July: To the Lighthouse

Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? 🐺

May and June was a total bust for book club, I admit it. We’re on week two of July and I’ve still not finished The Iliad, and although I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read so far, my recent non-stop travels took a toll on my reading. And that’s okay. I don’t know about you but I get hit with these reading lulls all the time, especially in the summer. I find this ironic because as a kid, I spent most of my summers indoors reading, and as an adult, I find any excuse to be outside with the husband or dog, leaving little time for books. Regardless of whether or not you’ve had a book in hand the last two months, I hope the warm weather and all the hustle and bustle of summer activities have treated you well.

If you’re still with me, and I really hope you are, we’re moving to Scotland for the month with Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel, To the Lighthouse. Isle of Skye specifically, which, if you’ve never been to or heard of it, let me paint you a pretty picture:

Heck of a picture! But first, Virginia Woolf!

Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in South Kensington, London in 1882 to a writer, historian, biographer, and essayist father, Sir Leslie Stephen, and a model and philanthropist mother, Julia Stephen. The family was quite large—both of Virginia’s parents had children from previous marriages (the entire brood was made up of eight)—and quite prolific (a photographer aunt, another aunt a member of the landed gentry, an artist sister, brothers in publishing and writing. She was even related to Charles Darwin!).

Virginia’s love for books and writing came early. She wrote letters by age five, and by 10, she’d begun an illustrated family newspaper titled the Hyde Park Gate News in which she chronicled the life and events of the Stephen family. There’s no doubt that a young and imaginative Virginia had little trouble sourcing material from the bustling household at 22 Hyde Park Gate. The family spent a majority of their summers outside of London, however, vacationing at Talland House in St Ives, Cornwall — the inspiration behind three of Woolf’s novels (including our month’s pick). The expansive white building, which the the Stephens called home three months out of the year, overlooked the Godrevy Lighthouse, and boasted a terraced garden and a slopping hill that led down to the sea.

The family would not return to Talland after Julia Stephen’s unexpected death in 1895 from heart failure brought on by a bout of influenza. She was 49 years old. The death of her mother was, as Woolf would later reflect, the direct cause of her first mental breakdown. Subsequently, Woolf’s elder half-sister, Stella Duckworth volunteered to help the family in this time of need but she too succumbed to an early death aged 28. This meant that Virginia’s half-brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth, were in charge of overseeing the ongoings of Hyde Park Gate. Modern scholars suggest that Virginia’s lifelong breakdowns and depressive periods were influenced by the sexual abuse to her and her sister Vanessa by their half brothers George and Gerald during this time. Virginia was only 15 when she first expressed wish for death. Upon her father’s death in 1904, Woolf suffered maybe her worst period of mental instability in her teen years, throwing herself out of a window. She was briefly institutionalized thereafter. Sadly, Virginia would suffer from mental illness until her eventual tragic suicide in 1941.

As adolescents, Virginia and Vanessa were already blazing their own paths outside of society’s demands. George Duckworth’s attempt to bring both sisters into society did not resonate with either sister, with Woolf later reflecting: "Society in those days was a very competent, perfectly complacent, ruthless machine. A girl had no chance against its fangs. No other desires—say to paint, or to write—could be taken seriously." And writing was a priority for Virginia, despite not being afforded a formal education per her mother’s decision (very common for the time). Sir Stephen’s vast library provided Virginia with a foundation, but it was her private tutors, Clara Pater and Janet Case, Woolf’s attendance at lectures hosted by King’s College, and being surrounded by the literary and artistic circles of the time (thanks to her brother Thoby, who attended Cambridge University and attracted a brainy crowd) that paved both her and Vanessa’s association with the social gatherings that came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group. The collective was made up of writers, philosophers, artists, and intellectuals that included E.M. Forster, Roger Fry, John Maynard Keynes, and Duncan Grant, to name a few. The group met on Thursdays (and eventually Fridays too), and discussed and explored progressive ideas including economics, philosophy, social issues, even sexuality. It was among these circles that Virginia would nurture her curiosities of a changing world, and also meet her future husband, the political theorist, author, and publisher, Leonard Woolf.

After much courting, the two married in August 1912. The couple never had children, despite Virginia’s desire to be a mother. Leonard felt his wife was not mentally strong enough to handle the responsibilities of being a parent. Controversial to say the least, but perhaps he was correct in this decision, because upon the completion of her first novel, The Voyage Out (to be published by her half-brother, Gerald), Virginia suffered various breakdowns, finding the process of reading and editing proofs to be emotionally taxing. Due to her illness, Gerald delayed the publication of the book until 1915. Virginia was 33 years old.

In 1922, Virginia metVita Sackville-West, the wife of a diplomat and a writer. Another member of the Bloomsbury Group, Vita became really close to Virginia and Vita, with the two women sharing a passionate love affair (memorialized in their correspondence). Scholars point to this time period as very prolific for both writers. Virginia’s love letter to Vita was her 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography. The book spans 300 years and features a protagonist who switches gender to explore “the self and the other.” Vita’s son called it “the first trans novel in the English language.”

