To the Light House – Virginia Woolf
This has been on my ‘to be read’ pile for sometime. I am not sure why it took me so long to get to it.
Here’s the blurb …
For years now the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever; but as the First World War looms, the integrity of family and society will be fatally challenged.
To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionist depiction of a family holiday, and a meditation on a marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and bitterness. Its use of stream of consciousness, reminiscence and shifting perspectives, gives the novel an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of Victorian and Edwardian literary values.
Virginia Woolf saw the novel as an elegy to her own parents, and in her diary she wrote: ‘I used to think of him (father) and mother daily; but writing The Lighthouse laid them in my mind”.
I loved this novel – it did take me a while to get use to the style, but I enjoyed the different stream of consciousness. It was more about what people were thinking and feeling than the plot. It was also a nice look at a time in the past.
Here is Margaret Atwood writing about To the Lighthouse
And this one from the NY Times