To The Lighthouse

One of the most popular twentieth-century novels, To the Lighthouse is the story of a woman and her family experiencing the passage of time and seeking to recapture meaning from the flux of things. Though Mrs Ramsay’s death is the event on which the novel turns, her presence pervades every page in a poetic evocation of loss and memory which is a celebration of domestic life and its intimate, trivial details. But, through the character of Mrs Ramsay’s friend Lily Briscoe, Virginia Woolf ’s great book is also a powerful allegory of the creative consciousness and its momentary triumphs over fleeting material life.