[In the following essay, Gregor argues that the autobiographical elements in To the Lighthouse ultimately compromise the novel's success because of Woolf's difficulty in distancing herself from her narrative and her characters.]

I, I, I,—how we have lost the secret of saying that.¹

—Virginia Woolf

I

On Wednesday, 28, November 1928, a year after the publication of To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary:

Father's birthday. He would have been 96, 96, yes, today; and could have been 96, like other people one has known: but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books;—inconceivable.

I used to think of him and mother daily; but writing the Lighthouse laid them in my mind. And now he comes back sometimes, but differently. (I believe this to be true—that I was observed by them both, unhealthily; and writing of them was a necessary act.) He comes back now more as a contemporary. I must read him some day. I wonder if I can feel again, I hear his voice, I know this by heart?

So the days pass and I ask myself sometimes whether one is not hypnotised, as a child by a silver globe, by life; and whether this is living. It’s very quick, bright, exciting. But superficial perhaps. I should like to take the globe in my hands and feel it quietly, round, smooth, heavy, and so hold it, day after day.²

In this casual diary entry we have, loosely assembled, elements central to the novel itself—the autobiographical pressure, the consolations of art, the persistent attempt to image the notion of “Life.” These elements, imaginatively recreated and controlled, go into shaping a novel generally considered to be Virginia Woolf's most successful single work. The ease with which the diary entry recalls concerns present in the novel indicates the centrality of the personal element in its making.

This element has, of course, been widely noted and usually in the way indicated by a comment once made by Dr. Leavis:

The substance of this novel was provided directly by life. … We know enough about Leslie Stephen, the novelist's father, and his family to know there is a large measure of direct transcription … [and there] is a clear relation between this fact and the unique success of To The Lighthouse.³

There is a truth in that judgment, but it is an equivocal truth. I would like to suggest in this essay that the relation between “the fact” and “the success” was considerably less “clear” than Dr. Leavis claims and that, so far from working in favor of the novel, the element of autobiography eventually begins to work against it.

To reflect on the criticism the novel has received in the fifty years since it was written is to be struck quite forcibly by two things which, taken together, seem somewhat at odds with each other. The first thing is that we can say with some confidence that, of all of Virginia Woolf's novels, To The Lighthouse has made the most immediate appeal. It has been written about again and again with a warmth and affection absent from accounts of her other novels, however much they may have been admired. The reasons are not far to seek—the generous presence of Mrs. Ramsay suffusing the novel, the depth and variety of the family relationships, the poignant reflections on death and the passage of time, the sharp sense of place. These admiring and affectionate accounts do not, however, prevent us noticing another thing: namely, the plurality of interpretation of the novel's overall meaning.

What would seem useful is a reflection on the novel which would concern itself with the disjunction between the clarity and immediacy with which the fiction makes its appeal and the troubling interpretative questions it seems to raise. I would like to argue that such a reflection will make us aware that this situation is caused by a flaw within the form of the work, a flaw which is itself the result of the novelist's attempt to meet the changing demands of the fiction as it develops. We can characterize those demands by saying that they bring about a change in the involvement of the novelist with her work which she feels she cannot evade. The fiction brings her to a point where she needs to change the inflection of her voice in a way that makes us recognize the justice in her own critical observation, “I, I, I,—how we have lost the secret of saying that.”

II

In “The Anatomy of Fiction” Virginia Woolf observed, with Emma in mind, “Between the sentences, apart from the story, a little space of some kind builds itself up.”⁴ This sense of space is central to Virginia Woolf's own practice as a novelist. Central aesthetically, in that it is expressive of the dramatic expression she seeks; central metaphysically, in that it is ineluctably expressive of the void, the horror of which is both the source and the substance of her creative energy. “Space,” “absence,” “void”—these words lie at the heart of her work, and to see them at work in To The Lighthouse is to see the imaginative movement of that novel as it gradually develops and takes shape.

