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One of the most important works of art of the twentieth century, To the Lighthouse is a profound, stirring, and ambitious novel written by an artist at the height of her extraordinary powers. Like all great works of art, To the Lighthouse is rich with meaning and implication. On the simplest level, it is about the Ramsay family, their vacation home on the Hebrides Islands in Scotland, and the guests who come to stay with them there. On a deeper level, the novel is a meditation on time, on how it is experienced, and on what resources humans beings have to reckon with its relentless, withering passage. The relentlessness of time is nowhere more powerfully felt than in the book's second section, "Time Passes." A shocking, almost inhuman picture of decay and death, "Time Passes" moves like a stop-motion film: weeds grow before our eyes, the unoccupied vacation house falls into disrepair, and history marches on its tumultuous way in the background. Bookending this harrowing section are the sections "The Window" and "The Lighthouse," the story of the Ramsay circle and how they face this unstoppable force. Each of the important characters in the novel demonstrates a slightly different approach to the problem of time's passage. Mr. Ramsay, a portrait of Woolf's own father, has dedicated himself to his philosophic writings. Well aware that his works are not profound enough to secure any lasting fame or immortality for his name, Mr. Ramsay spends his days in a volcanic depression. Mrs. Ramsay, on the other hand, less cerebral than her husband, devotes her energies to bringing harmony, stability, and happiness to her family in the time that they have together. But it is the painter Lily Briscoe, whose act of painting closes the novel, who seems to offer the best alternative. By composing, Woolf seems to suggest, the artist builds a provisional order out of the flux and chaos of life. What is important, though, is not whether Lily Briscoe's paintings are good enough to bring her artistic immortality, but the fact that she approaches the world with an artist's eye, capable of reveling in beauty and seeing provisional harmony in the midst of the volatility and confusion of life. It is, in other words, less the artist's expression itself and more the artist's way of perceiving the world that makes a difference.Woolf's masterpiece, To the Lighthouse was published in 1927 during one of most astonishing and impressive periods of achievement and development in English literary history. Indeed, not since the heyday of English Romanticism in the early nineteenth century, have so many enduring and groundbreaking masterworks been produced. To the Lighthouse was published just four years after that annus mirabilis, 1922, which saw the publication of both Eliot's The Waste Land and Joyce's Ulysses. Forster's A Passage to India (1924), Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Woolf's own Mrs. Dalloway (1925) are just a few of the remarkable works of a period which also found artists such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Wallace Stevens in the United States and D.H. Lawrence and W.B. Yeats in Great Britain working at the height of their powers.
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Fiction, Married people, Death, Mothers, Summer resorts, Loss (Psychology), English, Lighthouses, Widowers, Marriage, Social life and customs, Manuscripts, Translations, Technique, Textual Criticism, Criticism and interpretation, Facsimiles, Literature, Long Now Manual for Civilization, Psychological fiction, English fiction, Domestic fiction, Vacation homes, Middle class families, British and irish fiction (fictional works by one author), England, fiction, Married people, fiction, Scotland, fiction, Fiction, psychological, Widowers, fiction, Gewohnheit, Änderung, Sommerfrische, Großfamilie, Large type books, English literature, Fiction, general, 18.05 English literature, Manners and customs, British, Fiction, historical, general, Stream of consciousness fiction, Romans, nouvelles, Roman anglais, Perte (Psychologie), Stations d'été, Couples mariés, Phares, Veufs, Roman familial, Courant de conscience (Littérature), Classic Literature, Britanniques, English--scotland--fiction, Loss (psychology)--fiction, Mothers--death, Mothers--death--fiction, Summer resorts--fiction, Married people--fiction, Lighthouses--fiction, Widowers--fiction, English fiction--scotland, Pr6045.o72 t6 2005, 823/.912, Church records and registers, Church records and registers--germany--irlich (neuwied), Cs627.i74 t44 2007, 929/.343, 823.912 fPeople
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)Places
Skye, Island of (Scotland), Scotland, England, Skye, Island of SkyeShowing 12 featured editions. View all 520 editions?
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To the Lighthouse (Vintage Classics)
January 25, 2005, Vintage Books
in English
0099478293 9780099478294
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To the Lighthouse (Oxford World's Classics)
April 2, 1998, Oxford Univ Press
0192834134 9780192834133
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To the Lighthouse (Penguin Popular Classics)
May 30, 1996, Penguin Books Ltd
in English
0140622144 9780140622140
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This novel is an extraordinarily poignant evocation of a lost happiness that lives on in the memory. For years now the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever.In this, her most autobiographical novel, Virginia Woolf captures the intensity of childhood longing and delight, and the shifting complexity of adult relationships. From an acute awareness of transcience, she creates an enduring work of art.
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August 4, 2013 | Edited by VacuumBot | Updated format 'E-book' to 'eBook' |
April 3, 2013 | Edited by VacuumBot | Updated format 'eBook' to 'E-book'; Removed author from Edition (author found in Work) |
June 23, 2010 | Created by ImportBot | Imported from marc_overdrive MARC record |