Reading schedule for To the Lighthouse

Limber up, folks! We are reading another novel by Virginia Woolf

Phoar! See that butterfly?!

We are reading To the Lighthouse in February (spilling over into March). I’ve decided to keep the reading schedule simple — however there will be lots of posts and opportunities to engage, so don’t be fooled.

The book is divided into three sections: The Window; Time Passes; and The Lighthouse (with the middle ‘Time Passes’ section being shorter than the others).

Here’s the schedule:

January — Source a copy of To the Lighthouse or locate your own copy. 

Still January — For enthusiastic non-conformists, go ahead and start reading ahead of schedule. In the immortal words of Fleetwood Mac 'you can go your own way.' In the equally immortal words of Bob Dylan, 'don't follow (other) [readers], or watch parking meters'

1 February — Start reading. This is the official start of the readalong. Read all of 'The Window'. It's a long section but the idea is to gain momentum and get a big chunk under our belts. Giddy-up

2 February — Groundhog Day  

2 February — Groundhog Day (har har)

16 February — Finish ‘The Window’. Start the 'Time Passes' section 

23 February — Finish ‘Time Passes’. Start ‘The Lighthouse’ section

9 March — Finish ‘The Lighthouse’ section (in other words, finish the book)  

Reading Woolf

If you’ve read Virginia Woolf before, you’ll know what you’re in for.

If you haven’t, please don’t be worried if at first the writing seems strange or difficult or haphazard. The first thing to understand is that Woolf is concerned with portraying the inner lives of the characters. It can take a bit of getting used to — particularly as the material action of the story can seem hardly evident or buried under the frenzied, non-linear cognition of Mrs Ramsay or James or Mr Tansley or Lily Briscoe.

I wrote a primer for first time readers of Woolf here — it was written with Mrs Dalloway in mind but many of the pointers are relevant to To the Lighthouse as well.

Woolf’s novels can be challenging, but they are worth the challenge! They’re also great for a reading group like this — not only is there a lot to discuss, but you get the benefit of a group to help guide you through.

About To the Lighthouse

To the Lighthouse is Virginia Woolf’s most directly autobiographical novel. It is also the central novel in her oeuvre — the fifth of nine. In essence, it’s a portrait of Woolf’s father and mother, Leslie and Julia Stephen (represented in the novel by the formidable Mr and Mrs Ramsay) and takes as its inspiration Virginia’s childhood summers at Talland House near St Ives in Cornwall. The Stephen family spent each summer there from 1882 (the year of Virginia’s birth) until 1895 (the year of Virginia’s mother’s sudden death).¹

The lighthouse that inspired Woolf was probably the Godrevy Lighthouse which stood across the bay from Talland House. ‘For how would you like to be shut up for a whole month at a time, and possibly more in stormy weather, upon a rock the size of a tennis lawn,’ asks Mrs Ramsay in the novel, thinking to send over some magazines and tobacco to the lighthouse keeper.

Godrevy Lighthouse, 1949 – 2 by David M Murray-Rust - CC BY-SA 2.0

After the death of his wife, Leslie Stephen gave up the lease of Talland House, but the Stephen children returned to Cornwall as adults in the summer of 1905 (a year after their father’s death) and Virginia would return many times after that. ‘We are on the verge of going to Cornwall,’ Virginia wrote in her diary on 22 March 1921. ‘Why am I so incredibly & incurably romantic about Cornwall? One’s past, I suppose: I see children running in a garden. A spring day. Life so new. People so enchanting. The sound of the sea at night.’

In planning the novel, Woolf transposed the action from Cornwall to the Isle of Skye in Scotland. At first, she intended to put the focus on her father, then decided that ‘the dominating impression is to be of Mrs R’s character.’² She worried about the story being too sentimental. ‘The word ‘sentimental’ sticks in my gizzard…’ she wrote in her diary on 20 July 1925. But, she added, ‘I think […] that when I begin it I shall enrich it in all sorts of ways; thicken it; give it branches & roots which I do not perceive now. It might contain all characters boiled down; & childhood; and then this impersonal thing, which I am dared to do by my friends, the flight of time, & the consequent break of writing in my design.’

The ‘impersonal thing’ she was referring to was to become the middle section of the book — the beautiful and poetic ‘Time Passes’ sequence which acts as a passage — a corridor of years — between ‘The Window’ and ‘The Lighthouse’ sections. ‘That passage […] interests me very much,’ wrote Virginia. ‘A new problem like that breaks fresh ground in one’s mind; prevents the regular ruts.’³

Woolf began writing To the Lighthouse in August 1925. ‘I have made a very quick & flourishing attack on To the Lighthouse,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘—22 pages straight off in less than a fortnight. I am still crawling & easily enfeebled, but if I could once get up steam again, I believe I could spin it off with infinite relish.’ Unfortunately, soon after, Woolf fell ill and could not get going again until January 1926. At that point, she wrote at a pace of about two pages a day, and observed in a note to herself that she was writing ‘exactly the opposite from my other books: very loose at first… & shall have to tighten finally… Also at perhaps 3 times the speed.’⁴

Woolf completed the first draft in September 1926, then revised the novel between October 1926 and January 1927. Through February and March, she continued revising and overall felt pleased. ‘Dear me, how lovely some parts of The Lighthouse are! Soft & pliable, & I think deep, & never a word wrong for a page at a time.’⁵

To the Lighthouse was published on 5 May 1927 — the anniversary of Virginia’s mother’s death 32 years before — and sold well. With the proceeds from book sales, Woolf bought a car: ‘…I have learned enough to drive a car in the country alone. On the backs of paper I write down instructions for starting cars. We have a nice light little shut up car in which we can travel thousands of miles. It is very dark blue, with a paler line round it. The world gave me this for writing The Lighthouse, I reflect, a book which has now sold 3,160 (perhaps) copies: will sell 3,500 before it dies, & thus far exceeds any other of mine.’⁶

Before it dies.

See you on February 1!

1. See Julia Briggs, Virginia Woolf — An Inner Life, Harcourt, 2005, p 162.

2. See Briggs, p 163.

3. The Diary of Virginia Woolf — Volume Three: 1925-1930, ed. Olivier Bell, Harcourt, 1980, entry for 20 July 1925, p 36.

4. Virginia Woolf quoted in Hermoine Lee, Virginia Woolf, Vintage Books, 1996, p 471.

5. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, entry for 21 March 1927, p 132.

6. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, entry for 23 July 1927, p 147.