In the Library
To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf, 1927
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 43
- Length
- Length 69k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
What is the meaning of life? That was all - a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
The reading guide, in the app
How to Read To the Lighthouse
Almost nothing happens in the conventional sense, and this turns out to be precisely the point: Woolf is showing you the full weight and complexity of an afternoon's experience, and once you adjust your reading to her speed, the novel becomes impossible to put down.
The novel has a reputation for plotlessness, and in a strict sense the reputation is accurate: across three hundred pages, a family and their guests spend an afternoon on the Isle of Skye, ten years pass, they return. That is the story. What the summary cannot capture is what Woolf is doing instead of plot, which is rendering the interior life of eight or nine characters simultaneously, capturing the way a single afternoon can contain an entire emotional world, the way people sit in the same room and think completely different thoughts about the same moment, the way the past lives inside the present and the present is always partly memory.
If you like this, try
Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf
Woolf's other masterpiece of time and consciousness, set in a single London day.
£1.99
In Search of Lost Time
Marcel Proust
Proust builds the cathedral that Woolf condenses into a beam of light.
£1.99
The Waves
Virginia Woolf
Woolf takes the experiment further: six voices replace plot entirely.
£1.99
About the book
Candles are lit, the boeuf en daube carried steaming to the table, and around it on a Scottish island Mrs. Ramsay watches her family and guests cohere, for one hour, into something that feels eternal. She is the gravity of the house, the warmth every restless longing bends toward, and looking at the candlelight she thinks that of such moments the thing is made that endures. Then Woolf does the most devastating thing in modern fiction: she empties the house. The years pour through the abandoned rooms, the war arrives, and Mrs. Ramsay's death is set down inside square brackets, a world ended in a subordinate clause while the wind keeps lifting the curtains in the dark. Years later Lily Briscoe comes back to the easel she abandoned before the war, the canvas unfinished, the woman who once filled it now gone to a shape of absence. To take up that brush at all is the book's whole faith: that against everything time carries off, one evening at a table, one line drawn true, might be made to hold.