Reading Notes from Woolf’s "To the Lighthouse” and a Resource List from APStogether
“But looking together united them....” TTL, Ch. 2
(Note: this is a companion to my previous post, On Reading To the Lighthouse beside the Ionian Sea”)
After the introduction, this post contains two parts. You can jump there by clicking on the link:
My notes from APStogether’s read of To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.
A List of Recommended Resources from Readers of APSTogether TTL
I’ve read many books with APStogether since the beginning of the pandemic, including two rounds of War and Peace and Moby Dick with Yiyun Li and too many other memorables to list here. This particular group of APStogether: To the Lighthouse, led by the novelist Mona Simpson, dove in with such wit and enthusiasm. Perhaps this reflects the switch from Twitter to Substack as the comments are lengthier and the responses grouped together easier to read (no more scrolling through that annoying feed), making the back and forth conversations more involved and at times, engaging.
Readers new to the book were jealous of those who had read it before and a few of us who had read it before were jealous of those reading it for a first time. I can’t think of a better compliment to a book. With others, I saw for a first time in the text glimmers of Nabokov (who famously and obnoxiously dismissed Woolf), which led me to find a recent academic article that draws on elements of Woolf exploring this possible connection. I saw more of the artist at work underneath the prose as I write about in detail in my previous post. Someone else in the group promised an essay on To the Lighthouse and Arendt—yes, please!
My only regret is that because of the time difference here in Siracusa, Sicily, I couldn’t make the final meeting on May 15. But I look forward to future reads with this always changing and thoughtful group.
Below are my comments on APStogether To the Lighthouse with links to full threads with Mona Simpson’s leading notes and prompts. After that, there is an extensive list of resources suggested by APStogether readers.
My Reading Notes from APSTogether, To the Lighthouse, May 1-15
Day 1: Part 1, Ch. 1-3
My response (written in a plane flying from Rome to Catania):
I am taken in by the movement between the shifting points of view that all show the vulnerabilities of the primary characters thus far: Mrs. Ramsey’s self-awareness of her own suffocating gentility (she seems to despise Tansley as much as she needs to “invite” him); the children’s certainty they will outdo their mother even as they idolize her; and Tansley’s class sensitivity.
I am also struck by the circus advertisement. I looked up the date of Nabokov’s “Spring in Fialta,” well known for its circus advertisement element. I can’t help but wonder if he read this.
Day 2: Part 1, 4-5
In today’s chapters, images and objects resonate with color and meanings. Mr. Ramsey’s work is even described to starstruck Lily as about: “Subject and object and the nature of reality.” Meanwhile, Lily’s struggle with painting seems a study in the same thing and also (perhaps) an expression of VW's own creative struggle of writing one’s “vision" into the shape of a novel:
It was in that moment’s flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. Such she often felt herself—struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: “But this is what I see; this is what I see”, and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her.
Finally, Mrs. Ramsey’s meditations on the deteriorating furniture, the house, and its objects meld into the nature of time:
Mats, camp beds, crazy ghosts of chairs and tables whose London life of service was done—they did well enough here; and a photograph or two, and books.” She has no time to read impossible books, even those inscribed for her, but these titles are given to the reader: "Croom on the Mind and Bates on the Savage Customs of Polynesia (“My dear, stand still,” she said)—neither of those could one send to the Lighthouse.
Mrs. Ramsey sees time passing in (wishing it too might “stand still?”) in everything that surrounds her as she knits socks for the lighthouse keeper’s son. I’m in awe at how much Woolf gets into so few pages.
Day 3: Part 1, Ch. 6-8
My response to a lively reader thread about the “vanity of men” in TTL:
Woolf does seem to be making a point about the vanity of men, both types of vanity--useless and puffed up. I liked this phrase on it, repeated: "the arid scimitar of the male, which smote mercilessly, again and again, demanding sympathy."
