No plot to speak of – this is more of a character study, with images and moments in time portrayed minutely.

The setting is the Ramsay family’s holiday house on the Isle of Skye around the time of World War I. Written in a way that depicts the characters’ perspectives and voices, showing how different people think in different ways, the book is partly biographical. The author’s mother, and one of her brothers died young, as did Mrs Ramsay and her son Andrew. The overbearing Mr Ramsay is styled on the author’s father. Also, Virginia Woolf’s family went for holidays every summer to their beach house, as the Ramsays did. The author likened the writing of the book as a way of expressing her deep-felt emotions about her family.

“Turning, she looked across the bay, and there, sure enough, coming regularly across the waves first two quick strokes and then one long steady stroke, was the light of the Lighthouse. It had been lit.”

“Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters.”

~Quotes from “To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf.