To the Lighthouse

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, published in 1927, is a modernist masterpiece set at the Ramsay family’s summer home on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. The novel unfolds in three parts—The Window, Time Passes, and The Lighthouse—centering on Mrs. Ramsay’s promise to take her young son James to the nearby lighthouse, a trip thwarted by weather and later overshadowed by World War I, loss, and the passage of time. Through stream-of-consciousness narration, Woolf delves into the characters’ inner lives, exploring themes of perception, memory, gender roles, and the fleeting nature of human connections, as artist Lily Briscoe completes a painting that symbolically resolves the family’s fragmented emotions a decade later.