To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (Close Reading)

To the Lighthouse is a 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf. The novel centers on the Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920. Following and extending the tradition of modernist novelists like Marcel Proust and James Joyce, the plot of To the Lighthouse is secondary to its philosophical introspection.

In her forward, Eudora Welty writes “To the Lighthouse is at once ethereal and firm, as perhaps only a vision can be. A presiding presence with streaming hair and muscles stretched, the novel’s conception has the strength of a (William) Blake angel. It is an exertion, a vaunting, a triumph of wonder, of imaginative speculation and defiance; it is that bolt of lightning Virginia Woolf began with, an instantaneous burst of coherence over chaos and the dark. She has shown us the shape of the human spirit.”