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Virginia Woolf and To the Lighthouse

I created this set of pages on the modernist author Virginia Woolf and her novel To the Lighthouse as a final project for Dr.
Hal Gladfelder's CIV course. When I entered Stanford, all freshmen were required to take three academic quarters of CIV,
which stood for Cultures, Ideas and Values (CIV has since been supplanted by the Area One Program). The purpose of CIV
was to introduce students to the humanities, require them to read some of the great books of Western and non-Western
civilization, and encourage them to think about some of the aesthetic and philosophical issues raised by the works they studied.
In my CIV track, called "Literature and the Arts", we pursued an integrated exploration of literary and visual artworks from
ancient Greece and India through the European Renaissance to modern novels and film.

                                  Born in London in 1882, Virginia Woolf was the daughter of the prominent literary
                                  critic Leslie Stephen, who educated her at home. After leaving her father's house,
                                  Woolf continued to move in an intellectual atmosphere, joining a circle of artists
                                  and writers known as the Bloomsbury group. One of the members of this group,
                                  Leonard Woolf, became Virginia's husband in 1912. Virginia Woolf began to write
                                  in 1915, publishing a novel called The Voyage Out. This novel was followed by
                                  Night and Day (1919), Jacob's Room (1922) and Mrs. Dalloway (1925).
                                  Woolf's writing became increasingly experimental, and by the time she wrote To
                                  the Lighthouse in 1927 she was using a nonlinear narrative style which focused on
                                  the free association of ideas in her characters' minds.

                                  Even in the midst of her literary productivity, Woolf was troubled by a mental
                                  illness which gave her periods of exceptional creative energy followed by bouts of
                                  depression. She went on in 1929 to write A Room of One's Own, an analysis of
                                  the problems of women writers in a male-dominated literary world. This work was
                                  followed by more experimental novels, including The Waves (1931) and Between
                                  the Acts (1941). In a period of depression following the completion of her last
                                  novel, Woolf committed suicide by drowning herself in a stream in 1941.

Britannica Online article on Virginia Woolf
Britannica Online article on the Bloomsbury Group

This set of web pages deals primarily with To the Lighthouse, a work possibly based on Woolf's own memories of family
vacations on an island off Cornwall (although the novel is actually set in the Isles of Skye). The central characters are Mr. and
Mrs. Ramsay, a respectable couple who are joined in their large island house by their eight children and a variety of interesting
guests. The novel is divided into three parts. The first part, entitled "The Window", describes the events and emotions of a
single day at the house. James Ramsay, one of the children, wants to make a trip to the lighthouse which sweeps its beam over
the island, but is refused by his father on the grounds of poor weather. Lily Briscoe, an aspiring painter who is staying with the
Ramsays, struggles with the composition of a post-Impressionist painting. Meanwhile, Minta Doyle and Paul Rayley, two of the
other guests, become engaged to each other on a beach. The characters are united at the end of the section in an elegant
dinner, at which Mrs. Ramsay works to create harmony. The second part of the novel is called "Time Passes"; it describes how
time rushes by while the house is abandoned during World War I. Mr. Ramsay, Lily Briscoe and two of the children return to
the house in the third part, called "The Lighthouse". Now Mr. Ramsay and his children finally make their trip to the lighthouse,
while Lily Brisoce finishes the same painting she was working on ten years earlier.
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