My mum insisted for years that she hated Virginia Woolf. She had to study To the Lighthouse at school, and, although she never finished the novel, she didn’t make a secret of her hatred. Conversations about Virginia Woolf continued in this way throughout my early teenage years. Partly out of curiosity, and partly to be contrary, I read Mrs Dalloway when I was sixteen. My mum tells me, from time to time, that she’s always right, and I cite this instance as proof otherwise. I enjoyed Mrs Dalloway enough to read To the Lighthouse six months later. A few weeks after my GCSEs, it seemed like the perfect summer read. I’ve read it several times since: it was one of two novels I wrote about in my A-Level English coursework, and I studied it in the first year of my degree.
I read To the Lighthouse for the first time only three years ago, but, since then, it has become an old friend. When I applied to Oxford, I had a mock interview with one of my English teachers, in which she asked: if To the Lighthouse were a shape, what shape would it be? After a moment of panic, I said, “Water.” More than its obvious relevance to the coastal setting, water exemplifies my feelings towards the novel. The ebb and flow of waves is a reassuring sound; you know the waves will break. For me, To the Lighthouse is comfort, familiarity. It is well-trodden ground, as familiar as the blanket you had as a child and can’t bring yourself to let go of.
It is, however, a novel of disruption. The First World War plays out on the peripheries, and the Ramsay family (on whom the novel focuses) experiences significant upheavals. There is also not much in the way of plot, as the first and third sections of the novel – ‘The Window’ and ‘The Lighthouse’ – each span a single day, ten years apart. ‘Time Passes’, the middle and shortest section, covers the intervening years. Much changes in this time, though Woolf’s gaze never falters from the family’s summer house, where each part of the novel is set. The house remains standing throughout the social turbulence, despite the war nature wages against the building. When the Ramsays and their guests return after a decade, the place is irrevocably altered, but there remains a sense that things pick up where they left off. Lily Briscoe continues the painting she started in ‘The Window’, just as Mr Ramsay, James and Cam sail to the lighthouse – a journey that was thwarted ten years ago, on account of the weather.
For me, To the Lighthouse is a novel about trying. The characters are concerned with purpose, legacy and longevity – what lasts and what will be remembered – but it is the act of living and doing that I believe matters most. The waves warn Mrs Ramsay that it is ‘all ephemeral as a rainbow’. Time slips away, and the question arises as to how this can be reconciled with the desire to live life fully – to make a mark. I feel this ephemerality strongly. Lists such as Forbes’s ‘30 Under 30’, which celebrate success achieved at a young age, do not help the feeling that I need to have my whole life figured out as soon as possible. This year, Leila Mottley was longlisted for the Booker Prize at the age of twenty. I turn twenty in January. As familiar as I am with the story of the tortoise and the hare, it is difficult not to want to be a hare.
To the Lighthouse does not give in to this urge to rush through life. Lily returns to her painting, aged forty-four, ten years after she began the project. It is easy to become caught up in the idea that we should have done or achieved certain things by a certain age. Despite the time that has elapsed and all that has changed in the interim, Lily is allowed to attempt her vision again. There is no rush. It reminds us that, as the future is uncertain, we should worry less about where we will end up, and focus instead on what we do to get there.
True to life, To the Lighthouse is bittersweet – time will pass; people will come and go; life will change, in big and small ways. Woolf asks: ‘Who could tell what was going to last – in literature or indeed in anything else?’. She knows that we cannot be sure of the future, but she is sure that ‘nothing stays; all changes; but not words, not paint’. The words of To the Lighthouse will not change. Each time I return to the novel, I find it the same as how I left it. Its edges are now softened, rounding at the corners, with the ghost of a crack in the spine, but it is the same book. It has travelled with me to Oxford, and home again. Whatever happens in my life, the novel will still be there.
I will always come back to To the Lighthouse. It speaks to my fear that I will look back on my life and regret how I have spent my time. It seems silly to be afraid of being unremarkable, but it is a worry that the novel understands. I am sure that I will return to find something I’d missed in the text that strikes a new chord. That is the beauty of literature: the words do not change, but their meanings certainly can. Each reading will unearth new truths and ways to view the world, and To the Lighthouse is a novel I intend to continue reading. It poses as many questions as it answers, questions that may never be answered. I believe, however, that the importance lies in the effort to find satisfactory responses. It is not about the outcome, but the attempt itself. The novel itself asks:
‘What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.’
A life of little daily miracles and struck matches is one worth living. Woolf acknowledges the terrifying fact of time slipping through our fingers, and reminds us of the joy that lies in the small moments. A hot chocolate made on a cold day, enjoyed among friends, may not change the world, but it is a brief burst of light. My mum has finally read To the Lighthouse the whole way through, and concedes that it is a good book. A little daily miracle.