Considering Aesthetics with Virginia Woolf
She always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.
—Mrs Dalloway
SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER her death in 1941, Virginia Woolf remains, as she was in her lifetime, a household name among writers and readers. She has one of the all-time best author photographs, the title of a famous play (and film) contains her name, A Room of One’s Own is part of the feminist canon, and she is revered as a great modernist novelist; indeed she is among the handful of writers who helped to invent modernism. All of this might make us forget that for thirty years after her death she was seen as a marginal figure and that even now, I would suggest, her name—outside of college classrooms—is mentioned more often than her pages are read. To the Lighthouse is widely regarded as her most significant novel and remains a stubborn, radiant, difficult, and truthful book, one that repays our attention and one to which many writers, know it or not, like it or not, are indebted.
As in much of Woolf’s most enduring work, To the Lighthouse combines deeply autobiographical material with a clear aesthetic agenda. She is—it cannot be said too often—among our foremost stylists; her sentences and paragraphs have much to teach all practicing writers. But it is from examining the way in which she explains her aesthetic principles and then uses them to shape her material that we can learn the most. Every writer has a set of aesthetic beliefs—even if they’re not fully articulated—but very seldom do I hear myself, or my friends, cite these beliefs to defend or explain our work. Most of us, I suspect, have not taken the trouble to figure out what we are writing against. Or what we are writing toward. We are working, mostly in the tradition of realism. Does anything more need to be said? I would argue the answer is yes. We have much to gain from figuring out, as Woolf did in her letters, essays, and reviews, what our beliefs are and how we can embody them in our fictions.
Perhaps the word “aesthetic” has a daunting ring, so let me suggest a more pragmatic approach. Let us follow Woolf’s example and ask ourselves four questions:
1. Which writers, past or present, can teach us the most and give us the best tools for our own work?
2. What makes characters real for us as readers, and how, as writers, can we create such characters in our work?
3. What is new in the world that we need to capture in our novels and stories?
4. How can the answers to these first three questions help us to shape our intimate material in a way that avoids the dangers of mere autobiography?
Woolf spent much of her writing life asking, and answering, these questions. Her journey to the lighthouse required her to resolve various intellectual challenges as well as her relationship to her family history. No wonder ten years have to pass before Mr. Ramsay, at the end of the novel, finally jumps ashore.
Virginia was born in 1882 into what she described as “a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late-nineteenth-century world.” Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a writer and literary critic. The year she was born he embarked on the Dictionary of National Biography, which, in 1902, would earn him a knighthood. Her mother, Julia Duckworth, was a famous beauty (when that seems to have been a full-time job) and was related to the famous photographer Julia Cameron. Julia and Leslie began their marriage with two children apiece—each had already been married and widowed—and had four more of their own, of whom Virginia was the third. In their busy household, Virginia later wrote, she could hardly remember ever being alone with her mother.
Her childhood was divided between their large London house and the house they leased in Cornwall. Every summer, the entire family moved down to the seaside town of St. Ives for several months. This annual migration ended abruptly with Julia’s death in May 1895, when Virginia was thirteen. The idyllic house, with the sea nearby and the lighthouse in the distance, became even more idyllic by virtue of being forever lost. Leslie, widowed for a second time, mourned his wife with desperate tyranny. No one else was allowed to mourn her; no one else was mourning her sufficiently. Virginia learned early to scrutinize her emotions—and often to find them wanting. Her half-sister, Stella, took over the running of the household, but in 1897, only a few months after her marriage, she, too, died suddenly. “We never spoke of them,” Virginia wrote. “I can remember how awkwardly Thoby avoided saying ‘Stella’ when a ship called Stella was wrecked.” (Thoby, her older brother, died of typhoid in 1906.)
While her brothers attended school and went on to Cambridge University, Virginia and her older sister, Vanessa (later the painter Vanessa Bell), were educated at home and given the run of their father’s library. Although Virginia famously wrote in her diary that if her father hadn’t died, there would have been no novels, no work, he nevertheless took his daughters seriously and gave them unusual intellectual freedom. After he died from cancer in 1904, the four siblings moved into a house in the neighborhood of London known as Bloomsbury. Henry James, a long-time acquaintance of the family, was particularly appalled by their Bohemian lifestyle. Virginia began to publish reviews, and Thoby and Adrian, her younger brother, brought their university friends home to visit. Among these young men was Leonard Woolf, whom Virginia married in 1912—the same year in which the Titanic sank, Captain Scott reached the South Pole, and Thomas Mann published Death in Venice.
