The book is divided into three sections: ‘The Window’, ‘Time Passes’, and ‘The

Lighthouse’:

1) The first section, ‘The Window’, follows Mrs Dalloway in being set over the
course of just one day during the Ramsays’ family holiday on the Isle of Skye.
The son, James, wants to take a boat out to the lighthouse (hence the title), but his
father, the distant Victorian patriarch Mr Ramsay, isn’t sure the weather will allow
it – perhaps tomorrow (but probably not even then).
2) The second section, ‘Time Passes’, is at odds with the first section in reducing ten
years of ‘action’ into a relatively short middle section. Several of the novel’s
characters – including Mrs Ramsay herself – die, news of their deaths dropped
casually into the narration parenthetically. The War lurks behind this section –
that is, WWI.
3) The final section, ‘The Lighthouse’, sees James – now grown into a young man –
finally making the trip to the lighthouse, ten years after he’d originally wanted to
make the journey.
To the Lighthouse is Woolf’s most autobiographical work of fiction, drawing on her own
childhood and family experiences in the 1890s and early 1900s.

Divided into three sections (‘The Window’, ‘Time Passes’, and ‘The Lighthouse’), the
novel may, then, be attempting to put us in mind of the triple-decker novels of the
Victorian era (which had rapidly died out in the 1890s during Woolf’s childhood). But if
we expect a linear, teleological narrative with a clear goal and conclusion, our
expectations are to be dashed, because To the Lighthouse is all about delay, repetition,
and inaction. Note that the title, To the Lighthouse, could suggest a journey steadily
progressing towards an end goal (compare Woolf’s earlier use of the journey motif in The
Voyage Out), but what the novel actually gives us is a narrative in which that journey ‘to
the lighthouse’ is delayed until the end of the novel (and that final section, pointedly titled
‘The Lighthouse’; the preposition has been dropped, but has the trip to the lighthouse
really been achieved? It is, after all, years later and the children have grown up).
Thus the novel ostensibly remains a novel with a linear narrative (as its title and three-
part structure imply), while at the same time it seems to be straining against the limits or
expectations of such a narrative. Note how the novel ends with the lighthouse being
reached, and Lily Briscoe finishing her painting (which may be read as a self-reflexive
touch on Woolf’s part, since Woolf the literary ‘artist’ is at this moment
finishing her portrait of Mrs Ramsay, namely the novel).

Yet the action of painting the picture, the experience of artistic creation and the memories
and thoughts it entails, have been the important thing for Lily Briscoe: she doesn’t care
what happens to her picture once she’s finished it. Unlike Mr Ramsay, she couldn’t be
less concerned with questions of legacy or posterity.

Immediately we can see that subjective experience and perspective are key elements of
Woolf’s novel. Mr Ramsay sees the world very differently from his wife. However, the
two are not so different as they may first appear. For instance, Mr Ramsay seems to
embody the male, patriarchal, linear, and teleological view of the world which nineteenth-
century novels had often adopted (where we find out who the murderer was, the man and
woman get together, and all loose ends are satisfactorily tied up by the final page): he
sees ‘thought’ as something to be understood in a linear fashion, like working through the
alphabet from A to Z (there is an autobiographical suggestion here, too, since Woolf’s
father, Leslie Stephen, who was the model for Mr Ramsay, was the first editor of
the Dictionary of National Biography, now the ODNB). He also spends part of the early
section of the novel reciting Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, which is
revealing because this is a Victorian poem by the pre-eminent Victorian poet (Tennyson
was Poet Laureate for 42 years) but also because it is a poem about the action of
charging, moving forward, attacking, progressing.

However, it is also ironic, because the ‘charge’ memorialised in Tennyson’s poem was a
futile and self-destructive military action which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of men:
the light brigade charged to their deaths. But the linear, progressive, masculine quality of
Mr Ramsay’s reference to this poem is also undermined by the fact that he is constantly
repeating the same phrase (tellingly, ‘Someone had blundered’), and is thus caught in a
cyclical world of repetition and return which is at odds with the linearity he ostensibly
embodies. Mr Ramsay’s best work also appears to be behind him, and he seems doomed
to repeat the same ideas in his later work. He is caught in an ideology of teleological
development but cannot develop to any precise ‘end’.

