‘To the Lighthouse’ by Virginia Woolf: Contemporary Reviews (1927)

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse was published in May 1927 in both Britain and the United States. The publication of Mrs. Dalloway a year earlier had secured Virginia Woolf’s reputation as an experimental writer. To the Lighthouse was, consequently, widely reviewed in the British and American press in the months following its publication. Most reviewers praised Mrs. Woolf’s genius, although they found evidence of it in varied aspects of the book. For some, the book was a flawed masterpiece, although they did not agree on what the flaws were. A few recalcitrant reviewers failed to see anything of significance in Woolf’s new book at all. This collection of contemporary reviews, by reviewers including Louis Kronenberger, Conrad Aiken, Edwin Muir, Zona Gale, Ruth Sucknow and Arnold Bennett, is sourced from the Woolf Online web site. It includes standalone reviews of To the Lighthouse, extracts from longer reviews of new fiction, and in the last section, Edwin Clark’s full New York Times review of new fiction published in the first half of the year. Listeners may be surprised at just how varied 30 reviews of a single book can be! (Summary by Phil Benson)