The image is so empty, sharp in the imagination, cruelly pathetic. And demanding sympathy, which Mrs. Ramsey gives so generously, because that is what she--as a beautiful woman of her time--is most praised for and able to do. Her pursuit of uniqueness or genius, perhaps?
And in this expression of her genius, she does become like Prospero using her own powers to control others.....
My longer, laborious response for that day:
Great reading so many perspectives on today’s meditative chapters. In response to Susan Minot’s question: "Does Mr. Ramsay, like William Bankes, secretly suspect that if he hadn’t been blessed with this life, these children, he could have done the thing he might have done? Reach R? Even S, T?"
I see Mr. Ramsey somewhat as the Romantic's tortured soul (though he wishes (humorously, by VW I think, to prove “that the arts are merely a decoration imposed on the top of human life; they do not express it.”). He idolizes the lone bird on the sea eaten shore who can share his brilliant with no one, because no one else is brilliant enough to understand him. And yet... this passage also strikes me with a relief for Mrs. Ramsey and their children, while looking at his wife and child through the window (The Window is the name of the first section of the book):
Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her—who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?
I love this, Mr. R. with his "great mind" turning toward domestic comforts and seeing his need for them as paying "homage to the beauty of the world". Is this a suggestion that the greater (though certainly puffed up) mind of Mr. Ramsey sees beyond Mr. Bankes’ insecure pride? And yet, Mr. Ramsey’s greatness is so frail. He suddenly turns in the next chapter, calls himself a failure, which refers to one of many things Mrs. R. must shield him from: his last book was not his best. Mr. Ramsey seems to be the lone figure on the shore, much like the lonely man in the lighthouse with his single, focused job to do, like the “the liftman in the Tube” who "is an eternal necessity,” unlike those with great minds and financial means.
So, I almost think Mr. Ramsey knows he can’t reach “R”; he resents Shakespeare who did; and perhaps this is why Mr. Ramsey got embroiled in the comforts of family life, an appreciated excuse for being “a failure” which he would feel regardless...?
Day 4: Part 1, Chap. 9-10
My response:
The pessimism of Mrs. Ramsey is haunting. We see her signs of doubt, her recognition that she can’t control everything. I’m struck in today’s reading, by how many examples there are of unobtainable love-- Lily’s for Mrs. Ramsey, all other men for Mrs. Ramsey and unobtainable women--“love that never attempted to clutch its object”; Lily’s love for painting and her unobtainable vision; Mrs. Ramsey’s love for children and her hope they might never grow old and her wondering if her own marriage is happy; all of this ending with James’ love for the lighthouse. So much dream like imagery is filtered through through human need.
And the moving between points of view mirror this want, somehow. For me, Lily’s observation of colors-" the colour burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly’s wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral” . Of all that only a few random marks scrawled upon the canvas remained” ––seems similar to how Virginia Woolf is trying to write these characters, shapes and color, small movements against the bigness of ideas and life. Truly beautiful writing.
Day 5: Part 1, Chap. 11-12
One line from Mona’s notes I loved for personal reasons: “Meanwhile her husband is chuckling over the thought of Hume, the philosopher, grown enormously fat, stuck in a bog.”
My response:
Thank you, Mona, for bringing the time passing/not passing in this section to the forefront. Even the surprising age detail reflects this with such subtlety. The beauty and the foreboding quality of Chapter 11 stuns me. As others have commented, the writing could be a stand alone poem or poetic flash fiction. In this chapter, Mrs. Ramsey subtly becomes the elusive lighthouse for me. The symbolism, which a lesser writer would mess up by being too heavy-handed, works on so many levels. Her cold remove. Her beauty.
Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. Her horizon seemed to her limitless....This core of darkness could go anywhere, for no one saw it. They could not stop it, she thought, exulting. There was freedom, there was peace, there was, most welcome of all, a summoning together, a resting on a platform of stability.
And she resists being that dome shape Lily would squeeze her into. She is "a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others." The wedge shaped core also reminds me of a lighthouse in the dark when the light is turned away. Just beautiful.