The year after her marriage, Virginia finished her first novel, The Voyage Out, and had a nervous breakdown, her third, during which she made a suicide attempt, her second. Hermione Lee, to whose wonderful biography I am indebted throughout this essay, writes that Leonard made Virginia’s illness one of his life’s works. “He documents her illness,” Lee writes, “with the same scrupulous integrity, exhaustiveness and attempt at objectivity that he would apply to the minutes of the Labour Party’s Advisory Committee on International Relations.” He tried to keep Virginia from becoming overly stimulated, or overly tired, both of which sometimes led to the episodes of madness (her word) that she experienced throughout her life. It was his decision that they should not have children. On March 28, 1941, driven to despair by the voices in her head, Virginia walked into the River Ouse with stones in her pockets. She was fifty-nine years old. Leonard survived her by more than twenty-five years. In 1965, he went to see Edward Albee’s play—he had given permission for the title—and noted how moved he was by George and Martha and the theme of childlessness. With admirable if infuriating discretion, he never divulged exactly how he and Virginia had negotiated this question, or many others, during their long marriage.
I mention these details not to pathologize one of our most productive writers, but because Woolf’s relationship with her own consciousness, her acute awareness of moments of being, and her struggle to find a language with which to convey those moments, along with her mental and physical states, lies at the heart of her aesthetics and informs all her mature work. Here she is writing in her diary in 1937, shortly before the publication of The Years:
I wish I could write out my sensations at this moment. They are so peculiar & so unpleasant. . . . A physical feeling as if I were drumming slightly in the veins: very cold: impotent: & terrified. As if I were exposed on a high ledge in full light. Very lonely. L. out to lunch. Nessa has Quentin & don’t want me. Very useless. No atmosphere round me. No words. Very apprehensive. As if something cold & horrible—a roar of laughter at my expense were about to happen. And I am powerless to ward it off: I have no protection.
According to her nephew Quentin Bell, she could not bear to record her mental state during her breakdowns; what she mostly spoke of were the physical symptoms—the drumming, the cold, the lack of atmosphere—that accompanied her illnesses.
Despite Woolf’s ill health during the first years of their marriage, she and Leonard became companions and helpmates, sharing work and a wide social circle. By the time she published To the Lighthouse in 1927, she was forty-five and had, as she herself acknowledged, more freedom than any other writer in England. This was due not so much to her fame, although she was becoming better known every year, but to her work being published by the Hogarth Press, which she and Leonard had started in 1917 and ran together. If Leonard approved—and he did—then the work was published. In 1922 he thought Jacob’s Room her best work, a work of genius. In 1925 he thought Mrs Dalloway her best. In 1927 we find Woolf writing in her diary, “Well Leonard has read To the Lighthouse, and says it is much my best book, & it is a ‘masterpiece.’ . . . He calls it entirely new ‘a psychological poem,’ is his name for it.’” It’s hard not to wish that every writer could have her own Leonard.
Woolf not only had unusual freedom as a writer; she was also unusually prolific in four genres. As a fiction writer, she wrote novels and stories. As a critic, she wrote close to five hundred reviews, essays, and lectures. She kept a diary, which she was always railing against—why am I writing here again? she asks repeatedly. And she wrote many, many letters. All of this material has contributed to her reputation, and gives us a remarkable degree of insight into her methods as a writer. Moreover, through the Hogarth Press, through her friendships and her reviewing, she was deeply involved with other writers and acutely aware of what was going on in literature and art. Despite her productivity, her early work was not particularly precocious. It was not until she was nearly forty, working on Jacob’s Room in the aftermath of the First World War, that she felt she had begun at last to find her voice, her vision.
