To the Lighthouse

To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionistic depiction of a family holiday, and a meditation on marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and bitterness. For years now the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever; but as the First World War looms, the integrity of family and society will be fatally challenged. With a psychologically introspective mode, the use of memory, 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, born in 1882, was a major modernist novelist and the centre of the inter-war Bloomsbury Group. Between 1925 and 1931 she produced her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway to the poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves. She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, journalism and biography, including A Room of One's Own (1929), a passionate feminist essay. Suffering from depression, she drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941.