The beginning line picked up from the previous chapter, “Children always remember,” is devastating if one reads Woolf’s biography into the story. Which I shouldn’t do. Yet I do....
Day 6: Part 1, Ch. 13-16
My reflection including a response to Mona’s careful detailing of the guests at the famous dinner:
Great dinner guest list! I wasn’t keeping track, but I look forward to what others come up with! I’m also intrigued with the way Woolf quilts the endings and beginnings of the chapters into each other and struck by the wildly different lengths of the “chapters.”
In today’s Ch. 13 section, Lily’s sudden moment of perception reads almost as a writing tip from Woolf:
"And suddenly the meaning which, for no reason at all, as perhaps they are stepping out of the Tube or ringing a doorbell, descends on people, making them symbolical, making them representative, came upon them, and made them in the dusk standing, looking, the symbols of marriage, husband and wife. Then, after an instant, the symbolical outline which transcended the real figures sank down again, and they became, as they met them, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay watching the children throwing catches."
She perhaps integrates a character's movement to signal deeper meanings. Catching a ball, losing a brooch, (just as Mrs. Ramsey has her daughter choose her own jewelry), being afraid of a bull (just before they sit down to the Bœuf en Daube). The small physical movements of daily life move into high relief amid so much stream-of-consciousness. Much like a painter chooses specific brush strokes......or maybe I’m looking too hard for clues as to how Woolf manages to do all of this!
Day 7, Part 1, Ch. 17 (part 1)
My reflection:
I love this observation, Mona: "The party continues on miserably. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay—at opposite ends of the long table—have a silent, kabuki fight.” There are so many “rules” and obligations and ritual to the art these people at the dinner party are enduring.
As I read Mrs. Ramsey’s painful lines opening Ch. 17-""But what have I done with my life? thought Mrs. Ramsay, taking her place at the head of the table...” I wondered if this was also a reflection of the "scrubbed kitchen table" that represents Mr. Ramsey's work. And in today's same paragraph—she, [had] only this—an infinitely long table and plates and knives. At the far end, was her husband, sitting down, all in a heap, frowning."
The gender tensions (awful Tansley) lie thick in today's reading. “The sterility of men” who depend on women to help their conversation at the table reminded me of the earlier phrase I underlined a few chapters back: “the arid scimitar of the male, which smote mercilessly, again and again, demanding sympathy.” So stifling for all; so awful for the women.
And there is so much foreshadowing, an actual ghost story: Mrs Ramsey " now she went among them like a ghost; and it fascinated her, as if, while she had changed, that particular day, now become very still and beautiful, had remained there, all these years."
If Mrs. Ramsey is the lighthouse, Lily Briscoe seems in a way to be Virginia Woolf, trying to figure out who these people/characters are as well the artistic choices for her work, and constantly hearing voices such as “women can’t write, women can’t paint.” So many undercurrents and images in this narrative stream-of-consciousness, I’m constantly struck by the way Woolf conveys how the boundaries between the perceptions people have of each other keep bumping into the reality of each other as they sit at this dinner table.
Day 8: Part 1, Ch. 17 (part 2)
My response:
I underlined the section on the literary criticism as well! Though Woolf was a critic as well as a writer, I can't help but wonder if this is partly her responding to critics of her own work. I still feel like her own process is something more tied in with Lily.
So many phrases and ideas come together by the end the chapter; Mrs. Ramsey finds something of value in almost all of the main characters and seems to be looking at them from afar, just as she was remembering the dinner party from years ago with people she barely remembers. Relationships that merge with beginnings and endings, desires and disappointment. And death.
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.
I kept also thinking of the “out of it” section in the beginning of the chapter as it gets repeated here again. And the room gets a voice at the end of the flowing chapter: "it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past."
Such ominous longing.