Similarly, Mrs Ramsay’s narrative may embody more ‘feminine’ qualities, with its
emphasis on cycles, return, nurturing, and selflessness, but these same qualities also point
up her complicity in the Victorian patriarchy embraced by her husband: she is a
traditionalist who believes women should be married, wives should serve their husbands,
and unmarried men and women should not stay out too late together. In other words, those
looking for a clear distinction where Mr Ramsay = linearity and progress and Mrs Ramsay
= cycles and returning are sure to be disappointed.

The Ramsay family portrait is one that was intimately familiar to Virginia Woolf’s
Victorian sensibilities. She presents an outwardly functional social structure. Beneath the
surface of her characters’ actions and spoken words, however, rest contempt, frustration,
and dissatisfaction with an outmoded code of behavior that nevertheless continues to be
enforced.

To the Lighthouse is a novel propelled almost entirely by internal thoughts. The physical
activities undertaken by the characters serve merely as jumping-off points for Woolf to
comment upon and interpret the underlying realities. The voices of Lily Briscoe and Mrs.
Ramsay most clearly delineate the problems that Woolf chooses to address. Both display
reservations and confusion regarding their chosen codes of behavior. Lily proudly rejects
Victorian conventions. Opting to remain single, she can paint and develop platonic
relations with men primarily because she refuses to compromise herself by either aiding
insecure men, such as Mr. Ramsay, or indulging the egos of overweening men, such as
Charles Tansley. Unfortunately, however, Lily suffers insecurities about her bold
differentness. Mrs. Ramsay, on the other hand, recognizes that society is sexually
polarized, and she sees it as her duty to uphold the system. Consequently, she suppresses
her individuality to serve the dominant male society.
Mrs. Ramsay’s sacrifices are not without remorse; she frequently registers disdain for her
role. At dinner, for example, she regrets that her lack of a formal education prevents her
participation in conversations about square roots, literature, and politics. After dinner,
when some of the guests announce that they are going out to watch the waves, “Instantly,
for no reason at all, Mrs. Ramsay became like a girl of twenty, full of gaiety. A mood of
revelry suddenly took possession of her.” Nevertheless, Mrs. Ramsay suppresses her
longings; she knows that she must stay in the house to attend to her husband.

Woolf portrays Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, the man and the woman, as vastly different
creatures. Whereas Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts are more imaginative and jump back and
forth in time relating to specific events, people, and emotions, Mr. Ramsay’s thoughts
progress rationally along a linear plane. He moves, as he says, step by step from A to Z
and laments that he may not possess the intellectual acumen to move beyond Q. In the
process, he “wears Mrs. Ramsay to death.” She restlessly works to counteract, or
eradicate, his personal self-doubts and feelings of inadequacy.

Literary critics have readily compared the character of Lily with her creator, Virginia
Woolf: They are both revolutionary artists who find themselves out of place in a sexually
polarized society. In To the Lighthouse, Mr. Ramsay represents the purely masculine and
Mrs. Ramsay the purely feminine; neither functions successfully. Woolf offers Lily as an
androgynous figure who unifies the two extremes. It is Lily who becomes the central
figure in the final section of the novel. Her ideas about Mrs. Ramsay and her visions of
Mr. Ramsay and the children landing at the lighthouse enable her to complete her
painting. She unites the rational and the imaginative into the androgynous whole that the
painting represents.

To the Lighthouse was published in 1927, two years after Mrs. Woolf’s Mrs.
Dalloway was written and it has been generally regarded as an admirable piece of
workmanship. It is the most widely admired of Mrs. Woolf’s novels, and it has been a
great favourite with the reading public, F.R. Leavis regards it not merely as her best novel,
but also as her only good one. As soon as it was published, it became the best-seller in
her novels, and it has remained her most persistently praised book.