In her famous essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” written in 1924, the year before Mrs Dalloway was published, Woolf offers a strong argument for her aesthetics. In doing so she describes three groups of writers: the Victorians, whom she by and large admires; her immediate predecessors the Edwardians—Mr. Bennett, Mr. Galsworthy, and H. G. Wells—whom she by and large deplores; and herself and her peers, whom she calls the Georgians, and whom we now call the modernists. Among these last Woolf numbers E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey, James Joyce (the Hogarth Press rejected Ulysses because it was too long), and T. S. Eliot (whom the press briefly published before he took his work elsewhere). The list includes no women but, by implication, Woolf includes herself, Katherine Mansfield, and Elizabeth Bowen. At the end of “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” she writes, “I will make one final and surpassingly rash prediction—we are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature.” In fact, by 1924 there was nothing rash about the prediction. The great age was fully present.
Like A Room of One’s Own, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” began as a talk, and like that iconic work it retains the freshness of Woolf’s speaking voice. She begins by making two assertions: Everyone in this room is a judge of character and, more debatable, “in or about December, 1910, human character changed.” Halley’s comet appeared in 1910, Tolstoy died, and Edward VII was succeeded by George V, but the specific date is commonly taken to refer to the exhibition of impressionist paintings organized by Woolf’s friend, the painter and critic Roger Fry. Impressionism has become so familiar, almost a cliché, that it’s hard to remember how revolutionary it was to think of art as not being representational. A rose was a rose was a rose. Now, suddenly, the subjective—who saw the rose, how they saw it—was as important, sometimes even more important, than the actual flower. In To the Lighthouse, when the painter Lily Briscoe asks what Mr. Ramsay’s work is about, his son Andrew says, “‘Subject and object and the nature of reality,’ . . . And when she [Lily] said Heavens, she had no notion what that meant. ‘Think of a kitchen table then,’ he told her, ‘when you’re not there.’”
At the heart of “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” is an argument about character: what it is and how, at the deepest and most truthful level, it can be conjured onto the page. Woolf’s main objection to the Edwardians, who she is writing against, is their obfuscating didacticism, which she claims conceals rather than reveals character. She and her colleagues are the new realists, the writers who are trying to portray the shifts in human nature and in the contemporary world. Only a few years later, the German physicist Werner Heisenberg published what became known as the uncertainty principle, but Woolf was already well aware that uncertainty would be the ruling principle of her century. Near the end of To the Lighthouse, one of the characters thinks, “Nothing was simply one thing”—a sentence that could stand as a motto for both the life of this complicated writer and the experience of reading her fiction.
Woolf returns over and over in her work to two pressing questions: how to capture the simultaneity of experience and, increasingly as she grows older, how to capture the sensibility of women. She herself worries that no one likes her hat and that no one likes her novels. Can she include both kinds of worry in her work? This is the writer who refers to having her hair “bingled”—i.e., cut short—as one of the great events of her life; from behind, she says, she looks like a partridge’s rear. She is also the writer who claims that women have to invent a new syntax and yet must write androgynously. She hoped Mrs Dalloway was a masterpiece and was thrilled that it earned enough money for the Woolfs to have an indoor toilet installed at their country home (she and Leonard enjoyed showing guests how well it flushed).
On May 14, 1925, the day Mrs Dalloway was published, she wrote in her diary about her idea for a new novel:
This is going to be fairly short: to have father’s character done complete in it; & mother’s; & St Ives; & childhood; & all the usual things I try to put in—life, death, &c. But the centre is father’s character, sitting in a boat, reciting We perished, each alone, while he crushes a dying mackerel—However, I must refrain. I must write a few little stories first, & let the Lighthouse simmer, adding to it between tea & dinner till it is complete for writing out.
Later she would tell Vanessa that To the Lighthouse had come to her all at once, in a great rush, as she walked round Tavistock Square near her home in London.
Note that word “complete,” used twice in the above paragraph and an important term in Woolf’s aesthetic vocabulary. For her, a good novel is a complete novel; we can hold it whole in our minds and when we get to the end of it all we want to do is reread it, to understand it more deeply. As examples she gives Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and the work of Jane Austen. When you think of a great novel, she claims, you think of “some character who seemed to you so real” and then you think of all the things you think of through that character’s eyes—“of religion, of love, of war, of peace, of family life, of balls in country towns, of sunsets, moonrises, the immortality of the soul.” The job of the novelist, she contends, is to show us character and the world through character.