Though we talk of To The Lighthouse as being a novel in three sections, it is really the first of these sections, “The Window,” which makes the decisive impact on the reader. It is this section that constitutes the achievement of the novel, a section which has its own artistic completion, a perfectly accomplished “novella” posing awkward problems for the novel which contains it.

Towards the end of section nine in “The Window” there occurs a conversation between Lily Briscoe and William Bankes about the picture she is painting. The drift of the conversation could well have occurred in Virginia Woolf's book on Roger Fry, turning as it does on the general question about representational and nonrepresentational art.

What did she wish to indicate by the triangular purple shape …? It was Mrs. Ramsay reading to James, she said. She knew his objection—that no one could tell it for a human shape. But she had made no attempt at likeness.

The debate is a familiar one. Bankes recalls a favorite picture in his own possession, “cherry trees in blossom on the banks of the Kennet,” and while going on to accept Lily's own very different interest in terms of masses, lights, shapes, insists on the question “what did she wish to make of it”? Lily's rejoinder is to grasp her brush (“she could not even see it herself, without a brush in her hand”), resume her position at the canvas, and try to find “her picture” among “hedges and houses and mothers and children.” “It was a question, she remembered, how to connect this mass on the right hand with that on the left … bringing the line … breaking the vacancy. …” But then suddenly her whole mood changes and she is flooded with gratitude to Bankes for the experience they have shared. The point at issue is no longer the “attempt at likeness” or “the triangular purple shape,” her “picture” is not on the canvas, but within her, in the intensity of her response to the scene. It is Bankes's recognition of this that draws them together in affectionate sympathy. Earlier, Lily has talked of “that passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child,” and Bankes's gentle curiosity has enabled her to find comfort in his unobtrusive recognition of her as someone whose painting should be thought of not in terms of its “aims” but rather an expression of her deepest self. The conversation concludes in a mood of exhilaration—“that one could walk away down that long gallery not alone anymore but arm in arm with somebody.” A discussion which begins with talk about aesthetic principles concludes with a release of shared feeling, and has no need of formal expression for Lily and Bankes to feel its impact. It is a feeling caught and held in the way Lily “nicked the catch of her paint-box to, more firmly than was necessary, and the nick seemed to surround in a circle for ever the paint-box, the lawn, Mr. Bankes, and that wild villain, Cam, dashing past.”

The beautiful gradations of feeling from the painting to the person work in an opposite way at the dinner party, when Lily, looking at Mrs. Ramsay, feels that she is pitying William Bankes:

He is not in the least pitiable. He has his work, Lily said to herself. She remembered, all of a sudden as if she had found a treasure, that she had her work. In a flash she saw her picture and thought, Yes, I shall put the tree further in the middle; then I shall avoid that awkward space.

“That awkward space” presenting itself here sharply as a technical problem has behind it the earlier scene with Bankes, so that now we feel Lily has only to recall their “work” for their mutual feeling to be recalled and affirmed—the awkwardness of the space made awkward no longer.

The most intense moments in the dinner party belong, of course, to Mrs. Ramsay, and it is during one of these that we feel the harmony between contingent detail and individual feeling given its richest expression. Mrs. Ramsay, as the dinner party draws to an end, feels the occasion has been a great success:

“Andrew,” she said, “hold your plate lower, or I shall spill it.” (The Boeuf en Daube was a perfect triumph) Here, she felt, putting the spoon down, was the still space that lies about the heart of things, where one could move or rest; could wait now (they were all helped) listening; could then, like a hawk which lapses suddenly from its high station, flaunt and sink on laughter easily, resting her whole weight upon what at the other end of the table her husband was saying about the square root of one thousand two hundred and fifty-three, which happened to be the number on his railway ticket.