The scene is laid in the Island of Skye in the Hebrides, near the west coast of Scotland.
The Ramsays have their summer house there and they come to it with their eight children
and a number of guests. The isolation of a few characters in a remote island results in
intensity of effect. The author is able to concentrate on two or three main figures, and the
gain in intensity is enormous. In this way, she is able to create a number of life-like,
interesting, rounded figures, who once we are accounted with them, linger long in the
memory.

Mrs. Ramsay, the mother of eight children, is a middle-aged woman, of great charm and
fascination. She is the central figure in the novel. She, her husband and eight children, are
at their home in the Hebrides. Mr Ramsay is a scholar, a philosopher, honoured by
several universities. They have a number of guests staying with them. Charles Tansley,
a disagreeable young man with a pod brain is a student of her husband’s. Minta
Doyle and Paul Rayley are a young man and girl destined to fall in love. There
is Augustus Carmichael, an old gentleman, a poet; and Lily Briscoe, who paints, and
who (Mrs. Ramsay is afraid) will never marry. There is also William Bankes, an old
friend of Mr Ramsay’s. They are all staying at the summer-house of the Ramsays, except
William Bankes and Lily Briscoe who have rented rooms in the village, for the Ramsays’
house is not a big one.
The novel is of great autobiographical significance for the characters of Mr. and Mrs.
Ramsay are drawn to a great extent after the novelist’s parents, and she has put much of
her own self in the character of Lily Briscoe, the painter. F.R. Leavis is of the view that
the novel’s autobiographical basis accounts for much of its popularity. However it should
be remembered that it is a work of art, and not an autobiography, and as such, there is
considerable altering and modifying of biographical facts. Nor is a knowledge of
biography necessary for an understanding of the novel.

To the Lighthouse is the only novel of Mrs. Woolf which has a three part structure. The
first part is called The Window; the second Time Passes, and the third The Lighthouse.
The first section gives us the personality of Mrs. Ramsay, and the personality of Mr.
Ramsay, through the eyes of James, Lily Briscoe, Charles Tansley, William Bankes and
the rest of the guests they are there, isolated in Skye, to give us as full and as varied a
view as possible, of the principal characters. Then, in the second section memory begins
its task-memory curiously operative in the mind of old Mrs. McNab, the charwoman. We
see Mrs. Ramsay and the rest as reflected in a very simple mind which can give a
detached, if elementary judgment. In the third part Mrs. Ramsay is seen through the
memory of Lily Briscoe. The resulting portrait of Mrs. Ramsay is incomparably rich and
living. Indeed, she is the centre which holds the novel together. If she is withdrawn, the
novel would fall to pieces.

The story of the novel is quite simple, and can be told briefly. The lighthouse that shines
out at night, at a distance from the island of Skye where the Ramsays are spending their
holidays in their summer-house with a group of friends, is the point, both material and
symbolic, towards which all the lines of the novel converge. As the novel opens, we are
shown James Ramsay, six years old, cutting out pictures from an old catalogue as he sits
at the feet of his mother, who is knitting by the window. He is keen to go to the Lighthouse
tomorrow, thus realising his profoundest dream. He shall go if it is fine, Mrs. Ramsay
says. But it won’t be fine, Mr. Ramsay declares. The day draws to a close, a day like
many other days, made up of petty events: the children play, Lily Briscoe paints,
Carmichael dozes and dreams, Tansley argues with his master Mr. Ramsay, Mrs. Ramsay
knits and James cuts out pictures from the catalogue.
Soon it is evening. The dinner gong summons them all to table to enjoy boeuf en daube,
a French dish prepared specially for the occasion, for Mr. Bankes is dinning with them
that evening. The children go to bed, the young people go off to the beach to have a walk,
Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay read. It will rain tomorrow. The evening is as empty and yet as full
and almost as long as Clarissa Dalloway’s (in Mrs. Dalloway) day. Whereas the latter
took its rhythm from the hours struck by Big Ben, here only the changing light in the
garden marks the flow of time and the unchanging noise of the waves holds the evening
motionless. The characters through their physical closeness create a multiplicity of
contacts, but each also withdraws into his haunted solitude. Though living together, each
is an isolated soul.
Then night comes in, everybody comes indoor, the lights go out, and that night, that few
hours’ withdrawal, blends with the darkness and withdrawal of ten years’ absence that
flows over the empty house in twenty-five pages in which marriages, births and deaths
are recorded in parenthesis. This is the second part which, after the personal reign of day,
asserts the impersonal passing of time, and the fall of night, chaos and decay.

