To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse was published in 1927. It is an introspective modernist novel about the power of memory told through a decade in the life of the Ramsay family.

Divided into three sections, with shifting points of view by different narrators, the novel begins with the Ramsay family spending a summer at their vacation home in the Hebrides Islands. The Ramsay children want to row across the bay to a nearby lighthouse, but poor weather postpones their trip. Later, for the Ramsay adults and several acquaintances, a dinner party that seems ill-fated eventually ends in friendship and a pleasant evening.

In the novel's second and final sections, many years have passed, the summer home falls into disrepair while the Ramsays' world is altered by death and World War I, but the remaining members of the family return to their summer home to finally make the trip to the lighthouse.

1. Author: Virginia Woolf
2. Date of publication: May 5, 1927
3. Original publisher: The Hogarth Press
4. Uses stream of consciousness narration
5. Setting: Isle of Skye, Hebrides Islands, during the years before and after WWI
6. Divided into three sections, with shifting points of view
7. Considered Woolf's most complex and accomplished novel
8. Critically acclaimed at the time, as well as popular
9. Woolf's best-selling book, during her lifetime
10. The complexity of this novel is alluded to in the title of the Edward Albee play "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

1. "A light here required a shadow there."
2. "For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only."
3. "There were the eternal problems: suffering; death; the poor. There was always a woman dying of cancer even here. And yet she had said to all these children, You shall go through with it. To eight people she had said relentlessly that... For that reason, knowing what was before them — love and ambition and being wretched alone in dreary places — she had often the feeling, Why must they grow up and lose it all? And then she said to herself, brandishing her sword at life, Nonsense. They will be perfectly happy."

Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse was published in 1927. It is an introspective modernist novel about the power of memory told through a decade in the life of the Ramsay family.

Divided into three sections, with shifting points of view by different narrators, the novel begins with the Ramsay family spending a summer at their vacation home in the Hebrides Islands. The Ramsay children want to row across the bay to a nearby lighthouse, but poor weather postpones their trip. Later, for the Ramsay adults and several acquaintances, a dinner party that seems ill-fated eventually ends in friendship and a pleasant evening.

In the novel's second and final sections, many years have passed, the summer home falls into disrepair while the Ramsays' world is altered by death and World War I, but the remaining members of the family return to their summer home to finally make the trip to the lighthouse.

1. Author: Virginia Woolf

2. Date of publication: May 5, 1927

3. Original publisher: The Hogarth Press

4. Uses stream of consciousness narration

5. Setting: Isle of Skye, Hebrides Islands, during the years before and after WWI

6. Divided into three sections, with shifting points of view

7. Considered Woolf's most complex and accomplished novel

8. Critically acclaimed at the time, as well as popular

9. Woolf's best-selling book, during her lifetime

10. The complexity of this novel is alluded to in the title of the Edward Albee play "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

1. "A light here required a shadow there."

2. "For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only."

3. "There were the eternal problems: suffering; death; the poor. There was always a woman dying of cancer even here. And yet she had said to all these children, You shall go through with it. To eight people she had said relentlessly that... For that reason, knowing what was before them — love and ambition and being wretched alone in dreary places — she had often the feeling, Why must they grow up and lose it all? And then she said to herself, brandishing her sword at life, Nonsense. They will be perfectly happy."

4. </note>

• • See Mahalo's Guide to Virginia Woolf
• The Literature Network: Virginia Woolf Biography and Online Works
• Wikipedia: Virginia Woolf
• The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
• The International Virginia Woolf Society
• Mantex.co.uk: Virginia Woolf Chronology