Showing results for "Lighthouses" in Women's Studies

To the Lighthouse is one of Virginia Woolf's most autobiographical works, and since she was an active member of the Bloomsbury Set, it inevitably echoes the once revolutionary thoughts that were to shape our world. Set in the pivotal years spanning World War I, it describes a gathering of artists, intellectuals and children at the Ramsays' holiday home in the Scottish Isles. Guided through their parallel streams of consciousness, we are given a poignant sense of the isolation coexisting with togetherness, and of a permanence that can survive the seeming transience of life.

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. The novel's use of stream of consciousness, reminiscence and shifting perspectives gives it an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of Victorian and Edwardian literary values.