To the Lighthouse is Virginia Woolf´s most widely acclaimed novel. It stands, firmly and centrally, in her work and her life, shedding light on both her past and her future, as woman and as writer. It is more directly autobiographical than most of her fiction, as she herself makes plain in her comments on it in both letters and diaries, so no apologies are needed for introducing it initially in terms of her own history. It is rooted in family memory. It is an attempt at the exorcism of ghosts.
              Indeed, it is so closely connected with recollections of her mother and her father that she herself wondered whether it was a novel at all. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), was, as Mr Ramsay, a well-known philosopher not at the first rank, but, unlike Mr Ramsay,he was also a literary critic and biographer, and the first editor of that huge monument to the famous dead, the Dictionary of National Biography. Like Ramsay, he would cry aloud to himself poetry both good and bad; he was a leader of men, a great walker, and a climber of mountains peaks; he was occasionally tyrannical, short-tempered and unpredictable, grew impatient with guests, and groaned with boredom at the dinner table; he was precise and hated the female habit of exaggeration; he longed for praise and admiration; and, as Ramsay, he was greatly dependent on his wife. He married Julia Duckworth in 1878, a second marriage for both of them, and was, like Mr Ramsay, profoundly affected, indeed shattered, by her sudden and unexpected death in 1895, when Virginia was thirteen.
              The setting of this novel is as important as its cast, and it too is deeply rooted in remembered reality. The action takes place in a spacious family holiday home in Scotland rented by the Ramsays, which they visit every summer, as the Stephen family visited St Ives in Cornwall.
              This novel is a profound work of the redeeming imagination, in which the urges to transform embraces and transfers the urge to record. This is Virginia Woolf´s attempt to understand and accept not only her own past and its great sorrows but also the nature of time and immortality. Like Mr Ramsay, Woolf is obsessed by the perishability of the fame and the menacing oblivion of death. The novel is structured round a series of images which suggest the strife between permanence and evanescence (the lighthouse itself, the lost brooch, the boar´s skull, the body preserved in peat, the work of art, the dinner table), and Woolf´s prose captures the extraordinary pulsing and momentary vacillations and vibrations between stability and flux, the momentary and the eternal, the trivial and the grave in daily life.
              In the first section, ‘The Window’, we are introduced to the Ramsays in vacation, and to their guests. James, the youngest, longs passionately to go to the lighthouse the next day; his mother encourages him in his hope, but his father say it will rain.The fluctuating relationship of Mr and Mrs Ramsay is further explored. Lily Briscoe work at her painting at the garden. In this section, we see Mrs Ramsay in her domestic role, knitting a stocking; we see her as a mother, reading stories to James, comforting the younger children when they go to bed, and we see her as wife, yielding to but simultaneously triumphing over her husbands.
              In the second part, ‘Times Passes’, we visit the house in the absence of its owners, and note the effects of time upon it. We learnt that Mrs Ramsay has died suddenly, the eldest daughter Prue has married and she has died. The most promising son, Andrew, has also died, blown up by a shell in the First World War. Time passes, until the old charwoman Mrs McNab hears that at last the family is coming back. She cleans and tidy the house.
              In the third and last section, ‘The Lighthouse’, Lily Briscoe, who is still single and now aged forty-four, completes her painting, and Mr Ramsay and the two youngest children, Cam and James, now sixteen and seventeen, set off for and reach the lighthouse.
              In ‘To the Lighthouse’, Woolf is willing to examine both the happiness and the unhappiness of her own past, and her troubling relationship with her father. The book clearly has Freudian resonances , which remind us that she was writing in a period when Freud´s work was very much in the general literate consciousness. She tended to joke dismissively about Freud and his theories in her letters, but as he was published by her own Hogarth Press, and in translations by James Strachey, she can hardly have evaded his influence. One must beware of interpreting all references and symbols in Freudian terms; one doubts whether the red-hot pokers have a sexual message. Nevertheless, it is evident that Woolf is setting up in the book a debate about male and female qualities and values, which centres in the pivotal figure of the asexual ‘old maid’ Lily Briscoe.Lily, as Woolf herself, is endeavouring to supersede and transcend the art of the past, to force her medium to obey her own brighter firmer vision.
              We know that when Woolf wrote ‘To the Lighthouse’, she was reading her near contemporary Marcel  Proust, who had died in 1922 and whose masterpiece A  la recherche du temps perdu was appearing in England volume by volume. His project is not dissimilar in aim. Her book too is about Time Lost and Time Regained; her book too seeks to relive and redeem and release loved ones from death into the eternity of art. It is not surprising to find that she read him with mixed feelings, acknowledging his genius to her diary, and comparing her own achievements unfavourably with his.