To the Lighthouse

To the Lighthouse is a book of interrelationships among people. Those who reject To the Lighthouse as inferior to Mrs. Dalloway because it offers no one with half the memorable lucidity of Clarissa Dalloway must fail to perceive its larger and, artistically, more difficult aims. They must fail to notice the richer qualities of mind and imagination and emotion which Mrs. Woolf, perhaps not wanting them, omitted from Mrs. Dalloway the story which opens brilliantly and carries on through a magnificent interlude ends with too little force and expressiveness. At any rate the rest of the book has its excellencies . . . Mrs. Woolf makes use of her remarkable method of characterization, a method not based on observation or personal experience, but purely synthetic, purely creational Neither Clarissa nor Mrs. Ramsay has anything autobiographical about her. It is, I think, in the superb interlude called Time Passes that Mrs. Woolf reaches the most impressive height of the book . . . It is inferior to Mrs. Dalloway in the degree to which its aims are achieved; it is superior in the magnitude of the aims themselves.