By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
To the Lighthouse was Virginia Woolf’s fifth novel. By this stage of her career, she’d written a couple of more conventional novels, The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919); she’d written the novel which is often cited as the turning point in her career as a modernist writer, Jacob’s Room (1922); and she’d written what is probably her most famous novel, Mrs Dalloway (1925), which features a couple of characters who’d featured in The Voyage Out (the action of Mrs Dalloway takes place over one day in June 1923, although there are numerous flashbacks to earlier in the characters’ lives, particularly to the youthful years of the title character).
