Study Guide: To the Lighthouse (SE): Study Edition

(This Study Edition contains extra wide margins on each page to enable notes to be made.)

The book is set on two days which are ten years apart. The plot centres on the Ramsay family’s anticipation of and reflection upon a visit to a lighthouse and the connected familial tensions. One of the primary themes of the novel is the struggle in the creative process that beset painter Lily Briscoe while she struggles to paint in the midst of the family drama. The novel is also a meditation upon the lives of a nation’s inhabitants in the midst of war, and of the people left behind. It also explores the passage of time and how women are forced by society to allow men to take emotional strength from them.

CuriousPages Edition
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Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941) was an English writer and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century. Between the two world wars, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One’s Own (1929), with its famous dictum, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Woolf suffered from severe bouts of mental illness throughout her life and committed suicide by drowning in 1941 at the age of 59.