Day 9: Part 1, Chap. 18
My response:
.... “the Rayleys”—she tried the new name over; and she felt, with her hand on the nursery door, that community of feeling with other people which emotion gives as if the walls of partition had become so thin that practically (the feeling was one of relief and happiness) it was all one stream, and chairs, tables, maps, were hers, were theirs, it did not matter whose, and Paul and Minta would carry it on when she was dead.
I love how this quote seems to give a deeply human force to the stream of consciousness technique. Mrs. Ramsey is not “interfering” as much as she wants to last long into the future through memory, a female version of the men wanting their books to last? This also from the last chapter as Mrs. Ramsey reads her sonnets:
Slowly it came into her head, why is it then that one wants people to marry? What was the value, the meaning of things? (Every word they said now would be true.)
The question again, what is the meaning of things? And after learning every word they said now would be "true," he only says the stocking will not be finished (she wants the “asperity” in his voice). She says the stocking won’t be finished. She says it will be "wet" tomorrow, no lighthouse. But still the evening ends as her "triumph.”
Day 10: Part 2, “Time Passes,” the whole, famously gorgeous section:
My response, Part 1:
Ch. 6: Did Nature supplement what man advanced? Did she complete what he began? With equal complacence she saw his misery, condoned his meanness, and acquiesced in his torture.
This statement also seems to speak, in a grandiose sense, to the repeated question in the novel: but what does it mean? And of course, here is Carmichael's depth finally reaching the larger world, or is it the world finally realizing it needs him: "The war, people said, had revived their interest in poetry."
Wondering if people have listened to Max Richter's "Three Worlds: Music from Woolf Works"? It's created in response to other novels (Orlando and Mrs. Dalloway) but the severity of it speaks to these chapters--"The War Comes," "Entropy," etc.
https://www.maxrichtermusic.com/albums/three-worlds-music-from-woolf-works/
My response, Part 2:
I also really like Mona’s opening statement: "This was Woolf’s plan: she conceived of the novel in three parts late summer 1925 “with a sense of waiting, of expectation: the child waiting to go to the Lighthouse, the woman awaiting the couple.” She planned it in summer, then became ill and resumed work on it in January 1926. Woolf calls Time Passes “an interesting experiment.”
Is this drawn from the Writer’s Diary? Just curious because I like the notion of all of it. Thanks!
Day 11: Part III, Ch. 1-2
My reflection:
For me there is definitely an observation of the “awkwardness between people” and “the isolated feelings of misery, of inadequacy” that Mrs. Ramsey was able to keep hidden from them when they couldn’t appreciate her, when the children even looked down on her.
“She is dead” and Lily’s question that opens Part II, “What does it mean?” and the nothing, nothing, nothing, she repeats seems telling. Is there a bit of existential or absurdist philosophy entering in the prose at this point? I’m not sure. Because the nothing also seems to be everything. And there is also the lighthouse. So many symbols can be drawn to the lighthouse, but in the context of this book, I’m still thinking of Mrs. Ramsey’s saying/thinking in Part I that she identifies herself as that “long stroke” of light. And in Part II, as the house sits empty and waiting, the light from the lighthouse that seeps into the windows:
When darkness fell, the stroke of the Lighthouse, which had laid itself with such authority upon the carpet in the darkness, tracing its pattern, came now in the softer light of spring mixed with moonlight gliding gently as if it laid its caress and lingered stealthily and looked and came lovingly again. But in the very lull of this loving caress, as the long stroke leant upon the bed, the rock was rent asunder; another fold of the shawl loosened; there it hung, and swayed.
And now in Part III, they are finally going toward that light, Mr. Ramsey and Cam and James, begrudgingly, as Lily watches, frustrated with the young people who do not give their father something that means something to him. (Yes, Mr. R can be annoying, but I couldn’t help feeling the sympathy he was demanding, especially when he was so flattered by the talk of his boots.) I still wonder if Lily is VW herself, asking what does it mean? If she was drawing from her own sense of grief and regret about the loss of her parents. This brings an even deeper undercurrent for me.
