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PENGUIN BOOKS

To the Lighthouse

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 step-sister Stella, in 1897, leaving her subject to breakdowns for the rest of her life. Her father died in 1904 and two years later her favourite 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 and Roger Fry, 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 extraordinary poetic vision of The Waves (1931), the family saga of The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941). All these are published by Penguin, as are her Diaries , Volumes I-V, selections from her essays and short stories, and Flush (1933), a reconstruction of the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel.

Stella McNichol is the author of a critical study of To the Lighthouse (1971) and of Virginia Woolf and the Poetry of Fiction (1990), and the editor of a group of Virginia Woolf’s stories,

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

VIRGINIA WOOLF

TEXT EDITED BY STELLA McNICHOL

WITH AN INTRODUCTION

AND NOTES BY HERMIONE LEE

CONTENTS

Bibliographical Note

Introduction

Further Reading

A Note on the Text

To THE LIGHTHOUSE

Notes

Appendix I

Appendix II

Introduction

To the Lighthouse is the story of a marriage and a childhood. It is a lamentation of loss and grief for powerful, loved, dead parents, which Virginia Woolf wanted to call an ‘elegy’ rather than a novel. It is, less apparently, about the English class-structure and its radical break with Victorianism after the First World War. It demonstrates the urgent need for an art form which could, though with great difficulty, adapt to and register that break. It is all these things at once.

Since fiction is not music or painting or film^1 or unspoken thoughts, it requires formal strategies if it is to try and be several things at once. These strategies may be as complicated as a whole section written from the point of view of the passage of time, or as simple as a pair of brackets.

Mr Bankes, for instance, has a conversation in brackets on the telephone. He is talking to Mrs Ramsay about a train time. Then he looks out of the window ‘to see what progress the workmen were making with an hotel which they were building at the back of his house’. The ‘stir among the unfinished walls’ reminds him of her incongruities. The work outside goes on, inside another pair of brackets – ‘(they were carrying bricks up a little plank as he watched them)’ – while he builds up his version of Mrs Ramsay’s idiosyncrasies. More than one thing happens at once: what he says to Mrs Ramsay on the phone and what he thinks of saying; what he sees from his window and what he sees in his mind’s eye; and, in his mind’s eye, her beauty and her incongruities. More than one time coexists: the time of Mr Bankes’s narrative, which is under pressure to move onwards (‘Yes, he would catch the 10.30 at Euston’; ‘He must go to his work’); the moments in which she appears to his mind’s eye; and, outside Mr Bankes’s brackets, the moment in which Mrs Ramsay is knitting her stocking and talking to James.

A great deal goes on in brackets in To the Lighthouse : silent gestures – ‘(she glanced at him musing)’; identifications of a point of view – ‘(James thought)’; comments and qualifications – ‘(For she was in love with them all, in love with this world)’; reminders – ‘(The bill for the greenhouse would be fifty pounds)’; sudden deaths; a world war. The middle section, ‘Time Passes’, reads like a long parenthesis between the first and last sections. Its square brackets enclose the facts of death, as if they belonged to another kind of language. As ‘Time Passes’ comes to a close, its last section bulges with bracketed phrases

trundled up the little plank, the construction is under way. The building must be ‘formal and controlled’. But the entropic pull towards breakage and fragmentation – ‘things fall apart’ – is immense. And the difficulty is compounded because what she wants is a basis of strength and structure and an appearance of fluidity and translucence. So the novel has to be like Mrs Ramsay, its incongruities held in balance.

By means of Lily’s painting, Woolf builds into the novel a commentary on her own processes. Lily’s images for her art – ‘she saw the colour burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly’s wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral’ – go back to Virginia Stephen’s vision of Santa Sophia on her visit to Constantinople, recorded in her diary of 1906: ‘thin as glass, blown in plump curves’ and ‘as substantial as a pyramid’.^4 That dome shape occurs in the novel in the imaginations of Nancy, and of Lily, who thinks of Mrs Ramsay as ‘an august shape, the shape of a dome’. The dome shape, which combines the solid and the ethereal, was the essence of her plan for the book.