For the next few months, after having her rush of ideas, Woolf gathered ingredients for the novel, waiting for it to “simmer,” to “thicken.” “The sea,” she writes, “is to be heard all through it.” She was worried that the theme might be sentimental—to her one of the great vices and a charge one reviewer had brought against Mrs Dalloway. And she pondered whether To the Lighthouse would really be a novel or should it be called something else—perhaps an elegy?
By August 1925, she knew that the novel would be in three parts—part one would have “a sense of waiting, of expectation: the child waiting to go to the lighthouse: the woman awaiting the return of the couple.” Joining parts one and three would be “an interesting experiment . . . giving the sense of ten years passing.” She also records that the emphasis has now shifted from Mr. Ramsay to Mrs. Ramsay and includes a little sketch of the new work: “Two blocks joined by a corridor.” The corridor, the middle part where ten years pass, was going to contain all the lyrical passages she wanted to write so that they wouldn’t interrupt the narrative elsewhere.
Woolf’s planning of the novel fills me with admiration. Like many writers I know, I do not (so far) outline my work in advance. I begin a novel with a destination in mind but the route is vague. Any attempt to map the journey will, I worry, render the unwritten pages artificial and ridiculous. But Woolf is fearless in setting up goals and markers for herself. I wonder if she knew of Henry James’s notebooks, in which he famously worked out the plots of several of his great novels, going back to them in entry after entry until the psychological arc of the novel was finally clear.
One more thing we need to keep in mind as we approach To the Lighthouse is Woolf’s objections to the Edwardians. They want, she claims, something from their reader; their books are incomplete and they force us to go outside the book. “I believe,” she writes in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” “that all novels . . . Deal with character, and that it is to express character—not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose and undramatic, so rich, elastic and alive, has been evolved.” Much of the essay describes a short train journey from Richmond to London and Woolf’s observations of two of her fellow passengers: a woman in her sixties, whom she calls Mrs. Brown, and a man in his forties, whom she calls Mr. Smith. From the details of their appearance and the exchanges she overhears, she invents a rich inner life and a dramatic history. On first reading the essay I assumed that much of this was fictionalized later, but the writer Nigel Nicholson gives a vivid account of Woolf entertaining him as a small boy by making up stories about the strangers they met.
To the Lighthouse surely does strike some readers as “clumsy, verbose and undramatic.” As an early reviewer remarked, it is a novel in which nothing and everything happens. Each of the three parts is narrated in the third person, in short numbered sections—some only a few lines long, some a dozen pages—and each takes place in the same location, a large house by the sea. Woolf describes the house as being on the Hebrides in Scotland but makes almost no effort to disguise her beloved Cornwall.
Part one, “The Window,” follows one evening in the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, their eight children, their guests, and their, for the most part, conveniently invisible servants. The point of view moves fluently among the various characters and an omniscient narrator. The reader, especially in the opening sections, must sit at attention as Woolf ignores the normal boundaries and gathers facts, thoughts, and sensations, past and present, into long, sinuous sentences. Yes, if it’s fine, Mrs. Ramsay tells her son James, they can go to the lighthouse tomorrow.
In the hundred and twenty pages that follow, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay argue and are reconciled. We are shown Mr. Ramsay’s doubts: Is he a genius? In the alphabet of knowledge will he ever get past Q? Will his books last? All the questions Woolf asked herself. We are shown through the various guests Mrs. Ramsay’s beauty and her insight into her husband’s frailty. Meanwhile, in the garden, Lily Briscoe, a single woman in her thirties, struggles to paint a picture of the house. The zenith of the evening is a wonderfully Proustian dinner of boeuf en daube. At first the meal seems headed for disaster. “Nothing seemed to have merged,” Mrs. Ramsay thinks. “They all sat separate.” But with the help of Lily, the candlelight, and the delicious food, she at last brings everyone together. Just for a moment the chaos of life is averted and everyone is caught in a golden net, merged and complete. This kind of unity is what Lily’s painting promises and what Mr. Ramsay is seeking as he strives to get past Q. Woolf described the scene as one of the best things she’d ever written, a triumph of her method.
