Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse

Reading her masterwork in Cornwall

In my last post I talked about my trip to Cornwall with the London Literary Salon. I was there to discuss Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse with a room of strangers, in St. Ives, where the nove is set and where she spent her summers in childhood. Here is an excerpt of the memoir I’m writing in which I describe what the experience was like:

In the studio, we take turns reading aloud. The sentences are long, and sometimes we get lost. We weave in and out of characters’ consciousnesses. Sometimes, we laugh, hearing Woolf’s words spoken, noticing how funny she is, in a way we hadn’t noticed before. (If you want, try reading the following out loud and see.)

She [Mrs. Ramsay] was formidable to behold, and it was only in silence, looking up from their plates, after she had spoken so severely . . . , that her daughters—Prue, Nancy, Rose—could sport with infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves of a life different from hers; in Paris, perhaps; a wilder life; not always taking care of some man or other; for there was in their minds a mute questioning of deference and chivalry, of the Bank of England and the Indian Empire . . .

Woolf’s words—including that “formidable” (!)—come to life in our voices. Most of us in our group are Americans, but there are also four British women. I love hearing them read. I think about how they could narrate books for a living. I could go to sleep listening to their voices. (Try reading  the following in your head a Birish accent.)

Here, the houses falling away on both sides, they came out on the quay, and the whole bay spread before them and Mrs. Ramsay could not help exclaiming, ‘Oh, how beautiful!’ For the great plateful of blue water was before her; the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst; and on the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft low pleats, the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them, which always seemed to be running away into some moon country, uninhabited of men.

When Toby says, “That’s good,” we all sigh at the profound beauty of the words that only Woolf could write. Much as Lily and the other characters worship Mrs. Ramsay, we worship Woolf.

We let her words tumble over us, shake us, pierce us, as the distant rumble of waves sneaks in through the open window—the window hung with stained glass of the palest blue, made from sand on this very beach, which stretches, deep strips of tan and blue, to the horizon.

Then we start to speak, connecting threads to the web we’ve been constructing here among us. Each idea—Oh I love how, or It seems to me that—introduces another nearly transparent line cast out for someone else to catch.

And when it’s time—too soon for the mind but just in time for the stiff body—we stand up, laying our books down, and move this way and that, pulling the threads apart, or laying them carefully to rest so that we can pick them up again we return to this circle of chairs and the window that looks out on the sea.

In another session, we read about Mrs. Ramsay, taking some time for herself, when the young children are in bed and the older children and adults are all out exploring still. She sits down to knit, and simply to “be herself, by herself.” I have circled many words on the page—silent, alone, invisible to others, free, dark, deep, peace, eternity. Mrs. Ramsay is meditating, turning inward, like a Buddhist, or a mystic.

As she sinks into her own depths, she finds “a wedge-shaped core of darkness.”  It is hers alone. “Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep. . . . [It] could go anywhere, for no one saw it. They could not stop it, she thought, exulting. There was freedom, there was peace, there was, most of all, a summoning together, a resting on a platform of stability.”

We talk of the wedge of darkness, what it could mean, whether or not Woolf herself yearned for the dark stillness, if this was the place she yearned to return to. Yet also about her mother, and about mothers generally, who are pulled in every direction and give so much that they have little to nothing left over for themselves. How extraordinary it is that Woolf gives Mrs. Ramsay this interior space, of all the characters, all of whom guard their solitude and won’t let their edges blur, while Mrs. Ramsay is the one with hardly any edges. She is permeable, shape-shifting, becoming what each person—husband, child, or friend—wants her to be. Yet, here, Woolf has chosen to give her a depth of perception unmatched by any of the other characters, by setting her down in this chair to not only contemplate—but to feel—eternity.

Toby draws our attention the imagery Woolf uses to describe the culmination of her reverie: “there curled up off the floor of the mind, rose from the lake of one’s being, a mist, a bride to meet her lover.” Who is the lover, she asks, but herself?

And the bride? Perhaps the source of that eternal peace? Or is Mrs. Ramsay the bride and the source is the lover? Before this, she had thought, “It will come, it will come,” and then she suddenly adds, “We are in the hands of the Lord.”

With that last phrase, the spell is broken. She is annoyed with herself. “She had been trapped into saying something she did not mean.” It was a trick of habit, no longer useful or meaningful. There is no God in the universe of this book, for the Victorian era had killed Him. Yet, there is this merging of all things that one feels in the deep, dark well of oneself.

Standing up again from our discussion of the wedge of darkness, we walk away from the delicate web between us, and make our way through the narrow, darkening streets, to a restaurant on the beach.

A “jumbo,” a traditional boat from St. Ives. Spotted on our return to St. Ives from the lighthouse.

Later, I return to my tiny room and, before I go to sleep, write it all down, trying to capture it. Mrs. Ramsay only briefly admits God into her darkness, then she casts him out again. What she really feels, when she is alone, is a kind of Buddhist or Celtic Christian unity with all the living things around her, the plants and the running water; she “felt they became one.” And that’s the point at which the mysterious lover meets the bride. It’s an old metaphor for the soul, or wholeness, the Jungian idea of anima and animus reunited.

What continues to astonish me is the fact that Woolf chose Mrs. Ramsay for this experience. She is able, despite all of the demands on her person and affections, to retain this inner darkness, a wedge against intrusion, at her core. She possesses an interiority that is both untouched and untouchable, an inner life that requires no other to feel complete. No wonder the artist Lily Briscoe adores her.

I notice how Woolf has split the woman artist and the mother off from each other, as was the custom. Lily is drawn to Mrs. Ramsay as the mother figure, the link between all of them, the love in the room, so to speak. And Mrs. Ramsay wants Lily to be happy and encourages her to marry, as she does her own children. Yet a gulf remains between them. Lily cannot become a wife and mother and retain her ability to stand apart from human relations and create art.

I adore them both—I have been both. Like Mrs. Ramsay, I felt the weight of all of the effort to hold my family together. It ultimately crushed her. But then she had eight kids, while I had only one, and I have managed to escape. And like Lily, I have been overcome with doubts about my ability to create, and I try to claim the right to say, as she does, “But this is what I see.”

Back in the studio on Sunday morning, during our last discussion, we sum up our experiences of this book. I tell the group, “This is why I want to write. I want to capture life’s most meaningful moments, as she does—to write not just about literature but about life itself.”

This is what I meant when I said in my last letter that I feel like there is my life before reading this novel, and my life after reading it. I want to dig deeper, as a writer, to get to what is real. I don’t want to simply analyze Woolf; I want to be inspired by her. She has kindled my ambition—not for recognition, but for connection. That is what I experienced in that temporary community of readers in the studio looking out on the beach.

Okay, now it’s your turn. Are you a Woolf fan? If so, what is it about her writing that draws you in? I’d love to hear about your experiences reading her work. And if you’re not a Woolf fan, I’d love to hear about that too!

Until next time,

Anne

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