From the beginning, Woolf’s plan was clear to her. She expressed it to herself from the first through lists and inventories of ingredients that – as for the cooking of the Bœuf en Daube – would have to be held in balance and brought satisfactorily to the boil. When the novel was published in the spring of 1927, she looked back on the ‘unexpected way in which these things suddenly create themselves – one thing on top of another in about an hour… so I made up The Lighthouse one afternoon in the square here.’^5

The shape of the thing may have come to her all at once (‘without any premeditation, that I can see’, she said in a letter to Vanessa^6 ), but the ingredients had been accumulating for years: since childhood; since the ‘Reminiscences’ she wrote in 1908 about her parents; since the memoir of ‘22 Hyde Park Gate’ written between 1920 and 1921. As early as October 1924, on the day she wrote the last words of Mrs Dalloway , she entered a cryptic, even ominous, note in her diary, ‘I see already The Old Man’,^7 as though the figure of Mr Ramsay was the next thing she would have to deal with. By the time Mrs Dalloway was nearing publication, the ingredients for To the Lighthouse were becoming distinct. In her notebook (‘Notes for Writing’) for 6 March 1925, she envisaged a collection of ‘the stories of people at Mrs. D’s party’ and listed one of them as ‘The picture – I think of the sea’. On 14 March she was still thinking of a book of stories, and added to her list (square brackets show deletions):

The Past founded on [images?] ancestor worship, what it amounts to, & means. Some middle aged woman of distinguished parents; her feelings for her father & mother – [ancient?]

A list of eight story topics follows, and then:

It strikes me that it might all end with a picture. These stories about people would fill half the book; & then the other thing would loom up; & we should step into quite a different place & people? But what?

On the next page of the notebook, the notes for To the Lighthouse begin:

All character – not a view of the world. Two blocks joined by a corridor

Topics that may come in: How her beauty is to be conveyed by the impression that she makes on all these people. One after another feeling it without knowing exactly what she does to them, to charge her words. Episode of taking Tansley to call on the poor. How they see her. The great cleavages in to which the human race is split, through the Ramsays not liking Mr Tansley.

This is going to be fairly short: to have father’s character done complete in it; & mothers; & St Ives; & childhood; & all the usual things I try to put in – life, death &c. But the centre is father’s character, sitting in a boat, reciting We perished, each alone, while he crushes a dying mackerel…^9

First, though, she felt she must write the stories she had envisaged in March. They were written by 14 June, and in that time she had ‘thought out, perhaps too clearly, To the Lighthouse’.^10 (Why too clearly? Because the structure she had given herself presented problems, or because she felt it was ‘too clearly’ about her parents? This warning note would affect the development of the novel.)

The eight stories which formed the bridge between Mrs Dallomay and To the Lighthouse are all set at Mrs Dalloway’s party, but the tunes of To the Lighthouse are beginning to be played in them. Mabel Wearing in her embarrassing new dress thinks with relief of her ‘delicious moments’ by the sea at Easter, with ‘the melody of the waves – “Hush, hush,” they said, & the children’s shouts paddling’. A girl who is about to enter the adult world of introductions and conversations feels as if she is going to be ‘flung into a whirlpool where either she would perish or be saved’. Mrs Latham, sitting outside the house in the garden, thinks of the people inside as survivors, a ‘company of adventurers who, set about with dangers, sail on’. Mr Carslake looks at a comforting picture of a heath and imagines himself on a walk; he is annoyed because walking almost makes him want to say he believes in God. ‘It seemed to him as if he had been trapped into the words. “To believe in God”.’^11 All these moments, in which an inner voice or feeling takes the character away from the social context, will be used again in To the Lighthouse.

