The Lighthouse is rated so highly, despite the fact that it is a novelĪlmost devoid of any real plot. Of all time, surpassed only by George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Yet, in aĢ015 BBC poll of book critics outside the UK, To the Lighthouse was listed as the second greatest British novel Premature death of her mother when Virginia was still a young teen. Of Woolf’s attempt to deal with the sense of a void left in her life by the Lucio Ruotolo,įor example, discusses the way in which the book is, among other things, part Woolf herself had sometimes criticized othersįor writing fiction in an autobiographical mode, and as she conceived of To the Lighthouse she wondered if itĬould even be called a novel, given its roots in her own life. Patriarchal values of late Victorian society, values that Woolf saw were aliveĪnd well even in the late 1920s. The nature of time and memory and a detailed satirical takedown of the Late-Victorian family with a prominent patriarch, To the Lighthouse is both a profound philosophical exploration of

Partly based on Woolf’s own experience growing up in a Not typically over-fond of Woolf’s writing, placed it alongside Ulysses and The Waste Land as the three finest expressions of the literary consciousness Most-and the most positive-critical commentary. Of all of Woolf’s novels, To the Lighthouse has received the Most important novel, begins shortly before the date cited in her essay as theīeginning of the modern age and then extends roughly ten years beyond it, thusĮncompassing the first decade of this new age. To write new forms of literature that are appropriate to this newly changedįrom this point of view, it might be significant that the action

Her attempt to follow her own observation to its logical conclusion by trying Politics and literature.’’ Much of her subsequent career can then be seen as Relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, One, relations between ‘‘masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents andĬhildren’’ all understandably changed. Here, she declares that “in or about December,ġ910, human character changed.” As a result of this character shift, she goes One of her most famous arguments for the development of a new kind of art and In her essay “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,” Virginia Woolf presents

To the lighthouse virginia