Part two, “Time Passes”—the corridor—begins the same evening with the characters heading to bed. Woolf purposefully echoes Lord Grey’s famous remark on the eve of the First World War: “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” The sixteen pages that follow cover ten years, during which Mrs. Ramsay dies, as well as two of the children. The deaths are dealt with briefly; they are, literally, in parentheses. “(Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.)” It’s hard not to recall Woolf’s comment about her dead siblings: “We never spoke of them.”
Most of “Time Passes” is devoted to the house, which, for nearly a decade, is almost overwhelmed by wind and weather and is finally rescued when the family announces their return. Woolf wrote this section during the general strike of 1926, and she noted how the darkness and confusion of the strike had crept into her work: the women who rescue the house can be read as representatives of the stoic working people.
Part three, “The Lighthouse,” like “The Window,” takes place within a few hours. The long delayed voyage occurs. The narrative alternates between Mr. Ramsay in the boat with two of his children, sailing toward the lighthouse, and Lily Briscoe in the garden, once again struggling to paint the house. As she paints, Lily thinks about Mrs. Ramsay, who, in death, looms almost as large as she had in life. “Think about a table when you’re not there.” Or when it’s not there. The descriptions of Mrs. Ramsay are informed both by Woolf’s memories of her mother and by her affair with the writer Vita Sackville-West, which was, during the months she wrote this section, at its most ardent.
The novel ends with Mr. Ramsay arriving at the lighthouse and Lily finishing her picture. “With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.” The last sentence of the novel, like the first, begins with the word “yes.”
In “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Woolf takes the Edwardians to task for their approach to creating character. “I asked them—they are my elders and betters—How shall I begin to describe this woman’s character? And they said: ‘Begin by saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate. Ascertain the rent. Ascertain the wages of the shop assistants in the year 1878. Discover what her mother died of. Describe cancer. Describe calico. Describe—’” She goes on to explain the tremendous efforts that the Georgian writers, she and her friends, have made to tell the truth and the struggle to do so given the outmoded tools they have inherited. James Joyce, she writes, is like a man who breaks the window in order to breathe. “We must reflect,” she continues, “that where so much strength is spent on finding a way of telling the truth, the truth itself is bound to reach us in rather an exhausted and chaotic condition.” Several pages of the essay are devoted to the contract between writer and reader. She urges readers to be more demanding: “Your part is to insist that writers shall come down off their plinths and pedestals, and describe beautifully if possible, truthfully at any rate, our Mrs. Brown . . . But do not expect just at present a complete and satisfactory presentment of her.”
When she gave this talk, Woolf had not yet embarked on To the Lighthouse, but her words offer a helpful insight into her view of the role of the reader. Readers need to demand beauty and truth, but they do not get to demand that novelists take care of them, or make things easy. In a letter to her brother-in-law, Clive Bell, Woolf perceptively remarked, “I feel I have so few of the gifts that make novels amusing.” She is aware that, ideally, the reader needs to be entertained, but much more important is to convey the complexity of experience. The description of Mr. Ramsay’s arrival at the lighthouse is a good example of her ambition and her accomplishment: “He rose and stood in the bow of the boat, very straight and tall, for all the world, James thought, as if he were saying: ‘There is no God,’ and Cam thought, as if he were leaping into space, and they both rose to follow him as he sprang, lightly like a young man, holding his parcel, on to the rock.” To make this moment complete, Woolf needs to show the points of view of James, Cam, and an omniscient narrator. We inhabit her characters at the deepest level, following her from one consciousness to the next, even while we know almost none of the conventional facts about them. Woolf does not believe in exposition but she does believe, passionately, in consciousness, connection, and completeness.
This aesthetic agenda also makes clear why her best known novels, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, cover such short periods of time; a single day in the former, and a handful of hours, plus ten years, in the latter. In “A Sketch of the Past” Woolf writes, “The present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when it presses so close that you can feel nothing else.” She does not have time for conventional plots that require the passage of days and weeks. The excitement and importance of the novel, for Woolf, lies in the depth to which it can allow us to enter into the consciousness of her characters, and to see the world through their eyes. How can sentences, one following another, hope to convey that everyone, at almost every moment, is experiencing simultaneously so many things?
