Books: Mrs. Woolf's Way

Mrs. Woolf s Way

The Story* is divided into three parts. The first, situated like the other two in the Hebrides home of English family Ramsay, includes the hours of a summer day from mid-afternoon to bedtime. In it is regarded with an astute and penetrating scrutiny the character of Mrs. Ramsay as reflected in her children, guests, husband.

In the second part, time passes. "The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it. The long night seemed to have set in; the trifling airs, nibbling, the clammy breaths, fumbling, seemed to have triumphed. The saucepan had rusted and the mat decayed. Toads had nosed their way in. Idly, aimlessly, the swaying shawl swung to and fro. . . . Poppies sowed themselves among the dahlias; the lawn waved with long grass; giant artichokes towered among roses; a fringed carnation flowered among the cabbages; while the gentle tapping of a weed at the window had become, on winters' nights, a drumming from sturdy trees and thorned briers which made the whole room green in summer."

In the last glimpse, ten years later, with Mrs. Ramsay and two of her children dead, the others undertake a last visit to the lighthouse. Like the music of a fugue, this movement touches the themes of the first, catches them in new cadences and changed echoes. The group of people for whom Mrs. Ramsay had been the axis, whirl and drift like the specks of a nebula. In a curious key, full of sharps, Author Woolf produces the effect of an enormous change in life where little change is apparent.

The Significance of Author Woolf's last novel, Mrs. Dalloway, was that her "stream of consciousness" method was not only startlingly original but startlingly successful as well. Mrs. Dalloway observed the classic unities of drama, concentrating on one woman, one day in her life. In To the Lighthouse the stream-of-consciousness technique is present as before but its presence is subtler, more diffused. The author's scrutiny falls, not on one but on many personalities. Now, in her brilliant offensive on the human soul, she does not perpetrate an open advance. Weaving, stalking, spying from thickets, she discovers the nature of her prey. The actual capture she leaves to those who, reading her book, are her companions in the chase.

The Author in her critical studies, The Common Reader, made it apparent that her analytical abilities outweighed her previous achievements in fiction, Jacob's Room, Night and Day. But Mrs. Dalloway and this book mark her as one who has not only mastered the novel but extended its function.

Mrs. Woolf is the youngest daughter of the late Sir Leslie Stephen. She married Leonard Sidney Woolf, literary Editor of the Nation and Athenaeum, in 1912. They live at Hogarth House, an old place in Richmond, spending their quiet time alike at gardening and fine writing and printing.

*THE GLORIOUS ADVENTURE—Richard Halliburton—Bobbs-Merrill ($5). *TO THE LIGHTHOUSE—Virginia Woolf—Harcourt, Brace (§2.50).