Orlando / Mrs Dalloway / To The Lighthouse

by Virginia Woolf

Genres: Classics, Fiction, Novels, Book Club

435 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

(Adeline) Virginia Woolf was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.

During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

Reviews

[Realini Ionescu · Rating 4 out of 5]

To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf is included on The 100 Best Books of All Time aka Bokklubben World Library list, also on The 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read, and finally, it is ranked 25th on The Greatest Books of All Time site, albeit not in my top 2,000 – hundreds of the works on these lists are reviewed on my blog, where the best thing is https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/20...

8 out of 10 as a subjective assessment, although this is almost universally cherished as one of the magnum opera of the world


‘I feel as I do with Virginia Woolf I want to keep saying 'No, he didn't', No it didn't happen as you describe it', No, that isn't what he thought…No, that's just what she didn't say’ this was Magister Ludi Kingsley Amis complaining about the acclaimed author, who, in her turn, saw Joyce as nothing but an irksome distraction from her reading of Marcel Proust…

Incidentally, perhaps the two greatest writers ever – Proust is definitely number one for the under signed – met and even took a ride together, after attending a beano, where they did not say much, and on their short journey, James Joyce would open the window, which was something dangerous for the ailing Marcel Proust
Virginia Woolf wrote that she was ‘puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. And Tom, great Tom, thinks this on a par with War & Peace! An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating. When one can have cooked flesh, why have the raw?’

Furthermore, the author of To The Lighthouse insists ‘Never did I read such tosh. As for the first 2 chapters we will let them pass, but the 3rd 4th 5th 6th–merely the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges. Of course, genius may blaze out on page 652 but I have my doubts. And this is what Eliot worships’
Ergo, I should not feel so bad about not seeing To The Lighthouse as such a monumental chef d’oeuvre, or, at the very least, use that as ‘permission to be human’, a mantra suggested by Tal Ben Shahar https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/20... we need to accept our flaws

Not in an egotistical, narcissistic way, like the most ostentatious, abject example, the Orange Shit who has ejected the war hero Zelensky from the White House and is always praising the dictator Putin, but in trying to be kind to others and to one self – again, the displays of the new orange emperor are the opposite of self-esteem

‘Mrs. Woolf - I hate her so much, she is guilty😔most of the time of a forcing of Sensibility - what we get is a kind of intellectual melodrama, 😤the exacerbation of totally fictitious states of feeling into a Sentimental pipe- dream untouched by discipline and disagreeable primness of the sentence structure, and the images themselves are importunately tedious and unreal, exciting the response 'I don't believe a word of it'
That was Kingsley Amis again, and I use another reference, from To The Hermitage, which is quoted at the end of my standard ending, the characters in good novels are deeper, more interesting, the plots offer gratifying resolutions and more, while in To The Lighthouse, though I see the merits, I do not get access

There is a sense that I do not have the right frequency, I am clearly influenced, probably biased, after reading the very unfavorable opinion of Kingsley Amis, my favorite author, and tend to see that the protagonist has eight children, and somehow, that makes her less credible in my eyes too, helped by King Amis, admittedly
I mean, people had eight children, still do in parts of the world, but then they do not have the complexity, profile of Mrs. Ramsay, not in my mind, which brings me to another point on the list used when reading a book – which has to be God, just like Arthur Schopenhauer proclaimed, bad books prevent one from reading good ones

Not that this is bad, or, well, it could me for yours truly, and this comes down to According to Mark, by Penelope Lively https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/20... wherein we find that the author is God, he creates the characters, decides what, when, how things happen to them, but at the same time, my addition to this is that the reader is also some sort of monarch
He, she, they - this text would be banned in the US, seeing as I used they, which means I trespass into DEI territory, regulated by the likes of Trump and his bearded ‘piece of shit’, this is what they called him on a Times podcast, after he has attacked a war hero, president of an invaded country – by the way, diplomacy means you do not interject and scold somebody higher, VP does not talk down to someone higher, not even on the same level, but it is even more of a taboo to reach higher – have authority in their realm

If Mrs. Ramsey, her family and the rest of the population in To The Lighthouse do not entertain me, then I take a leaf from the book of the orange clown and throw them out – which is what they did with Zelensky, the other day, I still do not believe it, and as evidenced here, it is very much on my mind, granted, it is a paradigm
I just remembered about the boeuf in To The Lighthouse, French cooking, how the English destroyed the meals, and it goes to show that, instead of remembering lines about Shakespeare, I paid (too much) attention to the less demanding, essential parts of this acclaimed work, which is far from a favorite for the under signed



