A classic novel of modernism - To the Lighthouse

The back-cover copy on my old edition of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927) says something like: This is a story of an English family on vacation in the Hebrides. Whew, sounds pretty exciting - can you imagine a more dull come-on for any novel? And of course reading a VW novel, especially this one, is not about encountering an exciting plot w/ lots of action and drama or melodrama. This is high modernism, and the novel, while never exciting, is probing and influential. Woolf along w/ the other great modernist writers of her time, particularly Joyce and Proust, was focused on the interior life of her characters - on the giving us access to the consciousness of others (not of herself in particular, as w/ Proust, and not with a broad spectrum of society and culture, as w/ Joyce - she works on a small canvas, at least in Lighthouse and her other great work Mrs. Dalloway). So, yes, this novel is about a English family - the Ramsays, with the pere an Oxford academic with some following but clearly not at the top of his profession, the wife still a beauty at 50, w/ her life focused on building up the ego and self-confidence of her dour husband and dealing with their 8 (!) children, and assort acolytes and hangers-on who join them for part of their summer on the Isle of Skye. The novel takes place over just a couple of days, and in that time we learn of her yearnings, his self-doubt, and the subtle shifts in relationship among several of the peripheral characters: the amateur painter Lily Briscoe (probably the character closest to VW herself), the widower who is somewhat attracted to Lily, the opium addict (Carmichael), and the young-professor dry and dust and a real suck-up to Ramsay, Sr (Tansley). The children are just a vague mass of interchangeable names and characteristics except maybe for the eldest who is extremely bright (Andrew) and the youngest (James), clingy and unpleasant. So you don't do into this kind of novel expecting to be moved, frightened, or astonished - except by Woolf's insight into character, memory, frustration, and longing.

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