'Life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach'

For years now the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever; but, as the First World War looms, the integrity of family and society will be fatally challenged. To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionistic depiction of their family holiday, and a meditation on marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and bitterness. The novel's use of stream of consciousness, reminiscence and shifting perspectives gives it an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of all that had gone before.