Two stories anticipate To the Lighthouse more fully. In one, ‘The Man Who Loved His Kind’,^12 there is a prickly encounter between a middle-aged lawyer who prides himself on liking ‘ordinary people’, smoking shag tobacco and despising society, and a woman who dislikes his egotism, truculence and laziness. Out of his type, she feels, ‘spring revolutions’. It is a blueprint for the political and sexual conflict between Lily and Charles Tansley, which has not yet occurred in the list of ingredients for the novel.

The other story is called ‘Ancestors’, and comes from the note to herself about ‘ancestor worship’. A middle-aged woman at Mrs Dalloway’s party, Mrs Vallance, compares it with her lost family-home in Scotland. Tears come into her eyes as she thinks of her parents, her father’s old friends, the flowers her mother loved, her father’s reverence for women, herself as a child with ‘dark wild eyes’, picking Sweet Alice and reciting Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West

Wind’ to her father. The parents are dead, but if she had stayed with them in the garden (where it now seems to have been ‘always starlit, and always summer’), she would have always been happy.^13

‘Ancestors’ is a self-pitying, tearful story, and seems to have provided a warning for Woolf as she began, in June and July, to build ingredients from these stories into her plans for the novel. She knows, by now, that ‘the sea is to be heard all through it’, and that she would like to be able to call it an ‘Elegy’ rather than a novel.^14 Listing her ingredients again (‘father & mother & child in the garden; the death; the sail to the lighthouse’), she is anxious that the theme may be ‘sentimental’. How to thicken and enrich it? Another list ensues, mixing together, as so often, subjects and processes:

It might contain all characters boiled down; & childhood; & then this impersonal thing, which I’m dared to do by my friends, the flight of time, & the consequent break of unity in my design.^15

(These anxieties over sentimentality and the need for ‘thickening’ the material were never to leave her. As she came to the end of the first draft, she asked herself if it was ‘rather thin’,^16 and observed that she was going in dread of ‘sentimentality’.^17 On publication day she was still worrying that people would call it ‘sentimental’;^18 and she asks Vita Sackville- West the question ‘Do you think it sentimental?’,^19 before any criticism had time to arrive.) Meanwhile, she is interested by the ‘new problem’ she is setting herself with the passage in time and the ‘break of unity’. (And, she is reading Proust, the writer who has exactly the combination of sensibility and tenacity – ‘he is as tough as catgut & as evanescent as a butterfly’s bloom’ – 20 that she is seeking for in her novel.) By July, she is vacillating between ‘a single & intense character of father; & a far wider slower book’.^21 It needs to be ‘quiet’, but not ‘insipid’. She might ‘do something’ to ‘split up emotions more completely’.

These problems of balance and construction will be re-enacted in the novel, as when Mr Ramsay reads and judges Walter Scott (‘That’s fiddlesticks, that’s first-rate, he thought, putting one thing beside another’) or when Lily diagnoses the problem of design in her painting, which is also the problem of understanding the relations between the Ramsays:

For whatever reason she could not achieve that razor edge of balance between two opposite forces; Mr. Ramsay and the picture; which was necessary. There was something perhaps wrong with the design?… She smiled ironically; for had she not thought, when she began, that she had solved her problem? (p. 209.)

Similarly, Woolf does not solve all her ‘problem’ of design in advance. Her early lists and

and felt that she was setting herself new targets. She noted to herself on 9 March that she was writing ‘exactly the opposite from my other books: very loosely at first… & shall have to tighten finally… Also at perhaps 3 times the speed.’^32 The dinner party would seem to her ‘the best thing I ever wrote’.^33 The ‘Time Passes’ section, which she would describe as having given her ‘more trouble than all the rest of the book put together’,^34 pleased her for its strategy of ‘collecting’ all the ‘lyric portions’ in one place, so that they ‘dont interfere with the text so much as usual’.^35 In the last part, particularly towards the end, she wrestled, like Lily, with problems of balance, feeling that the material in the boat was not so rich ‘as it is with Lily on the lawn’.^36 As she completed the first draft, in September, she went into a period of intense depression. Out of it, in a curious state of mind, she began to see ‘a fin passing far out’,^37 and the image of ‘a solitary woman musing’:^38 possible premonitions of a next book.