And as morning dawns after these successive nights merged into one, the guests again
return to the summer house. Mrs. Ramsay is dead but her spirit, her ‘essence’ lives on and
continues to influence other characters. James starts off for the Lighthouse with his sister
Cam and his father, while Lily Briscoe sets up her easel where it must have stood ten
years ago and completes her painting, realizing her vision at the same moment as James
lands at the lighthouse and thus realises his dream. In the intensity of this second moment,
duration (psychological time) has revived and triumphed over time (clock time triumphed
even over death, since Mrs. Ramsay, who was dead, haunts these pages with a presence
that echoes the material permanence of the lighthouse.

The story of the novel, as briefly narrated above, does not contain any sensations and
thrills. There are no murders, no street fights, no blood-shed, no long lost heirs, no
mystery, none of the conventional stock-in trade of the novelists. As a matter of fact, To
the Lighthouse is not a conventional novel. It marks a complete break with the 19th
century tradition of the English novel It is, “a stream of consciousness”, novel but with a
difference. The novelist has freely exploited the interior monologues of the different
characters. Each of the important character is viewed through his or her own thoughts and
actions, as well as through the consciousness of other characters. In other words, each
character is presented through the use of the multiple point of view”, technique. The
consciousness of one or more characters is focused on other characters, we get their
reflection and reactions, and in this way are created strangely living, rich, complex and
fascinating personalities Mrs. Woolf’s aim was to capture reality, the fluidity of life itself
the “semitransparent envelope” and she has fully succeeded in doing so.

However, to the Lighthouse differs from the other “stream of consciousness” novels in
the fact that a central intelligence the novelist, as narrator–is always at work shifting,
selecting, and organising the chaotic material. As David Daiches points out there is a
careful weaving together of characters’ consciousness, thor’s comments, and one
character’s view of another.” This makes to the Lighthouse a masterpiece of construction.
It is not chaotic and incoherent like most stream of consciousness” novels, but a well-
organised and well-integrated work of art.

Since the purpose of the novelist was to convey inner reality or psychological truths, she
has made extensive use of symbolism to increase the expressive range of her language.
The window, the sea and the waves, the various characters or group of characters, are
important symbols, but the most important symbol is the lighthouse whose light is seen
shining throughout the novel. The lighthouse itself, standing lonely in the midst of the
sea, is a symbol of the individual who is at once a unique being, and a part of the flux of
history. To reach the lighthouse is, in a sense, to make contact with a truth outside oneself
to surrender the uniqueness of one’s ego to an impersonal reality.
Mr. Ramsay, who is an egotist, constantly seeking applause and encouragement from
others, resents his young son’s enthusiasm for visiting the lighthouse, and only years later,
when his wife has died and his own life is almost worn out, does he win this freedom
from self and it is significant that Virginia Woolf makes Mr. Ramsay escape from his
egotistic pre-occupations for the first time just before the boat finally reaches the
lighthouse. Indeed, the personal grudges nourished by each of the characters fall away
just as they arrive: Mr. Ramsay ceases to pose with his book and breaks out with an
exclamation of admiration for James’s steering: James and his sister Cam lose their
resentment at their father’s way of bullying them into this expedition and cease hugging
their grievances: What do you want ? they both wanted to ask They both wanted to say,
“Ask us anything and we will give it to you.” But he did not ask them anything. And at
the moment when they land Lily Briscoe and old Mr. Carmichael, who had not joined the
expedition, suddenly develop a mood of tolerance and compassion for mankind, and Lily
has the vision which enables her to complete her picture

