I had no idea, when I was walking the dog and trying ineffectually, to help Sandy fly his kite (Is it a man thing, kite flying? I just get in knots) that the lighthouse we could see from the dunes was THE lighthouse of Virginia Woolf fame and the beach around it up for sale - now sold at £70000 I think). I still remember the impact that book had on me when I read it 46 years ago (oh help!) It was the first novel I'd read that was at once poetic yet still a novel, many-layered, peopled with characters I came to know intimately and in some case (Charles Tansley) to hate with a frustrated, impotent, fury.
I wasn't to be a mother for another 10 years or more but I felt Mrs Ramsay's irritation and distress as her husband callously, thoughtlessly, with gloomy forecasts of inclement weather, destroyed the hopes and dreams of James, their young son, who so wanted an expedition to the Lighthouse the following day.
The other more complex themes I suppose I've either experienced myself or watched others going through in the many years that have passed since that first reading. The position of people who apparently arrive spontanteously and haphazardly into our lives and the influence they have over our subsequent passage, or the more permanent personalities we almost deny affecting us (I'm thinking of Mr. Ramsey here who, once cut adrift without his wife, suffered the anguish and fear which he scarcely acknowledged she had been softening and cushioning for him all their married life.)
The book has been a touch-stone for me - but rarely acknowledged for its influence on my life.
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