It may be sacrilege to call myself a) a feminist and b) an avid reader and to have just read my first ever Virginia Woolf but there it is. I finished To the Lighthouse this morning and to be honest, I found it rather weary, beautifully realized and wonderful use of language but weary. I generally don’t have a lot of patience for sincere verbosity; the kind of flowery language that takes itself entirely too seriously; give me Nabokov and his tongue-in-cheek pompousness any day, but I digress (I’m sure that in the life of this blog there will be plenty of opportunities to rave about my love, Vladimir).

I did really like the subtly of the characters; especially that they were not static but would waver in their loyalties, in their preferences for each other depending on their moods. All the characters were so well-fleshed out despite for some Woolf barely dedicated two descriptive lines — an ability that I generally see only in short-stories.

The simplicity of the story was another thing that I enjoyed; that Woolf could weave out an entire family’s dynamic in less than two hundred pages and barely forty-eight hours of actual time while keeping the plot both a minor element and at the fore-front of the novel.

Hmm, I guess that the heaviness of the descriptive language is heavily outweighed by what I enjoyed of the novel so consider this a reversal of my initial rating. I quite enjoyed To the Lighthouse. So there.