Cheap To the Lighthouse (Book) (Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty (Introduction)) Price

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Customer Reviews of To the Lighthouse

Reading and Re-Reading and
I haven't read To the Lighthouse since college, a time at which I understood very little about it, but was still greatly moved. Two things struck me about the experience of re-reading it. One is that while I can't claim full understanding, I no longer found myself struggling with the form in order to read the book. The second is how much more resonant the book became for me now that I'm older and can identify more with Mrs. Ramsey instead of seeing the book only through the character of Lily Briscoe.

To the Lighthouse centers around the Ramsey family and the people they bring in their wake to their home on the Isle of Skye. Families in the world of this book are fragile things. The first half creates the Ramsey family group so well that when the second half is without it, the reader is constantly aware of the ghost images standing in the empty spaces. Meanwhile, Lily tries to understand the world she's in and make her painting by meditating about the Ramseys and how much has changed in the world around them.

The book is tremendously beautiful and sad. I'll look forward to re-reading it again in another ten years.

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An astonishing experience of English family life.
"To The Lighthouse" doesn't tell a story--it allows the reader to experience it through the consciousness of its various characters. Woolf gets inside their heads and writes down what they're thinking from moment to moment, creating an intimacy between reader and character I've experienced with no other writer. The largest portion of the novel concerns a day at the Ramsay's summer house by the sea. Mr. Ramsay, a once-famous philosopher whose reputation is beginning to wane, entertains two or three of his students, while Mrs. Ramsay, the novel's central character, manages her family and the other guests. As Mr. Ramsay devotes his energy to philisophical obscurities, Mrs. Ramsay devotes hers to stroking her husband's ego when he needs it, consoling her youngest son James who wants to go to the lighthouse across the bay, and creating a serene, safe space for her guests. Gradually, a portrait of English family life emerges, and more importantly, an understanding of a woman's place within it--Mrs. Ramsay has essentially sacrificed herself for her family and husband, and has done so willingly. Woolf reveals these flawed but beautiful people to the reader in a work of art that seems less like reading prose than listening to music or experiencing a painting. To the Lighthouse is one of the masterpieces of 20th-century English literature

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Here and now
So here we have Mrs Woolf masterpiece, her great achievement at grasping time. This is a book for those that like a challenge in reading. It is not passive reading, Virginia needs your whole attention throughout the novel, and if you are lucky and get inside you will hace a wonderfull experience, you will be there with her and the characters, reading with a dim light, saling towards the lighthouse, painting, the air will brush your face and you will smell salt and sea and be dizzy after lunch. I do not Know if what she tells really interested me because it was jus something you experiment. Good chance