Summer reading: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Powered by Guardian.co.ukThis article titled “Summer reading: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf” was written by Susanna Rustin, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 10th August 2011 10.35 UTC

I read it for the first time in a tent nearly 20 years ago. I was camping in France after my first year at university, To the Lighthouse was on my summer reading list, and I clearly remember feeling startled by the time I had finished the first page.

Looking back at that opening now, I think I was not as impressed by the novel’s extraordinary emotional pitch or defiantly domestic content, as I was by the audacity with which the author put the two together. The first paragraphs describe the “heavenly bliss” of a six-year-old boy cutting pictures of kitchen appliances out of a magazine.

For a teenager whose most involved holiday reading experiences had mainly been with Victorian doorstoppers, with their fabulously elaborate plots and detailed chronologies, the sudden death of the central character, Mrs Ramsay, in parentheses in the novel’s highly stylised middle section, was deeply strange. So this was modernism …

But I hadn’t realised until I reread it how much To the Lighthouse is a book about summer holidays. Perhaps this didn’t really register the first time around, or not consciously anyway. Woolf‘s way of writing about people and their feelings was so overwhelming, and her prose so highly wrought, that the novel’s setting somehow escaped me. Even when I studied it later, and read articles about it, they seemed to suggest that it was a book about time, or art, or the first world war. One critic thought it was about the general strike.

Famously, To the Lighthouse is also a book about Woolf’s parents – about the huge hole that opened in her world when her mother died, and about the way her father imposed himself and his grief upon his daughters. Mrs Ramsay is at the heart of Woolf’s novel. Then she is gone, and the survivors must bear her absence. This is the plot of To the Lighthouse.

This became fascinating to me as I learned more about Woolf’s life, reading her diaries, and biographies that explored the relationship between her mental illness and her history of bereavement.

None of which makes To the Lighthouse sound like a book anyone but an eager undergraduate would want to pack in their suitcase. The Hebridean island setting, the company of old family friends, the rhythms and routines the characters adopt to pass the days, can all seem like so much incidental detail in a grand literary experiment.

But they are not. To the Lighthouse really is a book about holidays – a book about family holidays and the particular intensity of getting away from it all with the people who mean most to you, especially when you are in the middle of growing up. If you, like the two youngest Ramsay children in the novel’s final section (and like me – both the first time I read the novel and again next week) are going on holiday with your parents, take it with you.

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