“Mrs. Woolf’s Way.” Time. May 30,1927, pp. 39-40.

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
____
* TO THE LIGHTHOUSE—Virginia Woolf—
Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

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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. 

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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