To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionist depiction of a family holiday and a meditation on a marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny, and bitterness.
Its use of stream of consciousness, reminiscence, and shifting perspectives gives the novel an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of Victorian and Edwardian literary values.
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century, transformed the art of the novel. She was a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. The author of numerous novels, collections of letters, journals, and short stories, she was also an admired literary critic and a master of the essay form.
Phyllida Law, a Scottish actress, has appeared in Monarch of the Glen and Waking the Dead. Born in 1932, she is also the mother of actresses Emma Thompson and Sophie Thompson.