Skip to content
'To the Lighthouse' by Virginia Woolf episode artwork

Dec 8, 2025 18 min

'To the Lighthouse' by Virginia Woolf

from Conversations in Philosophy Hosted by London Review of Books

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. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrcip⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingscip⁠ Read more in the LRB: Jacqueline Rose: Where's Woolf? https://lrb.me/cipep13woolf1 Virgina Woolf: The Symbol https://lrb.me/cipep13woolf2 John Bayley: Superchild https://lrb.me/cipep13woolf3

Episode details come from the podcast's RSS feed.

Embed this episode

Ready to play

'To the Lighthouse' by Virginia Woolf

0:00 18:13

No transcript yet.

Requests help us decide what to transcribe next.

Frequently asked questions

How long is this episode of Conversations in Philosophy?

This episode is 18 minutes long.

When was this Conversations in Philosophy episode published?

This episode was published on December 8, 2025.

Can I download this Conversations in Philosophy episode?

Yes. Use the download control on the episode player to save the publisher-provided media file.