Ellie Mitchell: thoughts on To the lighthouse (1927)
Ellie Mitchell will lecture on To the Lighthouse in this year’s summer course. Our theme is Virginia Woolf: Writing Life. Here she offers some thoughts about her lecture.
(I am making up ‘To the Lighthouse’ – the sea is to be heard all through it. I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant “novel”. A new ——— by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?)
In parenthesis, as if speaking an aside to her future self, Woolf enters these thoughts into her diary during the summer of 1925. Like a seashell held up to a child’s ear, To the Lighthouse appears here in its earliest stages as but a receptacle for the sound of the sea – and indeed it is specifically the sea of Woolf’s childhood summers in Cornwall which is to be ‘heard all through it’. The novel is saturated by these summers, suffused by Woolf’s memories of them and by the feeling which she was later to refer to as the ‘ecstasy’ of ‘lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery at St Ives’, and ‘hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach; and then breaking, one, two, one, two, behind a yellow blind’.
Of all of Woolf’s novels, To the Lighthouse draws most deeply from the well of Woolf’s own experience. In it, we find Woolf writing both from and to life, by which I mean she is both memorialising and fictionalising at the same time. She is both dredging up and, as she writes here, ‘making up’.
My lecture for this year’s Literature Cambridge Summer Course on Woolf and Writing Life will explore how and why the novel combines these two processes of writing from and writing to life. It will ask, ultimately, how far this combination results, as Woolf writes here, in the discovery of a new kind of book which needs a new name. Is the novel an elegy? Or is it, perhaps, a eulogy? Does it invent some new variation on the theme of these forms?
Focusing on the portrait which the novel paints of Woolf’s mother, I will explore how faithful this portrait is, how much is invention, how much is interpretation, and if it matters. Mrs Ramsay appears in Lily Briscoe’s painting as a ‘triangular purple shape’, and this lecture accordingly considers her character as a trinity of mother, wife, and woman. How do these roles come into contact? How do they conflict? & what does Woolf have to say about the expectations placed upon each by the late-Victorian, upper-middle-class, intellectual culture of which her own mother was both producer and product?
Ten years ago, at Cambridge, I wrote my first undergraduate dissertation on To the Lighthouse. Little did I know then where that dissertation would lead, or that I would still be thinking and writing and talking about the novel ten years later. It’s a real joy to still be doing so. I am eagerly looking forward to this summer’s course on Woolf and Writing Life, and to the supervision discussions which I hope will grow out of my lecture. I find that there are always new discoveries to make in To the Lighthouse, new patterns to trace, new lines to be drawn – ‘there, in the centre’.
Like Lily Briscoe, everyone has their ‘vision’ of the novel, and like Mrs Ramsay, the novel itself needs at least ‘fifty pairs of eyes’ to be seen in all its multiplicity. I look forward to the magic of discussing the novel with the wonderful community of readers which always forms on Literature Cambridge’s summer courses, to combining our individual visions and discovering new views on a long loved –––– by Virginia Woolf.
Ellie Mitchell’s lecture is entitled To the Lighthouse: Writing from Life, Writing to Life.
Virginia Woolf: Writing Life. Live online summer course, 10-14 July 2025.
Virginia Woolf: Writing Life. Summer course in Cambridge, 20-25 July 2025.
Bookings close on 20 June.
