Conversations in Philosophy: ’To the Lighthouse’ by Virginia Woolf

In 1908, Virginia Woolf wrote that she hoped to revolutionise the novel and ‘capture multitudes of things at present fugitive’. ‘To the Lighthouse’ (1927) marks perhaps her fullest realisation of the novel as philosophical enterprise, and not simply because one of its central characters is engaged with the problem of ‘subject and object and the nature of reality’. In the final episode of their series, Jonathan and James consider different ways of reading Woolf’s great novel: as a satirical portrait of her father through Mr Ramsay, as a study of creative expression through Lily Briscoe, or as a mystical, Platonic quest in which form and style respond to philosophical propositions, and the truth of human experience is to be found in movement, conversation and laughter.

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Read more in the LRB:

Jacqueline Rose: Where's Woolf? https://lrb.me/cipep13woolf1

Virgina Woolf: The Symbol https://lrb.me/cipep13woolf2

John Bayley: Superchild https://lrb.me/cipep13woolf3