1920s 20c 20th-century american bloomsbury bloomsbury-group brit-lit britain british british-fiction british-literature classic classic-fiction classic-literature classics death england english english-literature experimental family feminism feminist fiction lighthouses literary literary-fiction literature marriage modern modernism modernist novel novels prose school time twentieth-century uk virginia-woolf war women women-writers womens-studies woolf

Subject of this extraordinary novel is the daily life of an English family in the Hebrides. Radiant as [To the Lighthouse] is in its beauty, there could never be a mistake about it: here is a novel to the last degree severe and uncompromising. I think that beyond being about the very nature of reality, it is itself a vision of reality.-Eudora Welty, from her Introduction.