The conversation with the past would not let her go. On her usual walk round Tavistock Square in the spring of 1925, Woolf suddenly thought of the shape for a novel. As with many of her other books, it was the shape which came first and which endured. She quickly sketched it out in a notebook: an ‘H’ shape, ‘two blocks joined by a corridor’.1 There was the past, and then a break, and then a reconvening. This simple structure embodied the plot and the point of To the Lighthouse.
Woolf acknowledged that this novel was a laying to rest of ghosts from her family past. ‘I wrote the book very quickly’, she said later, ‘and when it was written, I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her.’2 She had altered her memories of her father as well: ‘now he comes back sometimes, but differently.’3 Her process of writing about these two powerful figures, which she compared to psychoanalysis, did not make them any less present in her mind: she would go back to them later in The Years and again in her memoir ‘Sketch of the Past’. But in To the Lighthouse she started to take control of her relationship with them.
She had first to summon them up. In writing Mr and Mrs Ramsay she was drawing on her memories of her parents and seeing them through the eyes of a child – eight children in fact, because the eight Ramsay children, all of different ages, allow her to track something of what it was like to grow up in that family. Yet Woolf wanted to see Mr and Mrs Ramsay not only in the passionate, exaggerated, dependent way that a child knows his or her parents, but also in the steady, empathetic way that an adult can come to understand other adults. At the age of forty-four, then, Woolf made a portrait of her parents as they were in middle age, looking at them face to face. When Vanessa read the book she immediately saw the significance of this encounter: ‘It was like meeting her [their mother] again with oneself grown up and on equal terms.’4
Julia Jackson (later Julia Stephen) photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron in 1867. (Photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron)
When Woolf looked at her parents she found aspects of herself. She saw things she needed to rebel against and things which, for better or worse, there was no getting away from. So when she laughs at the self-involved Mr Ramsay, who leaps around, arms waving, quoting poetry, seeking truth, she is getting an ironic distance on her father and also on herself. She was not going to write concise lives of national heroes in alphabetical order, nor conceive her intellectual life as a logical progression from A to Z. But Mr Ramsay’s obsessive dedication to his work is hers. So are his ambition, his eccentricity, his desire for protection, and the tuning of his life to the quotations always running in his mind.
Her portrait of the Ramsay marriage is also an exploration of her own. The writing of To the Lighthouse coincided with the most intense period of her relationship with Vita Sackville-West and the novel took fire from the love affair. But it was separate from Vita (‘Oh but you shan’t read it. Its a ghost between us.’5). It was her long marriage, rather than this recent liaison, which seems most to have coloured Woolf’s writing. The presence of Vita brought into focus the contentment of her life with Leonard, and it was at just this time that she paid moving tribute in her diary to their marriage. She defended its ‘dailiness’, arguing that though much of married life becomes automatic, the ‘bead of sensation’ that forms here and there is exquisite precisely because so much unconsidered shared experience has accrued.6 She celebrated the small happiness of taking the bus together or opening a letter, or ‘sitting down after dinner, side by side, & saying “Are you in your stall, brother?”’7 This was the background against which she wrote the after-dinner scene where Mr and Mrs Ramsay are at last left alone at the end of the day.
Leonard Woolf and his spaniel Sally, by Vanessa Bell. In June 1925 Virginia celebrated in her diary her daily life with Leonard: ‘making an ice, opening a letter, sitting down after dinner, side by side, & saying “Are you in your stall, brother?” – well what can trouble this happiness?’ (Vanessa Bell, Leonard Woolf, 1925. National Portrait Gallery, London © Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy Henrietta Garnett)
If Woolf is inside the Ramsay marriage, she is more obviously outside it, in the figure of Lily Briscoe, though Lily is in no simple way a portrait of the artist. In early drafts the painter was a minor character, off painting hedgerows. But she became the central orchestrating figure, the woman who is trying to understand herself and her relation to the whole Ramsay family by painting a portrait of Mrs Ramsay and her son sitting on the steps of the house. Woolf might easily have made Lily one of the Ramsay children, a daughter, like herself, of the woman she was painting. But she chose instead a less easily definable standpoint. Lily is a friend, so she is outside the family. She is held in place by a strong but uncertain tie to Mrs Ramsay and her domestic world. There is room to suppose some erotic attraction, and there is a connection with Woolf’s feelings for Vita, but Woolf was not going to pin down this relationship. She leaves her artist as a purposely obscure figure whose life we do not know.
Some old anxieties go into this portrait. Lily is childless and extraneous to the busy life of the family. She is sensitive to criticism and perennially dogged by the sense of Mr Ramsay bearing down on her, ready to cast judgment. But it is this same Lily who triumphs. It is she who is able to say, ‘I have had my vision.’8 As she completes her painting she is thinking of Mr Ramsay arriving at the lighthouse; her final brushstroke marks the completion of his journey as well as hers. So it is in the imagination of the artist that everyone is finally brought together and momentarily at peace, as the disparate characters of The Waves will survive in the mind of the writer Bernard, given voice by him alone at the close.
Lily’s ‘vision’, when it comes, is very simple. She sees Mrs Ramsay knitting on the step: ‘There she sat.’9 It echoes the reappearance of Clarissa, who has survived death and returned to the party, at the end of Mrs Dalloway: ‘For there she was.’10 It is these plain facts that carry the emotional weight in Woolf’s writing. She may be in some ways a complicated writer, but she is always reaching for the most irreducible of statements. Lily need only make one final line down the centre of her picture to complete it – but it has to be the right line: ‘She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre.’11
Woolf was working towards a philosophy about these moments of clarity. She had experienced them all her life, as shocks or revelations, moments in which what was blurred becomes in an instant very clear. Walking through Bloomsbury one night in February 1926 (a year after seeing To the Lighthouse suddenly, very clearly, in Tavistock Square), she looked at the night sky, thinking of the same moon over Vita in Persia, and she had a ‘great & astonishing sense of something there, which is “it”’.12 In her diary the following day she asked: ‘Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on & say “This is it?”’13
The question sounded all through the novel she was writing, and resolved itself into the extraordinary affirmation of Lily’s vision at the end. But Virginia Woolf did not believe in a god, and if she sensed ‘something there’ it had nothing to do with Christianity. Her devout atheism was part of the inheritance she was writing about. Both her parents had been through a painful loss of faith and had worked strenuously towards a rationalist philosophy to replace it. Mr Ramsay, arriving at the lighthouse, stands up straight in the bow of the boat, ‘for all the world, James thought, as if he were saying “There is no God”’. 14 He seems to James rather ridiculous, but the scene is not entirely emptied of heroism. It is part of a powerful religious current in a novel which insistently borrows Christian iconography and puts it at the service of daily secular life. The dinner party scene is a ceremonial last supper, and the journey to the lighthouse is a necessary pilgrimage. Lily’s picture is in the long tradition of Madonna and Child paintings, but it is Mrs Ramsay and her son James, not the Holy Family, who are sacred to her.
Fifteen years later, when she was making notes for an autobiography and trying to articulate her need to write, Woolf arrived at something she was willing to call ‘a philosophy’:
that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we – I mean all human beings – are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.15
She had taken on the imagined voice of Mr Ramsay standing up in the boat as he reaches the lighthouse, though here it does not sound ridiculous at all.