Join us on Tuesday, August 21, all day, as we chat about Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, arguably one of the finest novels written in the twentieth century. Whether you’ve read To The Lighthouse twenty years ago or you’ve only just discovered it, please join us!

It is a truth universally acknowledged… wait, wait, I’m supposed to be introducing you to Virginia Woolf, not Jane Austen! But still… it really is the truth that what you get out of a book depends on who you are when you read it. (You never forget your first reader-response theory… sigh. Now I need a cigarette.)

When I first read To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf’s masterwork, I was very young and newly engaged to be married. I was terrified that like generations of women before me that I would lose my identity when I became a wife, especially since very few of my peers were choosing the same path. Therefore, Mrs. Ramsay, ueber-earth-mother, terrified me: would my life’s triumph be perfecting some recipe, like her boeuf en daube?

In fact, Mrs. Ramsay’s presence loomed so large for me at that time (and deliberately so; Woolf wants her to cast a long shadow) that the only message I heard from the character of Lily Briscoe was the oft-repeated message of “Can’t paint, can’t write” that she’s taken in from Charles Tansley. (Odious man.) Combined with the metaphor of the boeuf en daube, Briscoe’s mental refrain gave me chills — and prevented me from seeing that Lily Briscoe ultimately breaks free of both Mrs. Ramsay’s chosen prison, and her own.

My own fears also, then, prevented me from understanding a central message of the book. Before I began reading To the Lighthouse in preparation for this week’s discussion, I thought: well, you imbecile, you also missed out on the largest point of all. Virignia Woolf, after all, wrote this amazing book. Why are you so caught up in the “can’ts” and not seeing the achievement?

Then I began reading… and both realized and remembered how plagued by doubt and dismay Woolf herself was. However, she was such a genius that she was able to use her doubt and dismay to create a vision that illuminates her own psyche and that of her characters. Reading To the Lighthouse is an experience as rich as eating a proper Provencal stew or seeing a beautiful painting. It may not be the same as cooking that stew or creating that painting — and that’s all right.

What has reading To the Lighthouse been like for you?

-Bethanne Patrick

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 20th, 2007 at 6:23 am and is filed under WR Classics, Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.