How to Read in To the Lighthouse

Like Lawrence, Virginia Woolf wrote extensively about education, touting alternative pedagogies to the hierarchical British system. This chapter traces the largely unexplored continuities between To the Lighthouse, which is suffused with scenes of reading and references to teaching, and the lecture Woolf was writing concurrently: “How Should One Read a Book?” The talk, which lays out Woolf’s ideas about the phenomenon of reading and the value of literature, would later become an essay that would close out her second Common Reader. It equates the process of reading with the process of writing, or the consumption of art with the creation of art. The chapter first outlines the principles of responsive engagement that Woolf offers in her lecture and then shows the revised version of this philosophy in To the Lighthouse. By the end of the novel, as the academic Mr. Ramsay sits in a boat, reading a book, and the artist Lily Briscoe shapes her vision, Woolf has provided her reader with a set of interactive lessons about the novel as “a device for becoming”: a structure that teaches processes of layering, composing, and shaping that provide both transcendent pleasure and moral education.