The Far Side of Disaster:
On Virginia Woolf’s Unacknowledged Plague Novel To the Lighthouse

It’s been five years since the End of the World, and yet here we still are. Increasingly, I’ve found myself trying to understand what it might mean to write past the apocalypse, and whether or not the usual stories we turn to explain disaster still hold up. How do you continue to tell stories about the catastrophe when it’s all but disappeared into your rearview mirror?

I spent the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic reading Daniel Defoe’s 1722 book A Journal of the Plague Year, hoping to find some perspective on what was happening. I wasn’t alone. A friend revisited Thomas Dekker’s The Wonderfull Yeare, an account of the plague of 1603 (“wonderful” here not in the sense of delight but astonishment, like the “awe” that lies in “awesome”). Others, quarantined in their homes, turned to movies like Outbreak and Contagion, the latter quickly becoming one of the most streamed movies on iTunes.

A Journal of the Plague Year is a novel, though it doesn’t really feel like it. Rather than follow a Robinson Crusoe, Tom Jones, or Tristram Shandy, A Journal of the Plague Year’s plot is not the plot of human action. It’s the story of disease, moving deliberately through the progression of this plague from its first ominous signs, its gradually intensifying outbreak and the near-breakdown in society, to the glimmers of hope finally as the disease begins to abate. There are no heroes here, no depictions of great work by those fighting an implacable foe. There is only the action of those who are trying not to die, those waiting to die, and those who die.

If there was a comfort to reading this at the time, it was because these stories promised that, at least on some level, this would all end someday. The pandemic would burn itself out, and a new normal would return. These stories seemed to offer a way of getting a hold on the unfolding tragedy by giving it shape and promising some kind of end. They took the endless uncertainty of one’s daily life and promised a conclusion. But while this structure made sense in early 2020, it’s felt increasingly alien to me in the years since. It is, after all, the story of a pathogen, not the story of us. And it offers little about what happens after the end of the End of the World.

So perhaps for that reason, in the years since our own plague, I keep returning instead to Virginia Woolf’s 1927 masterpiece, To the Lighthouse. Mrs. Dalloway is in many ways her attempt to make sense of life in the immediate aftermath of the End, but To the Lighthouse takes a longer view. It’s a novel that makes no mention of the pandemic she lived through, and yet its structure—like a beautiful thing broken roughly in two—reflects the world in the long wake of disaster better than any other novel I know.

While not structured around the arc of plague, To the Lighthouse is centered around a traumatic absence that can’t be approached directly.

It is not, on its face, about plague. The Spanish flu, which raged from 1918 to 1920 and killed some 500 million people, does not even merit a casual mention, as it does in Mrs. Dalloway (Clarissa’s heart, we’re told, has been “affected, they said, by influenza”). This despite the fact that it marked Woolf’s world as it marked everyone around her. On July 2, 1918 she wrote in her diary, “Influenza, which rages all over the place, has come next door.” A week later, on the 10th: “Rain for the first time for weeks today, & a funeral next door; dead of influenza.” But she was mostly silent about the disease, even as it racked up over 200,000 deaths that fall in Britain alone.

Why didn’t Woolf write a novel more explicitly focused on the Spanish flu—and why, for that matter, didn’t the pandemic figure generally more in the art and literature of the 1920s? It’s a question Woolf herself acknowledged as pertinent. “Considering how common illness is,” Woolf notes in her 1926 essay “On Being Ill,” it is “strange indeed” that it has not taken “its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.” It should stand to reason, she suggests, that novels “would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia, lyrics to toothache.”

And yet, there is a reason why this isn’t the case. Literature, she contends, focuses on the mind, not the body, whereas in sickness one is trapped by the physical world. This in turn reflects the “poverty of the language” when it comes to illness; “let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.” Most importantly, though: to face illness risks a true existential crisis, because there may not be anything on the other side, no meaning awaiting us.

Wars, no matter how horrible, are occasions to reaffirm national identity, a chance to prove heroism and moral resolve. A chance to clearly delineate enemies and heroes. Precisely the kind of thing one writes books about. But novels devoted to sickness, Woolf suggests, would be criticized as lacking all this. “‘I am in bed with influenza’—but what does that convey of the great experience; how the world has changed its shape…”? The problem is one of perspective: being sick, even during a worldwide pandemic, is a singular, isolating phenomenon, where one is trapped in one’s body without the words to describe the experience.

But Woolf’s broad, sweeping pronouncements about what literature is and isn’t capable of were always meant sarcastically; her life’s work, after all, was to push the boundaries of literature so as to say the unsayable. A year after “On Being Ill” appeared in T.S. Eliot’s magazine The Criterion, Woolf published To the Lighthouse. Its structure is among her most daring narrative strategies, composed of three parts: “The Window,” which covers a single afternoon in 1910 at the Ramsay family’s summer house on the Isle of Skye, “Time Passes,” which covers a span of ten years in a few pages, and “The Lighthouse,” which reconvenes the remnants of the family and their friends on a morning in 1920. In the opening pages, the Ramsays discuss a trip to a nearby lighthouse, but they will not make it there until ten years later in the final section.

