It has taken me 59 years and 6 months to reach this point where I have finally read Mrs Dalloway and now To The Lighthouse. It is of course nearly a hundred years since these two were published. And I have finally caught up with Virginia.
I thought Mrs Dalloway was a tour de force of sustained eloquence, psychological incite, and dexterity in composition but To The Lighthouse is for me an almost divine revelation — even though I am an atheist.
The story is simple but the exposition of that story about one family and their friends who spend time together in their holiday cottage and attempt to visit that lighthouse is a masterpiece of sustained visual metaphors of naturalism and process and human observation that raises the ordinary human act into the mythic and the natural world into the rhythm of the eternal.