“The still space that lies about the heart of things where one could move or rest” is created by the density of particulars which surround it, and within those particulars, the reader, like Mrs. Ramsay, is free to maneuver, take his bearings, and share in the serenity of her mood. If Mrs. Ramsay can feel “the still space,” it is because the very mobility of her sensibility has created it for us, a mobility created by the intensity of her response to the detail of the world about her. This space is not to be identified with any particular, but nevertheless can only exist by the defining presence of those particulars—the conversation, the company, her husband, “the exquisite scent of olives and oil and juice from the great brown dish”—all blend, for Mrs. Ramsay, into an exquisite harmony. It is a harmony made imaginatively present for the reader too, so that in his memory of the dinner party, it is the detail which remains suffused by a glow of feeling which exists somewhere “between” the characters and the author, the author and the reader. This notion of a space between, present in the conversation with Lily and Bankes and then much more powerfully in distinctive moments during the dinner party, becomes the virtual substance of an extended scene between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, which brings the first section of the novel to a close.

The episode opens with the Ramsays absorbed in their reading, he with Scott's novel, she with a volume of poems. “They did not want to speak to each other. They had nothing to say, but something seemed, nevertheless to go from him to her.” Scott's novel dominates Mr. Ramsay's attention, “the poor old crazed creature in Mucklebackit's cottage made him feel so vigorous, so relieved that he felt roused and triumphant.” He forgets himself completely as the fiction proceeds. “Steenie's drowning … Mucklebackit's sorrow … the astonishing delight and vigour it gave him.” It is not the tragic tale that Scott tells which moves him so much as the completeness with which the novelist has understood, mastered, and communicated what he has to say. Scott's triumphant form has given form to Mr. Ramsay's feelings, and his reaction is one of delight and gratitude. The response which Mrs. Ramsay is making to the poem is similar. “All the odds and ends of the day stuck to this magnet; her mind felt swept, felt clean. … And there it was, suddenly entire … the essence sucked out of life and held rounded here—the sonnet.” Again it is the achieved form that liberates and gives shape to the inchoate feelings of the reader. In this heightened state of awareness, first Mrs. Ramsay and then her husband long to break the silence but find the appropriate idiom hard to find, hard because it will be too sharply self-revealing, too explicit a gesture of dependence. “Do say something, she thought, wishing only to hear his voice … say anything as if for help.” He breaks the silence and she takes his reproving remark with gratitude. The emotional pendulum swings, “He wanted something—wanted the thing she always found it so difficult to give him; wanted her to tell him that she loved him.” The silence deepens. “Then, knowing that he was watching her, instead of saying anything she turned, holding her stocking, and looked at him. And as she looked at him she began to smile, for though she had not said a word, he knew, of course he knew, that she loved him. He could not deny it.” Nothing is said, but the communication is complete.

This scene is for me the finest in the novel and arguably one of the finest in Virginia Woolf's work as a whole, because it conveys with unerring precision and delicacy the depth of feelings without words, feelings which have behind them years of shared living. Virginia Woolf in these pages is giving us a sense of married love which could be set without loss beside certain of the best pages in The Rainbow. To put it like that, however, is to see how radically different in approach the two novelists are. Lawrence making his language keep pace with the kaleidoscope of feelings he describes; Virginia Woolf making us feel its inadequacy, its hurried improvisations, its grateful acceptance of silent gesture: “… for though she had not said a word, he knew, of course he knew, that she loved him.” That is the dominant note sounded in the passage and it recalls her remark about Emma, “Between the sentences, apart from the story, a little space of some kind builds itself up.” Again and again throughout this first section of the novel and culminating finely in the scene between the Ramsays, we feel that Virginia Woolf has created just such a space, which is not an absence or a vacancy, but something, as she rightly says, “built.” That building is partly the novelist's, creating a suggestively defining set of particulars which give the scene its substance, but it is also the reader's. The plentitude of imaginative life so effortlessly present in “The Window” is testimony to Virginia Woolf's mastery of her form, so that like Mr. Ramsay reading Scott we too, in reading these pages, are liberated into a sense of “astonishing delight.”

