To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionist depiction of a family holiday and a meditation on a marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny, and bitterness.
Its use of stream of consciousness, reminiscence, and shifting perspectives gives the novel an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of Victorian and Edwardian literary values.
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was one of the most important writers of the twentieth-century modernist tradition. She was a pioneer in the usage of stream of consciousness narrative device, and since the publication of her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915 she published a steady and remarkable stream of essays, fiction, and literary criticism throughout her life. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf and together they founded Hogarth Press in 1917. Her friendship and relationship with the writer and gardener Vita Sackville West began in 1922 and carried on until she died by suicide in 1941. Among Woolf’s best-known works are Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando.View all by Virginia Woolf
