To the Lighthouse
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First published in 1927, To the Lighthouse centres on the Ramsay family and their guests during a summer holiday at their house on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. At its heart is the long-postponed promise of a journey to the nearby lighthouse, an apparently simple excursion that becomes charged with the hopes, frustrations and unspoken tensions of family life. Through the perspectives of Mrs Ramsay, her husband, the philosopher Mr Ramsay, and Lily Briscoe, a young painter struggling to complete her work, Woolf explores the fragile bonds between people and the private worlds that exist beneath everyday conversation.
Divided into three distinct sections, the novel moves across time, tracing the effects of absence, loss and memory on those who remain. Its shifting rhythms of consciousness and lyrical attention to ordinary experience make it one of the defining achievements of literary Modernism. Drawing upon Woolf's own childhood memories, To the Lighthouse is also a profound meditation on art, mortality, family and the elusive nature of human understanding.
From the book
“The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
On To the Lighthouse
“It is superior in the magnitude of the aims themselves.”
— Louis Kronenberger, The New York Times (1927)