Hanne's blog

This book was hard to read. Long sentences where you have to read to the end of a sentence several lines long, to the "she thought" or the like, at the end, to understand what is going on. Complicated thoughts and emotions and very little actual plot.

It is a novel, but kind of a biographic novel about her parents, I think.

The larger part of the book takes place in one day where Mrs. Ramsay is sitting with her youngest child James at the window in their summer house, while interacting with the people she has staying, with her husband, and her children, being the center of everything, even if her husband is the one who demands attention and encouragement all the time.

We learn a lot about her relationship to her husband and children, and to men in general, and about the way he dominates the whole family with his need to be praised and admired and have all her attention to a degree so the younger children hates him for it.

I think the youngest daughter, Cam, is Virginia herself. We hear very little about her until the end but we get an impression of the family she grew up in, and how very very difficult that father must have been to a sensitive child after the mother died.

The lighthouse is at an island close to their summer house and one can see the light from the house. It plays a role in Mrs. Ramsay's thoughts as kind of a stable anchor always there, and planning a trip to the lighthouse also plays a role in the book. But it is not about the lighthouse at all. It is about the going, or not going there.