This novel is an extraordinarily poignant evocation of a lost happiness that lives on in the memory. For years now the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever.

In this, her most autobiographical novel, Virginia Woolf captures the intensity of childhood longing and delight, and the shifting complexity of adult relationships. From an acute awareness of transcience, she creates an enduring work of art.

This book is with an introduction and notes by Dr Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading. "To the Lighthouse" is the most autobiographical of Virginia Woolf's novels. It is based on her own early experiences, and while it touches on childhood and children's perceptions and desires, it is at its most trenchant when exploring adult relationships, marriage and the changing class-structure in the period spanning the Great War.

With introductions by Eavan Boland and Maud Ellmann

Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography. From 1915, when she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf maintained an astonishing output of fiction, literary criticism, essays and biography. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, and in 1917 they founded The Hogarth Press. Virginia Woolf suffered a series of mental breakdowns throughout her life, and on 28 March 1941 she committed suicide.

?Yes, of course, if it?s fine tomorrow,? said Mrs Ramsay. ?But you?ll have to be up with the lark,? she added.

To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled the expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night?s darkness and a day?s sail, within touch. Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallize and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator as his mother spoke with heavenly bliss. It was fringed with joy. The wheelbarrow, the lawn-mower, the sound of poplar trees, leaves whitening before rain, rooks cawing, brooms knocking, dresses rustling ? all these were so coloured and distinguished in his mind that had already his private code, his secret language, though he appeared the image of stark and uncompromising severity, with his high forehead and his fierce blue eyes, impeccably candid and pure, frowning slightly at the sight of human frailty, so that his mother, watching him guide scissors neatly round the refrigerator, imagined him all red and ermine on the Bench or directing a stern and momentous enterprise in some crisis of public affairs.

?But,? said his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window, ?it won?t be fine.?

Had there been an axe handy, or a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father?s breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it. Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr. Ramsay excited in his children?s breasts by his mere presence; standing, as now, lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one, grinning sarcastically, not only with the pleasure of disillusioning his son and casting ridicule upon his wife, who was ten thousand times better in every way than he was (James thought), but also with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgement. What he said was true. It was always true. He was incapable of untruth; never tampered with a fact; never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all his own children, who, sprung from his loins, should be aware from childhood that life is difficult; facts uncompromising; and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail barks founder in darkness (here Mr. Ramsay would straighten his back and narrow his little blue eyes upon the horizon), one that needs, above all, courage, truth, and the power to endure.

2008-09-02 Woolf's Greatest Elegy?

'One sees a fin passing far out. What image can I reach to convey what I mean? Really there is none, I think.'

Woolf writing in her diary of 1925 reveals her life long concern with the problematic representation of experience. Her sense of reality's ineffability haunted all her major novels and in To the Lighthouse perhaps her art found its greatest expression.

The novel begins with a promise, a promise made by a mother to her small child that he can go and visit the lighthouse near where the large family holiday each year. It ends with the Lighthouse being reached finally years later after the mother's death. The process that takes us from a casual promise to its manifestation is for me one of the most magical journeys in literature. I'll be braver- one of the most magical journeys of my life! For like Proust, Woolf is preoccupied with remembrance, with ways in which the past is never finished with and recurs.
Questioning the exact generic title for her 'novel' Woolf wrote:

'I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant 'novel'. A new - by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?'

An elegy is exactly what To the Lighthouse turns out to be. It takes place before and after the First World War and the 'elegy' understatedly suggests the complex processes of mourning that individuals experienced in the aftermath of the Great War. The brilliance of Woolf lies in her fluid, suggestive style which captures often in parenthesis, the seemingly insubstantial moments of experience and renders them extraordinary.

'With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta's arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.'

Woolf's protagonist Mrs Ramsay poises quite literally at a 'threshold' between reflection and conjecture. Her 'moment of being' exists for her outside of linear 'lived time' and communicates her sudden awareness of the miracle of spatial, 'outside' time. The complexity of this realisation is mirrored in the intricacy of the sentence itself, with its welter of subordinate clauses. The sentence hesitates as the experience is experienced and this halting of the 'flow' of the sentence proves revelatory .

The careless tenderness of the reference to 'Minta's arm' coalesces the intensely private thoughts of Mrs Ramsay, with her public role as hostess, and engenders a poignancy that haunts the rest of the novel. For this is a farewell, and ironically it is a farewell to Mrs Ramsay which will remain unappeased until the last scene of the narrative.
The final scene of the text shows the artist Lily Briscoe searching for a means to complete her picture, a picture begun years before, in the early stages of the novel. Suddenly she is is 'visited' by Mrs Ramsay once again and acknowledges her dead friend's haunting centrality; and her extraordinary gift of love.

'With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue. I have had my vision.'

Fabulous!