Now for my standard closing of the note with a question, and invitation – maybe you have a good idea on how we could make more than a million dollars with this https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/20... – as it is, this is a unique technique, which we could promote, sell, open the Oscars show with or something and then make lots of money together, if you have the how, I have the product, I just do not know how to get the befits from it, other than the exercise per se

There is also the small matter of working for AT&T – this huge company asked me to be its Representative for Romania and Bulgaria, on the Calling Card side, which meant sailing into the Black Sea wo meet the US Navy ships, travelling to Sofia, a lot of activity, using my mother’s two bedrooms flat as office and warehouse, all for the grand total of $250, raised after a lot of persuasion to the staggering $400…with retirement ahead, there are no benefits, nothing…it is a longer story, but if you can help get the mastodont to pay some dues, or have an idea how it can happen, let me know

As for my role in the Revolution that killed Ceausescu, a smaller Mao, there it is http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/r...

Some favorite quotes from To The Hermitage and other works

‘Fiction is infinitely preferable to real life...As long as you avoid the books of Kafka or Beckett, the everlasting plot of fiction has fewer futile experiences than the careless plot of reality...Fiction's people are fuller, deeper, cleverer, more moving than those in real life…Its actions are more intricate, illuminating, noble, profound…There are many more dramas, climaxes, romantic fulfillment, twists, turns, gratified resolutions…Unlike reality, all of this you can experience without leaving the house or even getting out of bed…What's more, books are a form of intelligent human greatness, as stories are a higher order of sense…As random life is to destiny, so stories are to great authors, who provided us with some of the highest pleasures and the most wonderful mystifications we can find…Few stories are greater than Anna Karenina, that wise epic by an often foolish author…’

[Emi Yoshida · Rating 3 out of 5]

This took me forever to read. And I had already read Mrs Dalloway, so it took me forever to read just Orlando and To the Lighthouse. Virginia Woolf is hard work. She was experimental 90-some years ago, and her writing is still vague and veiled and convoluted. Orlando was confusing because it was so fanciful, that the guy woke up at the age of 30 suddenly having become a woman. And then kind of segued back and forth, gender fluidly, what? Time travel in addition to gender reallocation, really? Okay. When I read Woolf, I get the frustrating sense that everything is deep and meaningful, but over my head. I did grasp and appreciate a beautiful contrast between the wandering gypsies and British aristocracy, a kind of freedom vs wealth presented in a way that makes one question traditional values.

To the Lighthouse seems so very straightforward in comparison to Orlando, but I so do not understand how so many words can go into saying so little of consequence. I'm paraphrasing a literary critic I just read citing "delay, repetition and inaction". The Ramsay family has eight children and vacations on an island with some staff and visitors; littlest James wants to go to the lighthouse, but his father tells him no. The parents are at odds but through non-verbal communication. Then in the next section several Ramsays die, and in the final section a few of the remaining Ramsays finally do go to the Lighthouse. And a painting is finally finished. But I'm afraid I didn't really get much out of this book. I wish I'd had a book group to discuss these two stories with.

[Rue Baldry · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a review of Mrs Dalloway.
The writing is very experimental and I think the experiment is a success, but it is tiring to read too much of it at once and it ends up saying rather less than the number of words it uses. Peter Walsh was probably the character to whom I warmed the most, though Septimus Smith's story was the most interesting. At times the prose moves between the minds of different characters so fast that I felt travel-sick, and some of them thought rather similarly. I couldn't see why Peter and Richard were both in love with Clarissa (& probably Sally was too) because she didn't seem to have very much about her. All in all it was worth a read but not exactly gripping or beautiful.

[Ell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I only read Orlando but it was pretty enjoyable even if I had no clue what was happening most of the time. Some of the insights into our definition of society and what 'living' is were very interesting.

[Susanna]

Un viaggio avventuroso attraverso il tempo e lo spazio e nella storia d'Inghilterra. Il personaggio di Orlando impone una riflessione sincera sui mille volti della sessualità umana.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here we have a selection of works by Virginia Woolf. It is a definite must read, if for nothing else to enjoy Virginia Woolf’s writing style.

[Andre Piucci · Rating 3 out of 5]

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