Summary | Author | Book Reviews | Discussion Questions


To The Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf
309 pp.

In Brief
The novel is one of Woolf's most successful and accessible experiments in the modernist mode, including stream-of-consciousness. The three sections of the book take place between 1910 and 1920 and revolve around various members of the Ramsay family and their guests during visits to their summer residence on the Isle of Skye in Scotland.

Section I —"The Window": young James Ramsay fervently hopes to visit the lighthouse on the following day, but while his mother assures him, his father insists they will have to call off the trip due to weather. Various guests and colleagues interact with one another as Mrs. Ramsay attempts to placate all. The story progresses through shifting points of view.

Section II — "Time Passes": an omniscient narrator takes over to inform us about the war and the fates of some of the characters from the first section.

Section III— "The Lighthouse": Mr. Ramsay returns to the family's deserted summer home 10 years after the book's initial events. He and two of his children decide to sail out to visit the lighthouse. While they are gone, Lily Brisco, one of the previous guests, finishes an uncompleted painting.

top of page


About the Author

• Birth—January 25, 1882
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—Home schooling
• Death—March 28, 1941
• Where—Sussex, England


Virginia Woolf is now recognized as a major twentieth-century author, a great novelist and essayist and a key figure in literary history as a feminist and a modernist. Born in 1882, she was the daughter of the editor and critic Leslie Stephen, and suffered a traumatic adolescence after the deaths of her mother, in 1895, and her stepsister Stella, in 1897, leaving her subject to breakdowns for the rest of her life. Her father died in 1904 and two years later her favorite brother Thoby died suddenly of typhoid. With her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, she was drawn into the company of writers and artists such as Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, and E.M. Forster, and Roger Fry—a group later known as the Bloomsbury Group.

Among them she met Leonard Woolf, whom she married in 1912, and together they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, which was to publish the work of T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and Katherine Mansfield as well as the earliest translations of Freud. Woolf lived an energetic life among friends and family, reviewing and writing, and dividing her time between London and the Sussex Downs. In 1941, fearing another attack of mental illness, she drowned herself.

Her first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915, and she then worked through the transitional Night and Day (1919) to the highly experimental and impressionistic Jacob's Room (1922). From then on her fiction became a series of brilliant and extraordinarily varied experiments, each one searching for a fresh way of presenting the relationship between individual lives and the forces of society and history. She was particularly concerned with women's experience, not only in her novels but also in her essays and her two books of feminist polemic, A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). Her major novels include Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), the historical fantasy Orlando (1928), written for Vita Sackville-West, the extraordinarily poetic vision of The Waves (1931), the family saga of The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941). (From the publisher.)

top of page


Critics Say. . .
Characters and their individual perception are what intrigue Woolf, not plot—and in Lighthouse she gives full rein to her modernist ideas: reality is subjective, life is transient, truth and certainty are unattainable. It is only art that offers an antidote to an ever changing, death-threatening world.
What's the significance of the lighthouse? Good question. Obviously, a symbol, but one that's . . . Read more
LitLovers - LitPick October '08



Virginia Woolf stands as the chief figure of modernism in England and must be included with Joyce and Proust in the realization of experiments that have completely broken with tradition.
The New York Times



There are dozens of passages in which the secret revelations of men and women, especialy women, to the trifling events of life are rendered with convincing and elaborate subtlety. To have written them is to have surpassed...almost every contemporary novelist.
Saturday Review



(Refers to the audio version.) It's wondrous to listen to a fine reading of a long-loved novel. Leishman makes masterly use of volume, timbre and resonance to distinguish between characters and draw us into the emotional swings and vibrations of the internal musings of each. She creates not a new but a more nuanced reading, following the interwoven streams of consciousness in a British English that lends authenticity to each voice. Leishman swims smoothly through Woolf's sentences that ebb and flow with numerous parenthetical thoughts and fresh images. These passages are interspersed with quick, sharp, simple sentences that gain strength in contrast. Leishman also draws our attention to Woolf's poetic prose: her rhythms and images, her use of hard consonants in monosyllabic words in counterpoint to long, soft, dreamy words and phrases. To The Lighthouse plays back and forth between telescopic and microscopic views of nature and human nature. Mrs. Ramsey is both trapped in and pleased in her roles as wife, mother and hostess. The introspective Mr. Ramsey is consumed with his legacy of long-since-published abstract philosophy. This is a book that cannot be read-or heard-too often.
Publishers Weekly


Readers Say . . .
(When books have been around for a while, there's a shortage of mainstream online reviews, so we try to include helpful ones from Barnes & Noble customers.)


