To the Lighthouse Study Guide

Born into a prestigious literary family (her grandfather was William Thackeray), Virginia Stephen became an important part of London’s literary scene at a young age. She married the writer Leonard Woolf with whom she founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, which published all of her later novels as well as works by T.S. Eliot and other literary luminaries of the time. Woolf’s experiments with prose marked a radical departure from the tradition of the Victorian novel and created fresh possibilities for the novelistic form. Her works such as Mrs. Dalloway, The Waves, and To the Lighthouse, are to this day widely influential. Following the early deaths of her parents and sister, Woolf suffered periodic nervous breakdowns throughout her life and, in 1941, fearing another breakdown, she drowned herself in the River Ouse.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, new scientific developments usurped long-held worldviews and raised new questions about the nature of reality and human experience. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection subverted traditional beliefs in a world governed by God, and, as Darwin’s work contradicted people’s understanding of the world around them, Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious undermined people’s understandings of themselves by pointing out a mysterious region of the mind to which no one had conscious access. In To the Lighthouse, Woolf’s interest in the equal unknowability of the world and the human brain reflect the influence of such contemporary scientific theories.

The novel’s most closely related literary works are Woolf’s other novels, including Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves, also written in the stream of consciousness form that characterizes To the Lighthouse. Yet, around the time of Woolf’s writing, other novelists were experimenting with stream of consciousness, too, and their resultant works – including Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury – serve as productive points of contrast and comparison with Woolf’s own prose experiment.