The Reading Hour

Episode 10 departs from The Reading Hour's usual format by beginning with a few short works by the 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson, with whom episode 9 had concluded. The Reader Hour then presents chapters 4-7 of To the Lighthouse's third part, "The Lighthouse."

With Episode 9, we begin the third, final part of Woolf's To the Lighthouse, which is titled "The Lighthouse," and which relates the events of a day at the Ramsay summer house in the Scottish Hebrides roughly a decade after Part 1. The episode concludes with a brief introduction to Emily Dickinson and a reading of several of her poems.

Episode 8 presents the whole of To the Lighthouse's relatively short middle section, "Time Passes," during which the novel speeds through the human events of a decade while focusing on inhuman nature's effects upon the summer house and the care required to restore human order.

Episode 7 concludes our reading of To the Lighthouse's first part, "The Window." Between its final two chapters, one Victorian and two early-modern lyric poems excerpted in those chapters, are present in full: Charles Isaac Elton's "The Garden Song," William Browne's "The Siren's Song," and William Shakespeare's Sonnet 98 ("From you have I been absent in the spring").

Episode 6 briefly explains the title of To the Lighthouse's first of three parts, "The Window," then presents most of the novel's longest chapter, which relates Mrs. Ramsay's dinner part.

In Episode 5, our reading of Woolf's To the Lighthouse continues, followed by a relevant excerpt on duration from Henri Bergson's "Introduction to Metaphysics" (1904) and Walt Whitman's poem "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry."

Episode 4 continues our reading from Part 1 of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and concludes with a brief introduction to the Brothers Grimm's linguistic scholarship as background for "The Fisherman & His Wife," which Mrs. Ramsay has been reading to young James.

Episode 3 prefaces the continuation of our reading from Part 1 of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse by briefly acknowledging some similarities between Woolf's family and the fictional Ramsays. Because Mr. Ramsay has been intoning a line from Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade," the episode concludes with a reading of that poem about an event in the Crimean War in its entirety.

Episode 2 continues our reading from Part 1 of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and concludes with an excerpt of the French philosopher Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution on the concept of le durée (duration or felt time).

Episode 1 inaugurates The Reading Hour radio show and podcast with the first three chapters of Virginia Woolf's modernist British novel To the Lighthouse, part 1, The Window and the late-19th-century American philosopher William James's chapter "The Stream of Consciousness."