To the Lighthouse is a 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf. The book, along with much of Woolf's other work, is an example of literary modernism. Modernism is a distinct rebellion against that which came before, both in knowledge and literature. Other great modernist works include T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and William Faulkner's The Sound and The Fury. Modernist thinkers like Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson wrote about the subjectivity of human existence, and To the Lighthouse expands on this theme.
Woolf shows readers the contradictions of individuals and establishes any "reality" as the interaction of multiple subjective points of view. Using a stream of consciousness with a shifting third...
