Approaches to Teaching Woolf's to the Lighthouse

“Good, motivated, well-read students can have trouble reading To the Lighthouse,” admit the editors of this volume in the Approaches to Teaching series; “not-so-well-read students may have even greater difficulty.” Yet many instructors still find Woolf’s fifth novel her most accessible because it grapples with issues that interest students. The essays in this collection show how teachers can tackle the often threatening question “Why are we reading this?” with thoughtful answers that make the novel come alive in the classroom.

Like other books in the series, this volume is divided into two parts. Part 1, “Materials,” discusses the available editions of the novel and further reading for students, as well as reference works, bibliographies, critical works, and teaching aids. Part 2, “Approaches,” gathers twenty-one essays that provide instructors with strategies for introducing students to a difficult text. The first group of these essays focuses on how to read To the Lighthouse; the volume then presents a range of critical approaches, including autobiographical, contextual, and intertextual methods. As the editors note, all the essays “aim to help undergraduates new to Woolf’s novel become the readers Woolf ultimately wants: open, curious, sensitive, active.”