Dear Virginia Woolf, With shame I must admit that until now I had only read your essays.

Just as your protagonist Mrs. Ramsay asks, "What have I done with my life?", I too must ask what have I done till now without reading your fiction? Though I have always been drawn to you, sometimes for absurd reasons such as sharing the same birthday, I have not read more of your work. However, that has all changed, for I am in the midst of To the Lighthouse. I absolutely adore this novel because of its genius. Wondrous lines of free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness, all written in nicely fashioned lyrical lines, fill this novel and make it both pleasing and enlightening to read. Your essay "Modern Fiction," a criticism of H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and John Galsworthy, notes that their writing is "concerned not with the spirit but with the body" (MF 2149). You state that the "form of fiction most in vogue more often misses than secures the thing we seek" (MF 2150). And, as you so eloquently state, "Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end" (MF 2150). It is the luminous halo that you show so well in the lyrical arrangements of the brain-talk (as I call the various ways of protraying inner thoughts of characters). For example, the striking scene of Mrs. Ramsay reading the story to her son James is interspersed with all sorts of thoughts along the way. While there is this bodily action of plot, the inner life of Mrs. Ramsay tells us more. While reading aloud, the passage slips into Mrs. Ramsay's mind nimbly. Consider this excerpt: "'Well, what does she want then?' said the Flounder?" And where were they now? Mrs Ramsay wondered, reading and thinking, quite easily, both at the same time; for the story of the Fisherman and his Wife was like the bass gently accompanying a tune, which now and then ran up unexpectedly into the melody. And what should she be told? If nothing happened, she would have to speak seriously to Minta" (TLH 56). Three voices whirl around here: Mrs. Ramsay's physical voice, the narrator, and Mrs. Ramsay's inner voice or mind. This third voice adds a level of life that is not always present in narrative. The narrator's third point account is peeled back, and we see into the head of Mrs. Ramsay.

The beauty of your language and figures of speech also compel me to read more. When serving soup, Mrs. Ramsay wonders "how she had ever felt any emotion or affection for [her husband]" (TLH 83). Instead, she "had a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of everything, as she helped the soup, as if there was an eddy -there- and one could be in it, or one could be out of it, and she was out of it" (TLH 83). She is performing a domestic chore that she seems to increasingly grow weary of. The comparison of her life to the whirling of soup when being ladled is a poignant analogy. The word eddy means water that moves in circular pattern against the current. Often when ladling, there is an circular motion that forms around the ladle. The soup seems to represent Mrs. Ramsay's current life, and her life seems to be a circular life of domesticity that drains her. Furthermore, her husband, the distanced unhappy philosopher, who feels his scholarly life is hampered by being a husband and father, seems to drain her most acutely. With the brain-talk and striking similes and analogies throughout your novel, we see that life, in all its luminosity and truth, is presented to us. Instead of heavy plot, we see an inner life of high points, low points, love, antagonism, hatred, ambivalence and contradictions. You state so well that the "mind receives a myriad impressions-[...] an incessant shower of innumerable atoms [...][that] shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday"(MF 2150). So, my interest builds through these impressions on the page. The action of the narrative might be cloaked by the presentation of all the impressions. Yet, just as someone places hands over her ears and can then hear her own breath, the placing of impressions over action allows us to see the life of the story. I am also eager to see how Mrs. Ramsay deals with the Angel speaking in her ear. The soup scene seems to be the moment where of the novel where the protagonist might begin to resent that Angel of the house that you had to kill off. I must read on. Thank you, Mrs. Woolf, for your fiction. It has added nutrients to my life today. Sincerely, Chuck Knight Citations

Woolf, Virginia. "Modern Fiction." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Eds. M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000. 2149 - 2150. Print. Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. 1927. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1992.