Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)

Abstract

After a brief biographical survey, the first part of the essay situates Virginia Woolf in the social, political, and artistic context of the Bloomsbury Group. It examines the influence of Roger Fry and Clive Bell’s post-impressionist aesthetics on Woolf’s theoretical and fictional writings. The second part identifies central thematic concerns of To the Lighthouse, all of which are bound up with subjective perception: communication and its failure, modern epistemology, authorship. The third part addresses the innovative narrative technique of the novel, whose blurring of the narrator’s voice and the characters’ consciousness can be read as a consequence of the epistemological questions it raises. The leitmotifs of the novel, such as water and the lighthouse, are shown to reflect these epistemological and narrative preoccupations as well. The final section of the essay offers an overview of the scholarly reception of the novel, from narratological and poststructuralist to political and materialist approaches.