Hours he would spend thus, with his pipe, of an evening, thinking up and down and in and out of the old familiar lanes and commons, which were all stuck about with the history of that campaign there, the life of this statesman here, with poems and with anecdotes, with figures too, this thinker, that soldier; all very brisk and clear.

This is a description of Mr. Ramsey early in Virginia Woolf’s novel “To the Lighthouse.” Mr. Ramsey, a philosopher, was modeled on Woolf’s father, Sir. Leslie Stephen, and is widely considered a parody of him. But I cannot help to think back to Virginia Woolf’s beautiful, glowing essay about Michel de Montaigne when I read that description, because it sounds so much like his method for constructing many of the essays that inspired her.

In this essay, where Montaigne eventually lands on some comparison of Democritus and Heraclitus after an amusing digression where he attacks the game of chess, he spends about half the piece musing about the subjects he comes up and why he roams so free across them.

And it occurred to me as I revisited the piece this morning that his method sounds so much like the approach Virginia Woolf took in writing “To the Lighthouse.” Consider this passage from his fiftieth essay:

For I do not see the whole of anything; nor do those who promise to show it to us. Of a hundred members and faces that each thing has, I take one, sometimes only to lick it, sometimes to brush the surface, sometimes to pinch it to the bone. I give it a stab, not as wide but as deep as I know how. And most often I like to take them from some unaccustomed point of view. I would venture to treat some matter thoroughly, if I knew myself less well. Scattering a word here, there another, samples separated from their context, dispersed, without a plan and without a promise, I am not bound to make something of them or to adhere to them myself without varying when I please and giving myself up to doubt and uncertainty and my ruling quality, which is ignorance.

The genius Woolf adds to this approach is to enter the consciousness of multiple characters and to allow them to roam freely over the moments of the novel. Sometimes Woolf allows the characters to share a collective opinion — such as their disdain for English cuisine — and at other times she begins a thought attributed to one character, but then lets it drift into authorial insight.

In this way, Woolf was both heavily influenced by Montaigne, but then exceeded him. And while “To the Lighthouse” cannot be said to be about anything in particular, a repeated moment in the text concerns Mr. Ramsey’s assertion that a woman is incapable of writing or painting as well as a man.

You can then imagine the book as her direct challenge to her father, than she in fact can think as philosophically as he and write more beautifully as well, capturing her story exactly as she wished to portray it. In the process of exceeding her father, Woolf is also taking a step beyond Montaigne.

She has found that room of her own to muse and assay the world, But she has also discovered a way to transcend the suffocating subjective of Montaigne, the endless first person account, creating a work more universal and broadly empathetic, even while it is unmistakably hers.

These are just preliminary thoughts on Woolf in relation to Montaigne. I do not pretend to be an expert on her work and want to avoid the temptation of jumping in head-first once more on a subject I should study more closely first.

So just consider this marker and a promise of more to come.