III

“Such were some of the parts, but how string them together” wonders Lily as she watches preparations being made for the eventual sail to the lighthouse. It was a thought shared by Virginia Woolf as she contemplated the final section of her novel. In her diary we find her writing:

5 September 1926. At this moment I’m casting about for an end. The problem is how to bring Lily and Mr. R. together and make a combination of interest at the end. I am feathering about with various ideas. The last chapter which I begin tomorrow is In The Boat: I had meant to end with R. climbing on to the rock. If so, what becomes of Lily and her picture? Should there be a final page about her and Carmichael looking at the picture and summing up R's character? In that case, I lose the intensity of the moment. If this intervenes between R. and the lighthouse, there’s too much chop and change, I think. Could I do it in a parenthesis? So that one had the sense of reading the two things at the same time?⁵

It is interesting that the difficulty of “an end” should present itself in such unequivocally “technical” terms, interesting because it helps to confirm the impression that in the last section, in marked contrast to the first, there is a sense of strain, or calculated effect. Or, putting it another way, there is the air of “a problem” being posed and “a solution” being looked for.

In one way, problem and solution emerge clearly enough and lend themselves to description. The most obvious feature of the third section is its structure, consisting of contrasting meditations on Mr. Ramsay's sail to the lighthouse juxtaposed with those of Lily as she tries to complete her painting. “The end” being reached when a significant conjunction is established between the two. Behind both enterprises we have the continuing influence of Mrs. Ramsay, tacitly present in the whole idea of the voyage, overtly present in Lily's thoughts as she struggles with her picture. Both voyage and painting take up and try to complete “unfinished business” of ten years previously.

From gloomy beginnings the sail prospers. The children gradually lose their hostility to the trip and to their father, and when, at last, James wins spontaneous praise from Mr. Ramsay for his steering, we feel amends have been made for the thwarted trip of years ago. When Mr. Ramsay, far out at sea, looks back at the house and sees it as a “frail blue shape like the vapour of something which had burnt itself away,” the unhealthy spirit of an irrecoverable past would seem to have been exorcised, Mrs. Ramsay's spirit has triumphed, and the way is clear for a renewal of the relationship between Mr. Ramsay and his children.

Just as the voyage begins with the travellers ill at ease and uncertain of its outcome, so does the painting of the picture. “Here was Lily, at forty four, wasting her time, unable to do a thing, standing there, playing at painting, playing at the one thing one did not play at, and it was all Mrs. Ramsay's fault. She was dead. The step where she used to sit was empty.” Unlike Lily's first picture, Mrs. Ramsay is no longer its subject, instead of “the triangular purple shape” there are only “empty steps.” It is an overwhelming sense of an inner emptiness that Lily calls upon Mrs. Ramsay to fill, to the point at which she cries her name aloud, demanding why life is so short, so inexplicable. Perhaps then “the space would fill; those empty flourishes would form into shape; if they shouted loud enough Mrs. Ramsay would return.” Her cry is heard. “Some wave of white went over the window pane. The air must have stirred some flounce in the room. … Mrs. Ramsay—it was part of her perfect goodness—sat there quite simply, in the chair, flicked her needles to and fro, knitted her reddish-brown stocking, cast her shadow on the step. … And Mr. Ramsay? She wanted him.” Mrs. Ramsay, absent from the party to the lighthouse, absent from the picture, has returned to animate them both, making the past part of the present. In their respective ways James and Lily come to realize that no thing is one thing; the lighthouse is a visionary gleam and also a tower stark and straight, barred with black and white; tables and chairs can be on a level with ordinary experience, they can also be miraculous. The voyage is made, the picture completed; life and art are held in equipoise.

This would seem to be the formal design and intention of the last section of the novel; the problem is that it remains like that. Even in such a bald description as I have tried to give, some of the difficulties that Virginia Woolf has had to face in this section can be suspected.