While not structured around the arc of plague, To the Lighthouse is centered around a traumatic absence that can’t be approached directly. The figure who dominates “The Window” is the matriarch of the family, Mrs. Ramsay, who deals with the vulnerable egos of the men around her, the conflicting desires of her eight children, and tends to her houseguests (including the painter Lily Briscoe) with exhausted aplomb. The dinner that takes place in “The Window” comes together largely because Mrs. Ramsay, like Clarissa Dalloway, has an uncommon talent to create communion and kinship.

Yes, those were dark times, and yes, people died—but there’s no time to linger on any of that now, no time to stop and mourn the dead.

But in the beginning of “Time Passes,” in a short, callous bracketed aside, she is revealed to have died one night (“Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty”). She is not alone: her son Andrew, killed in the war, is also dispensed with in brackets (his death “mercifully” instantaneous), as is her daughter Prue (“in some illness connected with childbirth, which was indeed a tragedy, people said, everything, they said, had promised so well”).

Prue’s illness is unspecified, and To the Lighthouse makes no overt mention of influenza, yet Elizabeth Outka notes in her book Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature that Woolf’s novel contains echoes of the essay she’d published the year before. During the “Time Passes” section, we’re told how

The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain-pipes and scatter damp paths.

The image here has already appeared in “On Being Ill,” where she writes of how, once we are sick,

we cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright; we become deserters. They march to battle. We float with the sticks on the stream; helter skelter with the dead leaves on the lawn.

The entire world, it seems, is sick. Illness here is not explicitly seen, so much as felt in echoes and ripples, just as the disaster in To the Lighthouse is never depicted directly save for these brief asides. There is a before, and an after—and then there is the vast, vague, barely hinted at emptiness in between. By the morning of “The Lighthouse,” everyone is older, broken, and dissolute, but unable to admit or acknowledge why. The horrors of World War One, and of the ensuing Spanish Influenza epidemic, the wonderfull yeares of destruction, are condensed into a set of brackets.

There are times when I feel that To the Lighthouse is the bleakest of Woolf’s major novels.

It’s this casual disregard towards the deaths of its major characters, the immediate and almost total forgetting of them by those who carry on, has come to feel to me much like these United States, circa 2025, when we have chosen to forget our dead and simply move on, seemingly oblivious to the psychological scars we carry forward as a result. “Oh the dead!” Lily Briscoe murmurs to herself at one point; “one pitied them, one brushed them aside, one had even a little contempt for them. They are at our mercy.” As we ourselves have all now lived through a terrifying year when sudden, untimely deaths were the norm, Woolf’s brackets resonate with me because they are sudden, they are inexplicable, they are cruel, and they seem to capture the temptation to disregard the dead altogether, moving on rather than face the annoyance and discomfort they trigger within us.

Yes, those were dark times, and yes, people died—but there’s no time to linger on any of that now, no time to stop and mourn the dead. A storm called progress is blowing us forward into the future, and there’s no way to stop and gather up the ruins of the past and make them whole. We are rushing on, rushing forward? Where? To the lighthouse.

Resumed on the far side of the disaster, the journey to the lighthouse is a nothing, an empty quest, a destination without meaning or purpose. While Lily Briscoe watches from the shore, resuming a painting she’d begun ten years earlier and almost forgotten, three of the remaining Ramsays (Mr. Ramsay and two of his children) carry out their delayed voyage out of a sense of emptied obligation. The thing that seemed so important so many years ago has now become simply a rote exercise, a thing to follow through with for the sake of following through.

Woolf seemed to understand that we lack the storytelling powers to properly narrativize a tragedy like a pandemic, and what she seems to be offering instead is how such a great loss—the unspeakable black hole of emptiness—can hollow out the old story structures that we’re used to. And how, if we only know heroic quest narratives, we will continue to tell them even if they’re meaningless and dead.

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There are times when I feel that To the Lighthouse is the bleakest of Woolf’s major novels. It’s the most callous towards the dead, has fewer of those moments of surface brilliance that one finds in Mrs. Dalloway. Its characters are straining to keep themselves together; in the first half particularly, Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts are perpetually disrupted by odious men and their selfish emotional needs. Clarissa Dalloway’s ability to alight on a flash of color, or the momentary brilliance of another, seems to have faded in Mrs. Ramsay, for it is all she can do to simply manage the men and children around her and remind herself that she’s happy to have chosen this life.

I go back to To the Lighthouse because it’s a cold solace. It reminds me that others have struggled with this same question, how to write through the end of the world.