Simply Brilliant : Ms. Woolf has crafted some of the most wondeful, idiosyncratic and mystifying sentences in the English language, and, in the process, has created a portrait of a family that is unerring in its truth. Yes, the book is difficult, but the rewards are great, as the changes wrought by war, death, marriage, age and life itself are slowly revealed. This is my favorite book because it exemplifies all that literature can be and more, and I'm only 17. If I can reap the benefits of such a literary wonder, you can too.
Reviewer - 12/20/04



Brilliant! : What turns many away from this novel is the way Woolf uses space. The second part of the novel ('Time Passes') manages to compress the events of ten years into thirty pages while the entire first part ('The Window') is the longest section of the novel, at over 100 pages, and covers just ONE day, ending with the dinner party. To the people who hated it, I suggest they first read 'A Room of One's Own' to get a better idea of what Woolf aims to achieve in her art. Lily's experience mirrors Woolf's in a number of significant ways. It's pretty easy to 'dis' what you don't understand. But it may reflect your own understanding (or lack thereof) than the intrinsic qualities of the work.
Jon Hiatt, senior English major, Minnesota, 5/28/02



A True Master of Imagery and Emotion : This book was my first encounter with Virginia Woolf's work and it will certainly not be the last. From the moment I opened the book, I was engrossed with Virginia's ability to create an ebb and flow of human emotion mirror the actual presence of the ocean. As you read the innermost thought of the characters you connect with them, seeing small clips of characteristics that describe yourself. This book is a minor taste of the stream-of-consciousness movement that Woolf was a part of, but is not as difficult to follow as the works of Joyce and others.
Reviewer - Student of literature and writing, 8/3/01



In the Eyes of the Beholder : Virginia Woolf's novel is split into three sections. Each section is dedicated to a different time period in the lives of the Ramsay family as they vacation at their summer home in Scotland. The novel is simply a compilation of anecdotes narrating the interplay of the characters and the events in their lives from 1910 to 1920.

Woolf's style makes To the Lighthouse a complex novel. It is an unfamiliar style and yet very familiar, for Woolf writes using stream of consciousness. Stream of consciousness means Woolf writes the thoughts of the characters exactly as they think them. What makes this style so difficult to read is mostly the lack of punctuation. Since humans do not consciously put punctuation into their thoughts as they would if they were writing, the thoughts of the Ramsay's and other characters tend to be in run-on sentences. There is very little dialog, for all of the conversations that occur are described in the thoughts of one of the characters involved in the conversation. Since each character has a unique point of view, this style emphasizes the fact that everything is in the eye of the beholder. Woolf's style makes To the Lighthouse a slow, but intriguing, read.
Reviewer - Bret Maceyak, Colorado, 10/13/00

top of page


Book Club Discussion Questions

Sorry—the publisher has not made any questions available for this book.

But don't despair. Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

   • Generic Discussion Questions
   • Read-Think-Talk About a Book

Also, consider using these LitLovers pointers to help get your discussion started.

1. Woolf explores the ways in which people perceive or come to know the world: through intellect and facts or through intuition and feelings. Talk about how the different characters fall into those categories, especially Mrs. Ramsey and Mr. Ramsey; Charles Tansley and Lilly Briscoe. Where do you fall along these lines?

2. Mrs. Ramsey desires unity in her life over fragmentation. How does she express this desire. (Think about her knitting....) At her dinner party that evening, the guests are fractious, their individual desires keeping them separate. How, eventually, does the gathering finally achieve coherence and peace?

3. There is also a desire for permanence, for things to be "immune from change." How is this expressed in the book? Think of what Mrs. Ramsey wishes for, think of bowl of fruit on the dining table, the sea eating away at the land, the night air floating through the house, the change of seasons, Mr. Ramsey's wish for his books, and so on. (Remember that To the Lighthouse was written after World War I, so that author and her readers, even back then, were aware of the horrific change that would take place 4 years after the events in this book. Does that knowledge create a sense of fate...or doom?)

4. What do you think of Mr. Ramsey? Mrs. Ramsey? Why can't or won't Mrs. Ramsey tell her husband she loves him?

5. James yearns to visit the lighthouse—and his parents respond differently to his desiring something so specific. How do they respond...and what do their responses say about them?

6. Ten years later, James sees his lighthouse, but it's not the same. He wonders which vision is the correct one and realizes both are correct. How can that be? What conclusion does he reach?

7. Lily's painting is an attempt to fix the flux of time onto a canvas, to offer a sort of restoration of what is lost through time. How does that play out in this work? Consider memory, as well. Lily, like Mr. Ramsay and his books, is insecure about her painting. How does that change at the end? Why does the book end with Lily and her painting?

8. How do gender roles evidence themselves in this work? How, for instance, does Mrs. Ramsay, in particular, view women's roles vis-a-vis men?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)