The Light That Never Quite Reaches Shore: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse Still Dazzles

Order To the Lighthouse

There are novels that move by plot, and there are novels that move by pulse. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, first published in 1927, is decidedly of the latter kind—a novel that does not so much unfold as shimmer, refracting the interior lives of its characters through a lens as intimate as thought itself. Nearly a century later, it remains one of the boldest acts of literary modernism: elusive, elliptical, and quietly revelatory. Set largely in a summer home on the Isle of Skye before and after the First World War, the novel circles around the Ramsay family and their…