And in response to a response to my post:
Yes, [Mrs. Ramsey] is/was sad and secretive. And the “long stroke” vs. “short stroke” detail of the lighthouse also seems like a way that time sometimes moves. Slow in part I. So quickly in Part II. But I also am fighting with myself on this read not to get too carried away with the symbolism. The novel is powerful enough on the page.
Day 12: Part III, Ch. 3-4
A section from Mona Simpson’s post highlighting a following quote from Woolf:
“What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. This, that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs. Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs. Ramsay saying ‘Life stand still here’; Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent)—this was of the nature of a revelation.”
Mona Simpson: "This seems to me—always—Woolf’s revelation.
The Moment was all; the moment was enough. [The Waves]
My response:
Love and agree with everything Mona writes today about the beautiful and surprisingly hopeful (for me, anyway) revelation on time: "Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark."
And in the next chapter, amid James' conflicted thoughts of his father, his sudden riff on time also adds to VW's idea of these accumulated "moments of being":
"He began to search among the infinite series of impressions which time had laid down, leaf upon leaf, fold upon fold softly, incessantly upon his brain; among scents, sounds; voices, harsh, hollow, sweet; and lights passing, and brooms tapping; and the wash and hush of the sea, how a man had marched up and down and stopped dead, upright, over them."
Day 13: Part III, Ch. 5-8:
My response:
Regarding Mona’s question: "Doesn’t every woman of the next generation think this of the older woman?” Indeed! Something about Woolf’s putting that in more than once in this book is haunting: to see the vanity of youth and have a sense of where that will go and to know how awful it feels when those you might have mocked are gone.
Ch. 5-Love the “pool of thought” that Lily Briscoe makes of the morning as she observes and tries to capture it; her anguish seems to provide her with more "micro-revelations” mentioned the previous chapter-Carmichael and Lily, Virginia and Vanessa, or both Virginia in the role of writer and visionary wanting something that lasts: “...nothing stays; all changes; but not words, not paint."
Ch. 7-In TTL, all objects, even cliffs, have a consciousness that brings on change (also another glimmering of Nabokov taking something for the "gesticulating trees" in "Symbols and Signs”?). I truly love Woolf's live, quivering world:
"And as happens sometimes when the weather is very fine, the cliffs looked as if they were conscious of the ships, and the ships looked as if they were conscious of the cliffs, as if they signaled to each other some secret message of their own."
Ch. 8-And James’ sudden early recollection of being with his mother, her rage at Mr. Ramsey’s attempt to crush his desire to go to the lighthouse led me back to the line repeated by Mrs. Ramsey in Chapter 11, Part 1: "Children don’t forget.” They don’t forget his cruelty. They don’t forget her.
Once again, I don’t want this live, quivering book to end.
Day 14: Part III, Ch. 9-13:
Fellow reader’s response in which I learn a new word!
I’ve read this novel before. I think of Lily as the central character, and the novel being something of a kunstlerroman...
My response:
kunstlerroman...what a great word! And appropriate for this beautiful Modernist but truly felt voyage. For me it’s about vision more than device, an attempt to capture something using ….. using a method that hadn’t been used before. I think the goal was to capture lived experience (and the ultimate nothingness of experience) in way that felt true. Doesn’t read like device to me.
Here we came to the end of the read together.
