VIRGINIA WOOLF

She was a great Modernist novelist, an early representative of feminism on her essays
(stating that women should be given the opportunity to write) and also a promoter of literary
talents (she and her husband had a publishing house and encouraged literary innovation and
experimentation). In her essays she explains the new understanding of OBJECTIVITY and
REALISM that was to infuse the modernist novel. They started to think that mind doesn’t work
rationally (like the Victorians had thought), it works by associations, and it is not organized in a
logical way, but rather it is like a stream, like a flow. So she developed a narrative called
“stream-of-consciousness” (invented in France by Marcel Proust). This method can only hope
to capture the essence (LIFE SPIRIT) of existence and to register the thoughts and
impressions of an “ordinary mind on an ordinary day”. So she uses interior monologues. Her
prose is careful, exquisitely light, approaching poetry in its power to evoke mood and
sensation. She did not wish to limit herself to the mere story-telling, but wanted to see the novel
absorb as many literary devices as possible (prose, poetry).

“To the Lighthouse” (1927) deals with Ramsay’s (Prof. and Mrs. Ramsay, their son
James, daughter Camilla, and several other children), following their existence through a period
of over 10 years. The novel has 2 sections: “The Window” and “The Lighthouse” connected by
an interlude “Time Passes”. The structure of the book itself reproduces the effect of the
LIGHTHOUSE beam: the long flash represented by the first movement (“The Window”), the
interval of darkness represented by the 2nd novel (“Time Passes”) and the second and short flash
by the last novel (“The Lighthouse”). Two themes stand out: ISOLATION of the
INDIVIDUAL HUMAN SPIRIT and the CONTRAST between DISORDERED and
FRAGMENTARY EXPERIENCE OF LIVING and the IDEAL TRUTH OR BEAUTY to
which human mind aspires. The self is fragmented, but a certain coherence can be recuperated
through epiphany = a moment of inside, of illumination, of revelation. Such a moment is
represented in the novel when Lilly knows how to finish her picture.