The first and most obvious is with the character of Mr. Ramsay himself. The whole treatment of the voyage, delicately conveyed as it is, is that of moral discovery, the children for the father, he for them. But this must, of necessity, involve the reader in a kind of knowledge about Mr. Ramsay which he does not possess. On the boat the children gaze at him, eager to do his bidding. “But he did not ask them anything. He sat and looked at the island and he might be thinking, We perished, each alone, or he might be thinking, I have reached it. I have found it; but he said nothing.” That description of Mr. Ramsay is entirely appropriate to the way in which Mr. Ramsay has been presented in the first half of the novel, but here it comes across as an evasion. His silence is very different from the silences that punctuated the reading scene with his wife, different because the inarticulateness of that scene is accompanied at every point and felt through the sensibility of Mrs. Ramsay. That guiding presence has now been withdrawn. Clearly, however, Virginia Woolf requires us to take Mr. Ramsay's approving “Well done” to James as a moral climax, a transcending of his egoism. But for this to be imaginatively communicated it would require a greater insight, or more accurately a different kind of insight, into Mr. Ramsay's character than anything we have been previously given. We have a climax without a context, and so far as the reader is concerned, trust has to do the work of recognition.

If an inadequacy between climax and context is felt in Mr. Ramsay's gesture of approval, it is felt more acutely in the presentation of Lily Briscoe painting on the lawn, not least because it is here that Virginia Woolf seems to want the main stress of the section to fall.

In the first section we have seen how deeply interfused Lily's reactions to her painting are with her reactions to William Bankes, Mrs. Ramsay, and the family in general. In the present section, the picture is again central and the terms in which she thinks about it are familiar. “The question was of some relation between those masses. She had borne it in her mind all these years.” She begins to paint “… lightly and swiftly pausing, striking, she scored her canvas with brown running nervous lines which had no sooner settled there than they enclosed (she felt it looming out at her) a space. … For what could be more formidable than that space?” So far as this section of the novel is concerned, “that space” is too formidable. Here Virginia Woolf has not discovered a way of describing the painting which will enable her to put it within a psychological or metaphysical context. The picture remains stubbornly a canvas on a frame, the problems it sets, aesthetic ones of mass and line, the space, a vacancy. In a remark like the following, where Lily is recalling Mrs. Ramsay looking out to sea, we detect Virginia Woolf seeking an intensity of meaning, and obtaining only an exclamatory tone:

Is it a boat? Is it a cork? … Lily repeated, turning back, reluctantly to her canvas. Heaven be praised for it, the space remained, she thought, taking up her brush again.

The painting, the picture are being pressed into an imaginative service they cannot sustain. We can feel the same thing in the sharp interrogation and assertion of the passage in which, with the gnomically silent Mr. Carmichael, Lily feels that if they both “demanded an explanation, why was [life] so short, why was it so inexplicable, said it with violence … then … the space would fill; those empty flourishes would form into shape; if they shouted loud enough Mrs. Ramsay would return.” The tone would seem to indicate the extravagance, the hopelessness of desire, but Mrs. Ramsay does “return.” It is the theatricality—the “light stuff” behind the window, “the stroke of luck” causing “the odd-shaped triangular shadow” to fall across the step—which indicates how far the novelist's reach, at this stage, has exceeded her grasp.

In this last section of the novel Virginia Woolf has set up too rigid a structure, so that the impression it gives is that of a steely dialectic, between Mr. Ramsay's voyage to the lighthouse on the one hand and Lily painting her picture on the other. In consequence, everything becomes emblematic, every gesture representative and significant. The fluidity and particularity so characteristic of the first section yield here to the overriding pattern. Looking about her, Lily sees Mr. Ramsay stride past talking to himself, “and like everything else this strange morning the words became symbols, wrote themselves all over the grey-green walls.”

In making the influence of the past so pervasive, the section comes over as an epilogue to a tale already told, an epilogue whose function it is to make plain, to interrogate, to qualify, but not to bring imaginative life and bring it more abundantly. So we find monologues which seem to break free from a controlling dramatic context in their bleak explicitness. “What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in with the years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illustrations, matches struck in the dark. …” It is not the assertive explicitness of this as such that is troubling, but rather the loss of imaginative pressure that has made it possible. The fiction fades, and Lily's voice becomes interchangeable with the author's. To see why this is happening, it is useful to look at the short middle section of the novel, which begins to pose the problem of whose voice is speaking.