Resource List: Recommendations from readers of APStogether TTL
On this read, there were so many good resources mentioned--another benefit, perhaps, of using Substack to facilitate. I’m listing these here, mostly so I remember them—The APStogether Critical Edition of To the Lighthouse:
“The Sisterly Collusion Behind Vanessa Bell’s Book Covers for Virginia Woolf” by Madeleine Morley https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/the-sisterly-collusion-behind-vanessa-bells-book-covers-for-virginia-woolf/ (Article on book covers created by Vanessa Bell and Virigina Woolf recommended by Peter Schmader)
“The Brown Stocking” by Eric Aurbach https://www.themodern.org/sites/default/files/auerbach.pdf (Close read of TTL recommended by Anthony Domestico and Pia Z. Ehrdhart)
“Poetry in To The Lighthouse” compiled by Kim Provost McBee https://www.uah.edu/woolf/lighthouse_poems.pdf (Compilation of poems quoted in the novel recommended by Sadie Horton)
“Penelope Lively on Virginia Woolf: Serious Gardener? https://lithub.com/penelope-lively-on-virginia-woolf-serious-gardener/ (Essay about VW and gardening recommended by Sadie Horton)
“Woolf’s Parentheses and Brackets: Rhythmical Pulsations of the Interior” by Maddy Chiu https://www.academia.edu/49315762/Woolf_s_Parentheses_and_Brackets_Rhythmical_Pulsations_of_the_Interior (Recommended by Sadie Horton)
Images of Julia Stephen
“Mrs. Herbert Duckworth” by Julia Margaret Cameron https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/283098 (A photo of Woolf’s mother Julia Stephen, the model for "Mrs Ramsay" recommended by Shannon Stoney)
“The Annunciation.” https://jenikirbyhistory.getarchive.net/media/edward-burne-jones-the-annunciation-92a47b Burne-Jones’ painting of Virginia’s mother, Julia Stephen.
Mrs. Woolf and the Servants by Allison Light https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/mrs-woolf-and-the-servants-9781608192427 Book about Woolf’s relationship with her servants
“Imperfect Union” by Mona Simpson https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/01/imperfect-union/307221/
Mona Simpson’s review of Light’s book Mrs. Woolf and the Servants
“The Window: Knowledge of Other Minds in Virginia Woolf's 'To the Lighthouse” by Martha Nussbaum http://newliteraryhistory.org/articles/26-4-Martha_Nussbaum.pdf An essay on the problem of knowing others in "To the Lighthouse," recommended by Anthony Domestico and mary g.
“Deluxe Edition” by Alison Bechdel https://dykestowatchoutfor.com/deluxe-edition/ Bechdel’s blog post about her illustrations in the new Penguin edition of TTL, recommended by Davis Thompson
Studland Beach. Verso: Group of Male Nudes by Duncan Grant, 1912 (Vanessa Bell) https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/bell-studland-beach-verso-group-of-male-nudes-by-duncan-grant-t02080 Painting at the Tate that might be connected to the painting Lily is creating recommended by Laura Spence-Ash. (Note I think the verso may be by Duncan Grant? The museum information isn’t clear.)
The Bloomsbury Cookbook: Recipes for Life, Love, and Art by Jans Ondaatje Rolls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bloomsbury_Cookbook During our reading of the dinner scene, Anne Marie Ritchie recommended recipes for Boeuf en Daube and Asheham Rum Punch.
“Food in books: boeuf en daube from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf” by Kate Young https://www.theguardian.com/books/little-library-cafe/2015/dec/31/food-in-books-boeuf-en-daube-from-to-the-lighthouse-by-virginia-woolf Another recipe for Boeuf en Daube recommended by Sadie Horton.
"Slaves of the imagination": Sir Walter Scott in the works of Virginia Woolf” by Jennifer Parrott. http://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A297555298/AONE?u=nysl_oweb&sid=googleScholar&xid=3b3063a8 Journal article about VW and Scott recommended by Sadie Horton.
Max Richter - Three Worlds: Music From Woolf Works https://www.maxrichtermusic.com/albums/three-worlds-music-from-woolf-works/ Album by the contemporary composer inspired Woolf’s work, specifically Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves, recommended by me.
“The Castaway” by William Cowper https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44027/the-castaway Contains the line Mr. Ramsey quotes. recommended by Lawrence William Coates.
“The Angel in the House” 2 items:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Angel_in_the_House Poem by Coventry Patmore, recommended by shannon stoney.
“The Angel in the House” essay by Virginia Woolf:
wow! love the collection of resources here! Thanks so much for compiling!