To the Lighthouse is, despite its brevity, one of Virginia Woolf's major works. Conceived more as a painting than as a novel, it shows us the inner development of four characters over two days spanning ten years. The style of the novel, baroque and poetic, is as dazzling as the psychological portrait, the symbolic weight of its images, and the conceptual depth of a Virginia Woolf in a state of grace who, with this novel, offers us one of the pinnacles of literary modernism.
Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941) was one of the central figures of 20th-century literary modernism. Daughter of the critic and historian Leslie Stephen, she grew up in a deeply intellectual environment that shaped her education from a very young age. She soon became one of the most influential voices of the so-called Bloomsbury Group, a decisive circle in British cultural renewal, where she developed her interest in feminism, aesthetic experimentation, and new ways of narrating inner experience.
During the 1920s, she founded the publishing house Hogarth Press together with Leonard Woolf, from which she promoted both her own work and that of key authors of her time. Novels such as Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse transformed contemporary narrative through their exploration of consciousness and subjective time. In 1941, after several depressive episodes worsened by the context of World War II in the United Kingdom, she took her own life. Her work remains an essential reference in modern literature.
