To the Lighthouse

"To the Lighthouse is one of my favourite of Woolf’s novels. Aristotle tells us that all politics starts in the family, and you really do see that in To the Lighthouse . Woolf always said that there is no symbolism in the lighthouse at all, and I think we should believe her. All the same, I do think that the lighthouse, in a way, is Mrs Ramsay because the lighthouse is there to protect us from harm and from hazards, and Mrs Ramsay is a self-sacrificing, patient mother who attends to everyone’s needs and tends to protect them from hazards. Of course, that was an impossibility for Woolf, because her mother died when she was 13. So she is really trying to recreate her mother and also her father, Mr Ramsay. She’s brought them to life – I wonder what that must have been like for her to write. In Hot Milk , I refer to To the Lighthouse as well as Woolf’s earlier novel The Voyage Out . It seems to Sofia that her mother is a hazard, and she says, later, ‘I’ve been waiting for her to take the voyage out of her gloom, to buy a ticket to a vital life with an extra ticket for me. I’ve been waiting all my life for her to reserve a seat for me.’ We looked at Colette’s father, and now if we look at Mr Ramsay, he is a self-pitying philosopher whose mind is rather cold and rational, and he is selfish and self dramatizing. Mrs Ramsay is portrayed by Woolf as beautiful and warm, intuitive and the centre of the household, but also very controlling. The really excellent thing about that first section of To the Lighthouse , which revolves around the relationship of Mr and Mrs Ramsay, is that they love each other. They really are in love. I think that’s always the best position to write from. In that relationship, Woolf is writing from a position of love, with all its complexities. When I was writing Hot Milk , I was very much thinking about Mrs Ramsay and how Woolf had tried to find all the good things in the rituals that were available to women of her mother’s generation. She starts off with Mrs Ramsay knitting a stocking for the lighthouse keeper’s son, and she ends it with Lily Briscoe finishing her painting, completing her vision. So we start with a sock and we end with a piece of art, and Woolf is almost asking herself which is more important. We know that Lily Briscoe is a sort of avatar for Woolf, but the book is actually an incredible portrait of Mrs Ramsay – of love, of control, of self-sacrifice. Some of that was in my mind while I was writing Hot Milk ."

"It’s a very difficult thing to be asked to choose your favourite novels, especially if you’re a Virginia Woolf biographer. I could just as happily have chosen Jacob’s Room or Mrs Dalloway . I chose To the Lighthouse because, when all is said and done, I think it is her greatest novel. I find it still, every single time I read it—and I must have read it more than any other book in my reading life—very moving, tremendously impressive, extremely complicated and interesting in how it’s put together, and approachable in many different kinds of ways. It’s approachable as a love story, as a family story, as a ghost story, as an elegy for the nineteenth century, as a war novel—in an indirect and interesting way—and as an astonishingly ambitious experiment in a completely different way of writing fiction. There’s a fashion for that now. There could be another life of Virginia Woolf in the context of books like Elena Ferrante ’s series on Naples, where you have a slow burn through the minute descriptions of the lives of her characters. Or Karl Knausgård’s autobiographies, where you spend fifty pages on slow processes of his life. John Updike is another example. The idea that you go minutely and slowly, in intense close-up, into moments in people’s lives, is something that people find interesting, perhaps because readers are fascinated by autobiography and memoir. What Woolf does in her narratives is to think about many kinds of different shapes and forms, like a painting, or abstract marks down the middle of a page, or the shape of a bowl of fruit, or the shape of a lighthouse in the bay. She tries to build a story almost like an abstract painting—and there’s a lot about painting in To the Lighthouse . It’s a novel that doesn’t just let you read the story, it makes you think about the shape and structure. She is interested in how to master the passing of time. She is obsessed with death and loss and elegy and memory. This is a kind of a ghost story. And you feel, at any moment, that the whole thing could fall apart into fragments if she didn’t keep on shaping it and shaping it. In the middle there’s an extraordinary section called ‘Time Passes’, where you see the house left on its own, beginning to decay, and then it’s brought back into life. You’re made to think about structure all the time. You don’t just read for the story—chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3. She’s making you think about how a narrative can shape the passing of time. You don’t know who is speaking, there’s nobody there. I think these achievements are very modern and still fresh. Students who are now reading it for the first time are deeply interested in those kinds of experiments. It’s a very bold thing to do. You get invested in the characters in the first part of the novel, even if you don’t like them much—and you’re not necessarily supposed to like them. There’s a rather tyrannical, eccentric father, Mr Ramsay, and the kind of mother who thinks that a woman’s life is about having children and bringing up families and matchmaking, and being attentive to the head of the family. She is not particularly interested in feminism or new ways for women to live their lives. There is the family with all the conflicts that go on inside the many children’s lives, and then there are the visitors, who are watching this family. Mrs Ramsay is a magnetic figure who pulls people towards her. It is partly a love story between the parents, and between the children and visitors who are all in love with her. And then she dies. She dies in brackets, in passing, in the middle section. The last section is about how they all live their lives after she has gone, and about their memory of her. The brutality with which she is chucked away in the middle section never fails to shock people when they read the book for the first time. Here is this woman you’re supposed to be minding about, then she’s killed off in brackets. That’s exactly what happens to people, and certainly happened a lot to Virginia Woolf. You’re living your life, and suddenly fate comes and wipes someone out—you don’t know why and you don’t know how. This brutal, fatal, sudden removal of people in whom you are deeply invested is something that she writes about over and over again. She does do those too. But it’s a way of saying, ‘I’m not going to write the sort of novel in which I’m going to be sentimental about death’. She is very worried about being sentimental. She is worried about guarding her emotions from the page, and that’s why she’s so invested in form. She wants rhythm and form to create a wall from her personal emotions, so that they won’t be too raw on the page. There is another novel that I chose, The Years , which is very different, but is also a Victorian family story, in which there is a prolonged, Victorian death-bed scene, but she refuses to allow sentimentality in."