Leonard and Virginia split their time between their residences at Monks House, a weatherboarded home in Sussex, and two apartments in Bloomsbury (37 Meckleburgh Square and later 52 Tavistock Square, which were bombed during the Blitz in 1940; Sussex became their permanent home after that). The country cottage came with a view of the South Downs and the River Ouse and was deemed necessary for Virginia’s declining mental health. The couple founded and operated Hogarth Press, the publishing company that ran out of their home, starting in 1917, first in their London flats and later in Sussex. The company published many original works by the Bloomsbury Group, including Virginia’s and Vita’s. When writing became too stressful and Virginia was in need of distraction, she worked alongside Leonard on the handpress they purchased for £17. She would relinquish interest in the business and gave it up for good in 1938.

Probably her most famous novel, Mrs Dalloway, was published in 1925 by Hogarth Press. The slender book, which follows a day in the life of the upper-class woman in post-First World War England, Clarissa Dalloway, was well received by critics at the time, despite its experimental nature. To the Lighthouse is Woolf’s fifth novel. Although Mrs Dalloway celebrates it’s centennial this year, I have a tendency to pick those lesser read novels by prominent writers—I can’t help myself! But I’m excited because the very little I’ve read of To The Lighthouse has proved fantastic. If you have never picked up Mrs Dalloway, please do so. You can also watch a Hollywood interpretation of the book told in triptych-style in “The Hours,” based on the Michael Cunningham novel by the same name.

I want to warn first-time readers of Virginia Woolf that if you’re expecting conventional prose fiction (fully formed characters or a tidy and engaging plot that has a beginning, middle and end), you’re in for a surprise. Woolf, like Marcel Proust and James Joyce, was a writer of modernist novels, meaning that plot is typically secondary to the philosophical introspections presented in her books. Hisham Matar’s essay in The New Yorker captures her style perfectly by analyzing a single sentence. Woolf writes:

It could not last, she knew, but at the moment her eyes were so clear that they seemed to go round the table unveiling each of these people, and their thoughts and their feelings, without effort like a light stealing under water so that its ripples and the reeds in it and the minnows balancing themselves, and the sudden silent trout are all lit up hanging, trembling.

Matar comments:

“…she mastered a sort of sentence that she had been edging toward, a sentence we can now call her own: a freely progressing, long, fractured series of observations and insights, unburdened and unhurried by the need to tell the ‘story,’ yet moving with the unrelenting progression of a scalpel. It steals away, like ‘a light stealing under water,’ revealing not merely information but the cadence and temper of inner lives, and how they resonate against the images and sensations of the physical world. It has a precise power that is disinterested in overpowering reality. The momentum sweeps you away till that last word, ‘trembling,’ and the echo it sends back. That earlier ‘at the moment’ hinges it to the subjective, freeing it from any claim of authority. Yet the result is superbly authoritative. The acoustic quality of Woolf’s prose in ‘To the Lighthouse’ reverberates, and therefore her sentences are not easy to drop or leave behind. They mark indelibly.”

The authoress continued to write and in her lifetime published nine novels, five volumes of essays, one play, memoirs, reviews, portraits, a biography, and volumes of letters, diaries, and stories. Her final letter was a suicide note to her husband in March 1941. With the destruction of her London homes, the onset of the Second World War, and the poor critical reception towards her latest biography on her friend Roger Fry, Virginia’s mental conditioned worsened. Her diary indicates a growing obsession with death, and in her note to Leonard she wrote, “Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again.I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.” The letter ends on a better note: “I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.” On March 28th, stuffing a large stone in her pocket, Virginia Woolf drowned herself in the nearby River Ouse. She was 59.

But we will turn back the clock to better times and spend 10 years (or a few chapters) with our friends in To the Lighthouse. The remote and rugged landscape of the Hebrides is the setting for the Ramsay family, who we’ll follow during their summer holidays between 1910 and 1920. Mr. Ramsay is the patriarch, a revered London professor; his wife, the beautiful but aging Mrs. Ramsay; and their eight children and servants complete the ensemble of this 1927 novel. The book is a small one but massive in concept: it explores the passage of time, the complexities of relationships, and the exploration of the human consciousness, all done through Virginia’s mastery of the stream-of-consciousness style.

I chose this book, this author, rather, on purpose. Because we are faced with a daily deluge of nonstop news and social media, I felt attracted to read Woolf because her writing—my god, her sentences!—deserve your utmost attention—something so difficult in the age of brain rot. When you start these sentences, there is no space for your brain to wander away. When you break such concentration with her words, you must return to the beginning of the sentence and start again. Through this challenge of focus, we are rewarded with a front-row seat into her characters’ psyches. It’s oh so visceral, filled with internal monologues and shifting perspectives. And at the time of its publication, not many authors were courageous enough to provide readers with such insight into the human mind.

Virginia excels at capturing what it means to be human and as AI creeps—no barges—into our lives, it’s important more than ever to remember what that’s like. I look forward to embarking on this journey with you!

As always, support your local bookshop or library, and happy reading! 📚

How great is Nicole Kidman’s nose portraying Virginia Woolf’s nose in this?