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Updated July 31, 1998
Created July 31, 1998 from material supplied by Denise Brown Taylor.
How did readers respond to To the Lighthouse when it was first published?
TTL sold more copies than her previous novels --- 3,873 copies in the first year. The Seafarers' Educational Society bought 2 copies. From the success of TTL, Virginia acquired a motor-car.
VW perceived TTL to be her best novel yet. Vanessa's reaction was what VW longed for. In a letter to VW Vanessa writes:
"Anyhow it seems to me in the first part of the book you have given a portrait of mother which is more like her to me than anything I could ever have conceived of as possible. It is almost painful to have her so raised from the dead. You have made one feel the extraordinary beauty of her character, which must be the most difficult thing in the world to do. It was like meeting her again with oneself grown up & on equal terms & it seems to me the most astonishing feat of creation to have been able to see her in such a way -- You have given father too I think as clearly, but perhaps, I may be wrong, that isnt quite so difficult. There is more to catch hold of. Still it seems to me to be the only thing about him which ever gave a true idea. So you see as far as portrait painting goes you seem to me to be a supreme artist & it is so shattering to find oneself face to face with those two again that I can hardly consider anything else. In fact for the last two days I have hardly been able to attend to daily life."
Hussey notes that Vanessa also wrote wondering, "how Adrian will like James! Perhaps you'll finish his psychoanalysis for him. I shouldn't be surprised" (309).
Roger Fry also had this to say in a letter to VW after reading TTL.
"So you won't get criticism --- only you can't help my thinking it the best thing you've ever done, actually better than Mrs. Dalloway. You're no longer bothered by the simultaneity of things and go backwards and forwards in time with an extraordinary enrichment of each moment of consciousness."
Clive Bell wrote to Vanessa that VW had the right to be sublimely happy "as well she may be -- her book is a masterpiece" (Bell 129). The critics for the most part at that time shared the view. However in a letter on June 5, 1927 to Violet Dickinson, who liked some of TTL, that "The Hebrides are very angry" (Nicholson & Trautman 389). It seems they did not like her portrayal of the fauna & flora of the Hebrides and felt it totally inaccurate (Bell 129). Since she had based it on experiences and her memories of Cornwall, there were several inconsistencies/inaccuracies concerning the setting of Hebrides.
As noted in Nicholson & Trautman's collection of VW's letters, Roger Bennett wrote in the June 23, 1928 edition of the Evening Standard:
"I must say, despite my notorious grave reservations concerning Virginia Woolf, that the most original of the bunch is TTL.... Her character drawing has improved. Mrs. Ramsay almost amounts to a complete person" (395n)