To the Lighthouse

To the Lighthouse is a novel by the English writer Virginia Woolf, published in 1927. It is set on the Isle of Skye and its action is spread across the decade before and after the First World War.

The book has almost no plot in the conventional sense. Mrs Ramsay is the centre of the household, holding it together with sympathy and a kind of managing love; Mr Ramsay is a philosopher preoccupied with his own reputation and with the affection he feels he is owed; their eight children and the guests staying with them each carry their own view of the same house and the same summer. A promised trip to the lighthouse is postponed, which matters to a child far more than the adults understand. Between the first and last parts of the novel the war intervenes and the family is changed, and the house is left to itself for years while the weather works on it.

Woolf wrote most of the novel as thought, using a technique in which the narration passes between minds and settles in none, and the book is among the clearest examples of the modernist novel's interest in consciousness and in time as it is experienced rather than as it is recorded.