurate to describe Lily as the
protagonist.
Major ConflictThe common struggle that each of the characters faces is to bring meaning and order to the
chaos of life.
Rising ActionJames’s desire to journey to the lighthouse; Mr. Ramsay’s need to ask Mrs. Ramsay for
sympathy; Charles Tansley’s insistence that women cannot paint or write; Lily Briscoe’s stalled attempt at
her painting
ClimaxMrs. Ramsay’s dinner party
Falling ActionMr. Ramsay’s trip to the lighthouse with Cam and James; Lily Briscoe’s completion of her
painting
ThemesThe transience of life and work; art as a means of preservation; the subjective nature of reality; the
restorative effects of beauty
MotifsThe differing behaviors of men and women; brackets
SymbolsThe lighthouse, Lily’s painting, the Ramsays’ house, the sea, the boar’s skull, the fruit basket
ForeshadowingJames’s initial desire and anxiety surrounding the voyage to the lighthouse foreshadows the
trip he makes a decade later.