I usually sit down to write my review of a book a day or two after having finished it, but I’m writing this one having just read the final line of  “To the Lighthouse”.  I’ve read this remarkable book three times previously, but I still found Woolf’s depiction of the Ramsey family and their guests at their summer house on the Isle of Skye to be a stunning emotional experience.

Woolf is among my short list of very favorite authors.  “Mrs. Dalloway”, “The Common Reader”, “A Room of One’s Own”, and this novel certainly qualify her as one of the 20th Century’s very best, and there is also the fascinating cast of characters of the Bloomsbury Group living in London during the pre-WWI and interwar years including her sister and various artists, writers, and intellectuals living and loving around Bloomsbury Square in London.

“To the Lighthouse” is the story of the Ramseys, Mr. and Mrs. and their 8 children and the guests (the poet Mr. Carmichael, the ‘atheist” Mr. Tansley, the scientist, Mr. Banks, the older woman artist, Mrs. Beckwith, and the spinster, waspish, ‘puckered’ artist 30-something, Lily Briscoe) who live with them on the Isle of Skye during one summer and then again ten years later.  The second time, however, the family is tragically reduced in number though Mrs. Ramsey lives on in Lily’s thoughts and those of her husband and children.  Spoiler alert:  The line in which we learn of Mrs. Ramsey’s death is so stark and shocking that even though I knew it was coming and despite it being marked with three black checks in the margin of my book, it still shocked me:  “Mr. Ramsey stumbling along a passage stretched his arms out one dark morning, but, Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, he stretched his arms out. They remained empty.”  Just like a punch in the gut!

The book was quite revolutionary when published because along with Joyce’s “Ulysses”, it introduced stream of consciousness, and Woolf takes the reader on hundreds of voyages through the characters’ thoughts.  Many of those thoughts conclude with a trenchant observation about life’s major questions:  “that loneliness which was for both of them the truth about things.”; “Half one’s notions of other people were, after all, grotesque. They served private purposes of one’s own,”; “so much depends, she thought, upon distance,”; “how we perish, each alone.”; “What does it mean? How do you explain it all?” “Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life?—-startling, unexpected, unknown?….why was it so short, why was it so inexplicable?”; “What is the meaning of life?  That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years,”  I could go on.

There is little action and not much more dialogue, but the book is rich with the thoughts of the characters, and one is left feeling that Woolf has challenged us to move beyond the surface (e.g. the trip to the lighthouse, the house on Skye, Mr. Ramsey’s philosophy and poetry), and figure out what our lives might mean and how they might be remembered.

Reading this book reinforced my love for Virginia Woolf’s books, written by a brilliant and sad woman who took her own life in 1941 and for the idea that re-reading the classics is well worth the time and effort.  There’s always something new to discover and savor.