Woolf is not a documentary realist – the scenes and people ofTo the Lighthouse
are not those of the Isle of Skye. But the Ramsays are based on her mother and father,
and are more real than her other characters – though less present than the
consciousness of the author herself. People who are not members of the Ramsay
family are real only as outsiders; Charles Tansley, for instance, is witnessed by Mrs
Ramsay with kindly condescension. But her kindliness is missed when it is gone.
Part II, ‘Time Passes’, is very short indeed. In its second section, the house ages:Nothing stirred in the drawing-room or in the dining-room or on the staircase. Only
through the rusty hinges and swollen sea-moistened woodwork certain airs, detached
from the body of the wind (the house was ramshackle after all) crept round corners and
ventured indoors.At the end of the third section we read:
[Mr Ramsay 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.]There is the plot – in parentheses but indispensible! Mrs Ramsay’s death fills Part III,
‘The Lighthouse’, in which the lighthouse is reached. Lily and her picture symbolize
the role of art, and verbal composition, as consolation. The Mrs-Ramsay-shaped
void in their lives is an ache characteristic of this writer, who suffered sudden losses
in her life; which she ended by suicide in 1941.
To the Lighthouse rewards attention: it is a moving book. Yet, like a modernist
poem, it requires a high degree of attention. In The Waves (1931), Woolf ’s most
schematically experimental novel, six consciousnesses become conscious at intervals
through their lives.Like most modernists, Woolf has been appreciated, admired and
love d rather than very widely liked. As her subject-matter is that which is left out of
other novels, traditionally minded novel-readers miss things that they like, some of
which (with much that they might not) are to be found in Ulysses.
It may be unhelpful to think of Virginia Woolf as a novelist, if the term carries a
definite expectation of narrative solidity. She was a writer almost unique in her
re fined and singular sensibility and distinctive prose style. Her non-fiction shows her
ranging from impressionistic description to critical appreciation to whimsical wit to
controversial polemic. She shows to advantage in critical essays, especially in the talks
she addressed to specific audiences, often female; for the requirements of an audience
meant that her personality was kept in balance by her judgement and her remarkable
knowledge of the byways of literary history. But Woolf ’s experimental novels, like
Ulysses, take some getting used to, for they require not only close reading but a toler-
ance of discontinuity. Woolf is a deliberately insubstantial writer, and she was not
co nsidered one of the greater modernists until the 1970s. The rise in her reputation
is connected with the promotion of feminism in academic life, first in American and
then in British universities, a movement which has held Woolf up above other women
writers: not only her novels, her judgements and her opinions but also her letters and
her life. She became a committed feminist but would not have wanted to be a role-
model. She is unsuited to this role, not because she was exceptionally cultivated,
bookish and refined (deriving, as she said, her knowledge of human nature from the
serv ants),but because she had so individual, rare and vulnerable a personality.
Her fiction has a mode of sensibility which she thought distinctively feminine,
though a similarly intense self-consciousness can also be found in Eliot, Joyce and360 13 · FROM POST-WAR TO POST-WAR: 1920–55