To the Lighthouse is a complex work of art, and as such suggest a number of themes and
ideas. Different critics have interpreted it in different ways. Thus according to Blackstone,
its dominant themes are (1) love, married life and family, and (2) self-shedding and self-
dramatisation. According to David Daiches the main theme is the relation of personality,
death, and time to each other, the relation of the individual to sum of experience in
general. According to others its theme is the contrast between the rational and logical
approach and the emotional and intuitive approach to the problems of life, as symbolised
by Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, Others are of the view that its theme is the contrast between the
permanence of art and the transitory nature of human life. According to Norman Friedman
the novel studies, “Subject and object and the nature of reality”. In other words, the novel
examines (a) the relationship of one person to another (b) the relation of man to nature,
and (c) the relation of art to life.

All the symbols are interwoven and this great work of fiction concentrates on them. In To
the lighthouse, the light house is a substantial symbol that manifests Mrs. Woolf’s
central idea that she insinuates in the novel or upon which the whole novel is woven. The
tower is frequently shadowed in mist; its glints are intermitted in the murk. Its light
signifies reality or truth that strengthens its states even through the twilight of nascence.

The lighthouse is an enigma but it also pertains to day-to-day living. It is manmade,

To Mrs. Ramsay as she takes the seat and crochets in the window, it seems at one
moment the light of truth, stern, searching and beautiful with which she can unite her own
personality. The odyssey towards lighthouse is also emblematic. It is the emblem of
movement toward veracity, which Mrs. Ramsay preaches against the factual truth.
Ramsay’s family’s aptitude at the lighthouse that they contemplate to go in the first
part of the novel, symbolizes the aptitude of an artist. If a person is an artist in true aura,
he must return towards reality or truth after imagination.

Firstly, Mrs. Ramsay and her family set out to stop by the lighthouse in the winds but due
to bad weather unfavourable climatic conditions, they have to set aside their programme.
In second chapter, though most judicious ménage pushes up the daisies and Mrs. Ramsay
herself kicks the bucket, but in the last part of the novel, remaining persons, at length,
succeed in visiting the lighthouse with flying colours.

Lily Briscoe’s accomplishment of her painting is also symbolic to a great extent. She
neither in first nor in second part of the work of fiction can be able to complete her picture.
In the whole period that contains more than a decade, she is perplexed about to fill the
gap of her picture, but at the lighthouse, she executes her production.
This symbolizes that an artist can be impeccable in his art when he reaches and finds the
final limitations of reality or truth.

Mrs. Ramsay’s knitting of stockings is also the symbol of the notion that she crochets in
her consciousness. The thoughts, through which she knits novel’s first part like knitting
stockings for lighthouse’s keeper’s son. Her analysis of every person or character of the
novel, her matchmaking, her role at the dinner party and many other actions weave the
novel as she knits the stockings.

Mrs. Ramsay said, the sea is the symbol of eternal flux of life and time a mid which all
we exist. Life ceaselessly changes its characters. Sea is the sign of life as it has altered its
visitors from first part to third part of the novel. Mrs. Ramsay hankers for its visit with
his clan but she has been incapable to do so as a person in her life of ten falls flat to frame
her firmness of findings. After a decade, other characters supplant her and visits Sea or
lighthouse.

To Mrs. Ramsay, the sea at one moment sounds soothing and consoling like a cradle song.
Sometimes “Like a ghostly roll of drum constantly beating a warning of death,” it brings
terror, sometimes “a fountain of bright water which seems to match the sudden springs
of vitality in the human spirit”. As life is sometimes ravishingly beautiful with all its
munificence and blessing to human beings so is the case with the sea according to Mrs.
Ramsay.

In the long run, we can sanguinely remark that Virginia Woolf‘s symbols in the novel
“To the Lighthouse” revolve round life, flair and facts. In the point of fact, she clears
out her outlook of bond of life, art and reality.