Described by Virginia Woolf herself as 'easily the best of my books', and by her husband Leonard as a 'masterpiece', To the Lighthouse, first published in 1927, is one of the milestones of Modernism. Set on the Isle of Skye, over a decade spanning the First World War, the narrative centres on the Ramsay family, and is framed by Mrs Ramsay's promise to take a trip to the lighthouse the next day - a promise which isn't to be fulfilled for a decade. Flowing from character to character and from year to year, the novel paints a ...
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Described by Virginia Woolf herself as 'easily the best of my books', and by her husband Leonard as a 'masterpiece', To the Lighthouse, first published in 1927, is one of the milestones of Modernism. Set on the Isle of Skye, over a decade spanning the First World War, the narrative centres on the Ramsay family, and is framed by Mrs Ramsay's promise to take a trip to the lighthouse the next day - a promise which isn't to be fulfilled for a decade. Flowing from character to character and from year to year, the novel paints a moving portrait of love, loss and perception. Bearing all the hallmarks of Woolf's prose, with her delicate handling of the complexities of human relationships, To the Lighthouse has earned its reputation - frequently appearing in lists of the best novels of the twentieth century, it has lost not an iota of brilliance.
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Add this copy of To the Lighthouse to cart. $18.44, new condition, Sold by GreatBookPrices rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Columbia, MD, UNITED STATES, published 2021 by Renard Press Ltd.
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New. In Stock. 100% Money Back Guarantee. Brand New, Perfect Condition, allow 4-14 business days for standard shipping. To Alaska, Hawaii, U.S. protectorate, P.O. box, and APO/FPO addresses allow 4-28 business days for Standard shipping. No expedited shipping. All orders placed with expedited shipping will be cancelled. Over 3, 000, 000 happy customers.
Add this copy of To the Lighthouse to cart. $18.45, new condition, Sold by Ria Christie Books rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Uxbridge, MIDDLESEX, UNITED KINGDOM, published 2021 by Renard Press Ltd.
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"To The Lighthouse is sublime." You simply must read it if you haven't read it yet. If you've read it, read it again and again and again..
rejoyce
Aug 23, 2007
Sea-Change
"While staying with the Ramsay family on St. Ives, painter Lily Briscoe looks up from the canvas to the garden: "And as she lost consciousness of outer things, and her name and her personality and her appearance. . .her mind kept throwing up from its depths, scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting over that. . .white space, while she modelled it with greens and blues."
And with this, Virginia Woolf reverses the conceptions of the 19th century English novel by dismantling the scaffolding of exterior events--at times events like Mrs. Ramsay's death and World War I seem almost parenthetical--that serve only as mere occasions to release the inner processes and movements of her characters' minds, to introduce speculation and doubt in the narrative voice even about the opaqueness of those characters where once the (usually male) narrator was omniscient and godlike in its authority, and to replicate what Toni Morrison called "the fluidity of female intelligence." The author concentrates largely upon "moments of being," since life consists of "little separate incidents which one lived one by one."
Consider director Robert Altman's fluid camera work in a film like "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" hovering, flitting and alighting upon his ensemble of characters, then consider a disembodied narrator who with subtlety discloses the characters' interior lives, particularly women characters like Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe, and you have some notion of Woolf's revolutionary technique. In the process, she explores themes of female submission and masculine certitude and misogyny, chaos and art's order, time and memory and mortality, the fragmentation of the unitary consciousness.
Yet in the Ramsays' family journey to the lighthouse, the reader too undergoes a sea-change, an immersion in perception and consciousness, a musical orchestration of voices. In the end, Lily Briscoe thinks, "I have had my vision"; her vision, like Woolf's novel, becomes that vision of wholeness that each character desires. An indispensable reading experience."
