On Woolf and silence, see also Howard Harper, Between Language and Silence: The Novels of Virginia Woolf (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982). Patricia Ondek Laurence, The Reading of Silence: Virginia Woolf in the English Tradition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 12. See Raoul Mortly, From Word to Silence especially vol I, The Rise and Fall of Logos (Bonn: Hannstein, 1986), 110–124 where he analyzes the “the late Greek pessimism about the efficacy of language.” Josephine O’Brien Schaefer, The Three-Fold Nature of Reality in the Novels of Virginia Woolf (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1965), 138. Peter Walsh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 107. Marc Froment-Meurice, Solitudes: From Rimbaud to Heidegger, tr. See also Elizabeth Abel, Virgina Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 68–83. Gabriel Josipovici (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1976), 149–185. Norton, 1995), 381.įor some divergent views see, for example John Mepham, “Figures of Desire: Narration and Fiction in To the Lighthouse,” in The Modern English Novel: The Reader, the Writer and the Work, ed. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors.

And over the last five or six decades, as To the Lighthouse has generated increasing critical attention, most commentators have also been confident, as a recent biographer has written, that the novel “ends on a note of triumph.” A number of critics, however, have become uncomfortable with that judgment and have suggested that the ending (indeed, the whole novel) is more indeterminate. 1 Most readers recognize that the novel is preoccupied with the difficulty of human communication and with the relentless striving for meaning and unity, especially by Lily Briscoe, whose painting (both the process and on the canvas) so dominates the narrative. T o the Lighthouse is probably the most analyzed of Woolf’s novels, and over the years that commentary has taken a certain shape.

Lily briscoe to the lighthouse