Considered by the author herself to be "the best of [her] books," To the Lighthouse is Virginia Woolf's third novel and modernist masterpiece.
In 1910, the Ramsays gather at their summer home in the Isle of Skye with their children, colleagues and friends. James, the youngest son, wants to visit the lighthouse with his mother only to have his father, the philosophical but inadvertently dictatorial Mr. Ramsay, dismiss his wish. Lily, a young but passionate painter, wants to create a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay and James; but is plagued by anxiety due to the discouragement of Charles Tansley. Mr. Ramsay wants comfort and sympathetic assurances from his wife about his place in the world and the legacy of his work; and she, Mrs. Ramsay, the matariach, is a woman who finds strength in her efforts to ensure that things-and people-remain whole.
Set on two days ten years apart, To the Lighthouse is a masterfully crafted exploration of the human experience and the search for meaning in each moment of life: good, bad, trying, and triumphant. Described at the time of being written as, "an entirely new...pyschological poem," the semi-autobiographical novel uses a stream of consciousness narrative structure to lay bare the myseries and harsh realities of familial relationships.
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About the Author :
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English novelist. Born in London, she was raised in a family of eight children by Julia Prinsep Jackson, a model and philanthropist, and Leslie Stephen, a writer and critic. Homeschooled alongside her sisters, including famed painter Vanessa Bell, Woolf was introduced to classic literature at an early age. Following the death of her mother in 1895, Woolf suffered her first mental breakdown. Two years later, she enrolled at King's College London, where she studied history and classics and encountered leaders of the burgeoning women's rights movement. Another mental breakdown accompanied her father's death in 1904, after which she moved with her Cambridge-educated brothers to Bloomsbury, a bohemian district on London's West End. There, she became a member of the influential Bloomsbury Group, a gathering of leading artists and intellectuals including Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Vanessa Bell, E.M. Forster, and Leonard Woolf, whom she would marry in 1912. Together they founded the Hogarth Press, which would publish most of Woolf's work. Recognized as a central figure of literary modernism, Woolf was a gifted practitioner of experimental fiction, employing the stream of consciousness technique and mastering the use of free indirect discourse, a form of third person narration which allows the reader to enter the minds of her characters. Woolf, who produced such masterpieces as Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and A Room of One's Own (1929), continued to suffer from depression throughout her life. Following the German Blitz on her native London, Woolf, a lifelong pacifist, died by suicide in 1941. Her career cut cruelly short, she left a legacy and a body of work unmatched by any English novelist of her day.