Much of the first half of the novel is given over to claustrophobic atmosphere that overwhelms the wide open country all around them. One simply cannot escape the men and their egos, the casual negging meant to keep women in their place one minute, the desperate leaning on them for support the next. Their constant need to disturb and cloud others’ thoughts and emotions. Any moments of tenderness are washed away, almost immediately, in exhaustion. The novel, for me, has little of the joy of Orlando, or the sublime of The Waves. Her most dazzling re-imaginings of how one might live in a newly fractured world are yet to come. Here, time has warped the world of the novel, but Woolf has not yet found a way to heal it.

But is that all? In “On Being Ill,” Woolf ultimately moves beyond questions of how to narrate disease and pandemic, and on to that individual sufferer, no longer a “soldier in the army of the upright,” they’re instead now a “deserter.” There lies a new perspective. Liberated by plague from the need to participate in the world, the invalid is free to observe it as detached spectator. Such people have a much larger capacity for genuine sympathy, a feeling dispensed, as Woolf see it, “chiefly by the laggards and failures, women for the most part (in whom the obsolete exists so strangely side by side with anarchy and newness), who, having dropped out of the race, have time to spend upon fantastic and unprofitable excursions.” It’s this perspective she brings to To the Lighthouse. Unable to narrate the disaster itself, she opts instead for the more reserved outlook of the recumbent, primarily in the form of the painter, Lily Briscoe.

Through her eyes, flashes of life (and anarchy, and newness) still burst through. In “The Window,” Lily, putting down her paintbrushes for the day, looks up to see the Ramsays, at first dismissing Mr. Ramsay (“he is absorbed in himself, he is tyrannical, he is unjust”), before being caught by something else:

Directly one looked up and saw them, what she called ‘being in love’ flooded them. They became part of that unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is the world seen through the eyes of love. The sky stuck to them; the birds sang through them. And, what was even more exciting, she felt, too, as she saw Mr Ramsay bearing down and retreating, and Mrs Ramsay, sitting with James in the window, and the cloud moving and the tree bending, how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash, on the beach.

What Lily understands, watching Mrs. Ramsay (and then watching William Bankes also watch her), is a love “that never attempted to clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of the human gain.” It is in these moments that Lily comes to understand the world, when everything else pales “beside this ‘rapture,’ this silent stare, for which she felt intense gratitude.” Lily, choosing painting over domestic life, rejecting Mrs. Ramsay’s suggestion to marry William Bankes, and having dropped out of this particular race in favor of her fantastic and unprofitable work, is afforded these rare moments of sympathy that break through the novel’s gloom.

Can these fleeting moments that Lily seizes on, these rapturous, silent asides—can they be translated into art, into something that lasts? The novel’s beating heart, gradually revealed, is not the quest for the lighthouse, but Lily Briscoe’s painting, what she will call, in the novel’s final pages, “her vision.” She is working on it in the first half of the novel, only to set it aside (“It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad!”). It will take her another ten years to return to it.

We’re given precious little information from Woolf as to the painting’s design and subject. We know there is a tree, and that Mrs. Ramsay figures in it in some form, as she tries to remember, in the book’s opening pages, to hold her head in the same pose. We know there is a suggestion of a mother and a child. But mostly it is abstract, with its triangular purple shapes and shadowed corners.

And yet, the whole weight of the novel rests on the successful completion of this vision, for it’s all we’re ever going to be given, one way or another. Does it have a reckoning of the disaster she’s survived, however oblique? Does it engage, in its form, the task of remembering? Does it, like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, attempt to make whole what has been smashed? Or is it content to be blown along like a sailboat caught in a gale, towards a destination that no longer has any real meaning?

“The great revelation had never come,” Lily realizes as she watches Mr. Ramsay and his two surviving children make their way, finally, belatedly, to the lighthouse. “Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.” At the end of the day, we know that a successful dinner party is not enough to ward off the doom, the brilliance of Mrs. Ramsay and Clarissa Dalloway ultimately too fleeting to shore against the ruins. There must be something that balances the fleeting and the permanent. “Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface,” Lily knows, “feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly’s wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron. It was to be a thing you could ruffle with your breath; and a thing you could not dislodge with a team of horses.”

I go back to To the Lighthouse because it’s a cold solace. It reminds me that others have struggled with this same question, how to write through the end of the world, how to find narratives and art that can still have meaning after the End. And I remain fascinated by how Woolf writes around the edges of what truly matters. Unable to represent the disaster directly, she gives us bracketed asides and elisions. But beyond that, here she can not quite yet represent the art that might salvage and redeem our loss, giving us only colors and brushstrokes and the hope of something concrete. Something as steadfast as it is ephemeral. It is a novel that is not hopeful, yet holds open a space for hope, something unnamed, rough and unsteady, but something that may yet be born.

So here we are, at novel’s end, trying to hold the scene, peering over Lily’s shoulder to get a glimpse of that vision, hoping it holds some measure of truth for us. Hoping for clarity. Hoping for rapture, however fleeting.

Hoping beyond hope for a new and different kind of wonder.