Many of us, as writers, probably need more external story than Woolf offers in her major fiction. She has almost no interest in conventional plot and suspense but she is very interested in the larger seismic shifts of society. In “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” she claims, “All human relations have shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.” In her efforts to portray these changes, she shows us how to be ambitious for our work. Although we write in our own very different forms, we can share her goals of creating complex, contradictory characters, of portraying a new sensibility that reveals the new reality, and of writing sentences that might elicit the kind of admiration that Clive Bell offers to hers. “What is Virginia doing now,” he writes, “at half past three o’clock. Moulding one of those delicately tangible sentences which remind me of nothing so much as a live bird in the hand, the heart beating through tumultuously.”
In workshops and in private conversations my students seldom appeal to a larger aesthetic vision to justify their choices. Indeed the most common defense of fiction remains the oxymoron: this really happened. It’s easy to imagine the first thirty pages of To the Lighthouse faring poorly in a workshop discussion, and not through any fault of the participants; the pages are difficult, sometimes confusing, and often demanding. But it’s also easy to imagine Woolf defending the pages, pointing to what she thinks fiction should accomplish, showing how her sentences fulfill those demands. Here she is, in 1926, in the thick of To the Lighthouse, writing to Sackville-West:
Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words . . . Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (Which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it.
Given this amazing ambition, to make a wave in the mind—“the sea is to be heard all through it”— Woolf’s style is surprisingly simple.
I find the argument that Woolf presents in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” very persuasive, but it is interesting to note that a large part of the essay is a beautiful and very conventional character sketch of Mrs. Brown and her interactions with Mr. Smith. We see Mrs. Brown with her tidy threadbare clothes and clean little boots; we hear her speak; we speculate about her thoughts, her feelings, and her history:
“Can you tell me if an oak-tree dies when the leaves have been eaten for two years in succession by caterpillars?”
She spoke quite brightly, and rather precisely, in a cultivated, inquisitive voice.
Mr. Smith was startled, but relieved to have a safe topic of conversation given him. He told her a great deal very quickly . . . While he talked a very odd thing happened. Mrs. Brown took out her little white handkerchief and began to dab her eyes. She was crying.
Paragraph after paragraph, the descriptions build and deepen and complicate in smoothly written prose. But Woolf herself claims that Mrs. Brown has slipped through her fingers; she has shirked the arduous task of getting her on the page. In To the Lighthouse, the narrator seldom presents her characters with such clarity. She refuses to sum them up but instead enters into them at the deepest, murkiest level. We are wading through the rag-and-bone shop of the mind and heart. We see them as they see themselves; we see them as others see them. Forget the impressionists and think of Picasso depicting a woman’s face, fractured, from several angles.
The idea for To the Lighthouse may have been suggested to Woolf by the shades of her dead parents, but she was adamant that she did not want to write fiction that was solely biographical or autobiographical. The novel had to be about something more, something larger—an elegy not only for two individuals but also for Europe before the war. And, in the figure of Lily Briscoe, an artist and the main observer of the struggle between Mrs. Ramsay’s intuitions and Mr. Ramsay’s reasons, she was also able to question the whole notion of representation and of how experience is conveyed from one person to another. Woolf thought the novel was the best thing she ever wrote, and when it was done she noticed something remarkable. From the ages of thirteen to forty-four she had been obsessed with her mother, but after writing To the Lighthouse, her mother disappeared. “I no longer hear her voice,” she wrote. “I do not see her.” The novel turned out to be not only an elegy but also an exorcism.
If she were alive and writing now, Woolf would surely be pondering the many shifts in consciousness that have occurred since the Second World War. She would be writing and arguing about what it means to write in a time of such interconnectedness, when news flashes around the world in minutes, when many more people feel free to experiment with the shifting nature of sexual identity, when issues of race, class, religion, and citizenship are more complicated and vexed than ever before, when nature and climate can no longer be safely taken for granted. She would be teaching us how to resist the platitudes of thought and feeling that we sometimes succumb to, and to keep questioning the gap between lived experience and the page. Now more than ever, when so many writers are at work, it behooves us to figure out what we value in fiction, what we are writing toward, and against, and how our work can more accurately capture the chaos of experience in the golden net of consciousness. “Nothing was simply one thing.”