To the Lighthouse

“Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they tall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old.”

Virginia Woolf clearly described her attitude to the novel of her day in her essay on ‘Modern Fiction’. To the Lighthouse is notable for her manner of telling the story – a projected visit to a lighthouse by a family on holiday in Skye-almost entirely by reflections within the minds of the characters.

The novel was acclaimed on its appearance in 1927, and the Spectator commented that her genius was ‘at once more difficult and more original than that of any other novelist of today’.