“To the Lighthouse,” Virginia Woolf
After reading and thoroughly enjoying Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” I was expecting a little more of “To the Lighthouse.” Maybe that’s not fair of me, but Woolf seemed like a righteous feminist—one of the first and foremost of her day—and I was anticipating seeing this in “To the Lighthouse.” I am sure it there, somewhere, I’m just not sure where exactly. “To the Lighthouse” is very diluted and abstract. It is centered on Mrs. Ramsay, a housewife questioning exactly what her role in life is and whether she has lived a life to be proud of. The first part spans less than a few days, the second ten years, and the third one day. The first part focuses on a supposed trip to the lighthouse that Mrs. Ramsay supports and her husband does not, and the implications of that, of which there are supposedly many. In the second part, characters, including Mrs. Ramsay herself, pass away, and in the third, others are left to deal with what remains.
“A Clergyman’s Daughter,” George Orwell
This is the second novel I have read by George Orwell, and it deals with social themes as well. The novel follows a young woman named Dorothy, who from the reader’s point of view is leading a despicable life. She has no time to do anything but her father’s chores, and is constantly trying to pay off her father’s debts. One day, she wakes up in London with no memory. As she tries to make sense of this new life, she fully experiences the streets of London: poverty, begging and sleeping on the streets. Dorothy eventually makes her way home, but only with the help of her father and (male) relative. In the end, someone offers her an escape from the life she leads with her father, but she decides to stay in what she herself has acknowledged as an ‘empty’ path. Through his writing, Orwell makes observations about life in England in the 1930s for women and the poor without ever directly stating anything about either group, and that is what makes him the literary icon he is.