"About life, about death; about Mrs Ramsay"- no, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody" (To the Lighthouse, pp. I32-3). Lily Briscoe, the painter, looking on, clumsy with words, illogical and ungrammatical, addresses the experience which Virginia Woolf tackles in her novel and finds it impossible to label. Yet the artist"s effort, and even her sense of failure, registering the scale of the task,help to communicate both how ambitious and unpretentious their work is. The mood is gay and grim in the spirit of a family holiday,domestic in scale but felt as cataclysmic, where the battle for survival of every individual, their struggles of self-assertion, are balanced by the craving for unconditional love. ...

This simple and haunting story captures thetransience of life and its surrounding emotions.

To the Lighthouse is the most autobiographical of Virginia Woolf's novels. It is based on her own early experiences, and while it touches on childhood and children's perceptions and desires, it is at its most trenchant when exploring adult relationships, marriage and the changing class-structure in the period spanning the Great War.