-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
Summary | Excerpt | Discuss | Reviews | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
"Radiant as [To the Lighthouse] is in its beauty, there could never be a mistake about it: here is a novel to the last degree severe and uncompromising.
I think that beyond being about the very nature of reality, it is itself a vision of reality."—Eudora Welty, from the Introduction. The serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, and their children and assorted guests are on holiday on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Woolf constructs a remarkable, moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life and the conflict between men and women.
The Window
1
"Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow," said Mrs. Ramsay. "But you'll have to be up with the lark," she added.
To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled, the expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night's darkness and a day's sail, within touch. Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss. It was fringed with joy. The wheelbarrow, ...
Is there a book you can name that's influenced your life in some way?
...honest, sometimes angry and sometime mean. Harriet gave me permission to be honest about my feelings (though hopefully not too mean in public!) Also To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, which I read in the spring semester of my freshman year (1976)-- the first book I'd ever read in an English class by a woman! It was revelatory, as...
-Michelle_H
Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home
I reread this book every once in a while, and every time I do I find it more capacious and startling. It's so revolutionary and so exquisitely wrought that it keeps evolving on its own somehow, as if it's alive. Margaret Drabble, author of The Witch of Exmoor
To the Lighthouse is one of the greatest elegies in the English language, a book which transcends time.
L.A. Women by Ella Berman
Two ambitious writers in 1960s LA face betrayal when one writes a novel based on the other's life.