Virginia Woolf was in no doubt about what she wished to do in the section titled “Time Passes” and under no illusion about the difficulty of doing it. “Here,” she writes in her diary, “is the most difficult abstract piece of writing—I have to give an empty house, no people's characters, the passage of time, all eyeless and featureless with nothing to cling to. …”⁶ She is to set about the creation of vacancy; the dense life so vividly recreated in “The Window” is to give way to its opposite, give way, in Donne's words to, “absence, darkness, death; things which are not.”⁷ It is a hazardous enterprise particularly for a novelist, raising a problem not only about content, but, more radically, about whose voice is to be heard by the reader. It cannot be that of any individual character and it cannot, in the nature of things, be that of an omniscient narrator. Virginia Woolf seeks to overcome the difficulty by employing not one voice but many.

There is the harshly factual:

(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).

The gently elegiac:

Loveliness and stillness clasped hands in the bedroom, and among the shrouded jugs and sheeted chairs, even the prying of the wind, and the soft nose of the clammy sea airs, rubbing, snuffling, iterating, and reiterating their questions—“Will you fade? Will you perish?”—scarcely disturbed the peace.

The apocalyptic:

… gigantic chaos streaked with lightening could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason and mounted one on top of another, and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight … in idiot games, until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself.

Certainly, passages like this come across as having no specific voice, but in the way that pastiche has no “voice.” If there is anonymity, it is the anonymity of a ventriloquist where the manner of the performance becomes its own end. The style which seeks to escape style becomes all style.

With the reassembly of the house party we might imagine that the authorial presence would be easier to modify. But the questions raised by “Time Passes” are, even in terms of the narrative, too insistent to allow the fiction simply to resume its course. In the final section, “The Lighthouse,” the author is under a dual obligation which could be divisive. On the one hand there is the obligation to a specific narrative history initiated in part one; on the other, there is the obligation to questions raised in part two by “the passage of time, all eyeless and featureless.” No matter how we describe this difference, what seems clear is that the first two sections of the novel are juxtaposed in a way that makes the structural effort of the final section one of mediation. Lily Briscoe as a friend of the Ramsay family will help to carry the narrative forward; Lily Briscoe as a painter will enable the novelist to enter her fiction with a new directness and allow free play to that question with which the last section begins: “What does it mean then, what can it all mean?”

IV

Questions of “meaning” seem far away when we come across the first mention of the novel in the diary on 14 May 1925:

I’m now all on the strain with desire to stop journalism and get on To The Lighthouse. This is going to be fairly short; to have father's character done complete in it; and mother's and St. Ives; and childhood; and all the usual things I try to put in—life, death, etc. But the centre is father's character.⁸

The autobiographical emphasis is firm and unequivocal and though we can observe marked shifts of emphasis, the intention becomes the deed, and “father's character … mother's and St. Ives and childhood” are the material that make up the opening section and give it its memorability. We can judge the degree of personal involvement present in this re-creation when we recall Virginia Woolf's remark that she used “to think of father and mother daily” and that writing about them had laid their spirits to rest for her. Nevertheless, that involvement had become transfigured in the absorbed intentness of her re-creation, and though Mrs. Ramsay was, according to Vanessa Bell, “an amazing portrait of mother,” she was also for Virginia Woolf a person whose sensibility allowed the author to explore her created world completely. We are not surprised to find her noting in her diary during the writing of this part of the novel, “I live entirely in it, and come to the surface rather obscurely. …”⁹

The very completeness of Virginia Woolf's imaginative re-creation of her parents carries within it, for her, its own skepticism so that she is driven on beyond it into asking what such re-creation means, what value it possesses, what can turn “an absence” into “a presence.”