Between October and January she revised the novel, working at the typewriter, and still liking it: ‘easily the best of my books’.^39 During the period of revision, she and Leonard went for a winter holiday to a house near St Ives, and she wrote ruefully: ‘All my facts about Lighthouses are wrong.’^40 On 23 January 1927 Leonard read the novel and called it ‘a masterpiece’.^41 Between February and March she revised two sets of proofs for the American and English editions. Even during this drudgery, and anxiety about its reception, she was still pleased with it:

Dear me, how lovely some parts of The Lighthouse are! Soft & pliable, & I think deep, & never a word wrong for a page at a time.^42

Retrospectively, she saw it as a successful endeavour to do the two things she makes Lily do in the last part of the book: understand her own feelings, and create a structure that worked

• ‘I… got down to my depths & made shapes square up.’^43

Her preoccupation with making shapes repeatedly enters the action of the novel, from the cutting-out of objects from the Army and Navy Stores’ catalogue on the first page, to the final stroke down the middle of Lily’s canvas on the last. The metamorphosing forms of the lighthouse, the making of the dinner party and the completion of the picture are the three dominant shapes of the book. But, other shapes, which vary and change depending on perspective (‘So much depends, she thought, upon distance’), enter every scene of the book: the purple triangle of Lily’s picture; the wedge-shaped core of darkness that Mrs Ramsay

sinks down to in solitude; the ‘august dome’ that represents her; the line of letters Mr Ramsay sees stretching ahead of him into the distance; the knots of rope and shoelace that are tied and untied; the shape of the sonnet; and the island, ‘shaped something like a leaf stood on end’.

These shapes tend towards, or hover on the edge of, the symbolic, but are not quite solved by being read as firmly explicable ‘symbols’. ‘I am making some use of symbolism, I observe’, she observes drily, and warily, as she reaches the end of the first draft.^44 But she rapidly backs off from Roger Fry’s suggestion that arriving at the lighthouse ‘has a symbolic meaning which escapes me’:

I meant nothing by The Lighthouse. One has to have a central line down the middle of the book to hold the design together. I saw that all sorts of feelings would accrue to this, but I refused to think them out, and trusted that people would make it the deposit for their own emotions – which they have done, one thinking it means one thing another another. I can’t manage Symbolism except in this vague, generalized way.^45

This canny prediction of the next seventy years’ criticism of To the Lighthouse – ‘one thinking it means one thing another another’ – could be read as a defensive smokescreen. I prefer to treat it as a useful warning. In her autobiographical writings in Moments of Being , she describes the process of ‘scene making’ as her ‘natural way of marking the past’, ‘the origin of my writing impulse’. ‘Always a scene has arranged itself: representative, enduring.’^46 It might be her father sitting in a boat, reciting ‘we perished, each alone’, or her mother sitting by the window knitting while the children played cricket. These scenes are not codes, they do not ‘stand’ for something else. ‘Representative’ is not the same as ‘symbolic’. More obscurely, they provide the shapes that are the focal points for strong emotions. So the narrative is made up of scenes which are constructed to centre around certain shapes. This is why the novel is so much about ways of looking (even when there are no human beings on the scene, the scene is being looked at, and the narrative is concerned with vantage points and perceptions), as when Lily looks along Mr Bankes’s ‘beam’ and adds to it ‘her different ray’, or when Mrs Ramsay observes Mr Carmichael looking at the fruit bowl: ‘That was his way of looking, different from hers. But looking together united them.’ And the need to look through , to make the solid transparent, is repeatedly insisted on. Lily turns Charles Tansley into ‘an X-ray photograph’, or presses up against Mrs Ramsay, trying to get inside her ‘secret chambers’, or needs a ‘secret sense’ (like the lighthouse beam) to ‘steal through keyholes’ with.