The philosophy of Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse’

The LRB Podcast

London Review of Books

Society & Culture

4.4 • 579 Ratings

🗓️ 8 April 2026

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1908, Virginia Woolf wrote that she hoped to revolutionise the novel and ‘capture multitudes of things at present fugitive’. ‘To the Lighthouse’ (1927) marks perhaps her fullest realisation of the novel as philosophical enterprise, and not simply because one of its central characters is engaged with the problem of ‘subject and object and the nature of reality’. In the final episode of their series, Jonathan and James consider different ways of reading Woolf’s great novel: as a satirical portrait of her father through Mr Ramsay, as a study of creative expression through Lily Briscoe, or as a mystical, Platonic quest in which form and style respond to philosophical propositions, and the truth of human experience is to be found in movement, conversation and laughter. Get 50% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings when you use the code 'woolf' at checkout: https://lrb.me/woolfcrpod (Note: this offer is only available on the link above, through our partner Supporting Cast, and not if you subscribe directly in Apple Podcasts, but you can still listen in Apple Podcasts if you subscribe in Supporting Cast.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Last year on the LRB's Close Readings podcast, Jonathan Ray and James Wood discussed philosophical
0:06.4	style in the work of writers from Soren Kierkegaard to Iris Murdoch. Today, we're bringing
0:12.0	you one of the most popular episodes of Conversations in Philosophy on Virginia Woolf, in which
0:17.5	James and Jonathan consider to the Lighthouse as a philosophical novel.
0:22.1	You can listen to the full series now and to all our other series,
0:25.6	covering literature, philosophy and history from ancient Greece to the present day,
0:29.7	including James Woods' new series on realism on the Close Reading's podcast.
0:34.8	And for April only, you can get 50% off a 12-month subscription if you use the code
0:40.0	at checkout. This offer is only available through the link in the description, and not if you
0:45.6	subscribe directly in Apple Podcasts. Hello, and welcome to Conversations in Philosophy, a close
0:52.5	reading series from the London Review of Books.
0:55.5	I'm James Wood, staff writer at the New Yorker and occasional contributor to the LRB, and I'm joined
1:01.5	as ever by Jonathan Ray, philosopher and regular contributor for the London Review of Books.
1:07.7	Hello, James. Hello, Jonathan. So today we are discussing in our last session of what's been a wonderful series for both of us,
1:18.9	at least I speak for myself, we're discussing Virginia Woolf's novel of 1927 to the
1:27.4	lighthouse. It's interesting to go back and
1:32.8	look at Wolf's diaries at the time that she was writing to the lighthouse. She'd had a nervous
1:40.4	breakdown in 1926. It was a period of great strain. And she tentatively seems to be aware
1:48.9	of having pulled something off, something magnificent off as she finishes to the lighthouse.
1:56.1	But it's all uncertain and provisional, and she hands it to Leonard as ever and needs Leonard's
2:01.6	her husband's imprimatur in some way to reassure her that she's really achieved something.
2:10.6	So here she is writing this beautiful novel, which is, as many of our listeners will know,
	...

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