“But the centre is father's character.” It is here of course that the novel departs most markedly from the scenario of intentions, departs not simply in its detail, but in the nature of its concern. The process of writing has taken her out of a re-created past, however vivid, into the obscurity and uncertainty of the present. “The centre,” if we can think of the resolution of the novel in this way, is not to be found in any object of her imagination, but in looking at the act of imagining itself.

The recollection of her parents, the mutability of life, the affirmation and the limitations of art—we can see all these elements at work in the novel, but what we also see is that every extension of the elements has created new difficulties, and it has created them because it has involved the author more and more directly until there is nothing to separate the novelist from the novel. The structure has been worn thin trying to hold together a fiction which is really completed with Mrs. Ramsay's death and a fiction about the artist which emerges out of the contemplation of that death. But for Virginia Woolf these two fictions must be one; they are the story of the writing of this novel. What makes them discordant is that her imagination can no longer make coherent what her experience has given her as fact. And when Lily draws a line “there, in the centre” of her canvas to complete her picture, Virginia Woolf must do the same for the novel; it is not a conclusion, it is a line drawn across a space, a mark indicating a break in a work in progress.

The closing of that final space, bringing the painting and the novel simultaneously to their completion, concludes a treatment of space which, throughout the novel, has provided a dramatic notation for the constantly shifting involvement of the author.

In “The Window” Virginia Woolf, in re-creating her past, explored the resonance of the space between people, space which both extended and guarded the individual, where feelings could find wordless expression, where speech could become gesture. That she was able to do this so triumphantly is testimony to the confidence with which she knew and felt that vanished world in a way that allowed her to become a loving but impersonal mediator. In “Time Passes” she seeks to strip that world of all its detail, and in place of the life-enhancing space she creates the space of emptiness and decay, death and the void. Having to write in no voice, she tries to write in many, but we begin to hear only her own, as questions start to form themselves, meanings begin to be insisted upon. The multiple voices of “Time Passes” become a dramatized presence in “The Lighthouse.” In Lily's voice we can hear the author's. Space is now no longer a metaphor, “lying about the heart of things,” it is there on the canvas, an invitation and a challenge, and “what could be more formidable?” The difficulties of the painting (“the question was of some relation between those masses”) and the difficulties of writing the novel (“how to create a combination of interest at the end?”) become virtually interchangeable. Spaces which, at the beginning of the novel, were created by the richness of its texture, become, by the end, gaps in the texture itself. But such a texture, we have to go on to say, could only have been created by an imagination of such purity of intent that its every creation contained within it its own skepticism. And it is in the unflinching acting out of that struggle that we see the difficulty of saying “I” for Virginia Woolf was the more radical difficulty of finding the “I” she had to express. To The Lighthouse may not have been wholly successful in this, but it enabled her to see what was at issue in such a way that the rest of her fiction would echo with Lily's questions as she painted her canvas and contemplated its “formidable space.”

Notes

1. “Reading,” Collected Essays, 2 vols. (London, 1966), 2: 29.

2. A Writer's Diary (London, 1953), p. 138.

3. “After To The Lighthouse,” Scrutiny 10 no. 3 (January 1942): 207.

4. “The Anatomy of Fiction,” Collected Essays, 2: 138.

5. Diary, p. 99.

6. Ibid., pp. 76-77.

7. “A Nocturnall upon S. Lucie's Day.”

8. Diary, pp. 76-77.

9. Ibid., p. 85. It is interesting to note how close in feeling the novel is to the mood she describes in the memoir she wrote in 1939. “Until I was in my forties … the presence of my mother obsessed me. I could hear her voice, see her, imagine what she would do or say as I went about my day's doings. She was one of the invisible presences who after all play so important a part in every life. … Then one day walking round Tavistock Square I made up, as I sometimes make up my books, To the Lighthouse; in a great involuntary rush. … I wrote very quickly; and when it was written, I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her.” “A Sketch of the Past,” printed in Moments of Being (London, 1976), pp. 80-81. The whole memoir is of considerable interest in describing the emotional background of the novel.