Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf 	Virginia Woolf
 	
Subject: 	Literature II
Life Span: 	1882-1941
Work(s) Analysed:	To the Lighthouse
Chronology 	Chronology
Previous: 	Joseph Conrad
Next: 	Stevie Smith
==Biography==
Born in 1882 in London, the novels of British novelist, essayist, and critic Virginia Woolf exerted a major influence on fiction through her nonlinear approach to narrative. Daughters of the eminent man of letters Leslie Stephen, Virginia and her sister Vanessa became the early nucleus of the Bloomsbury group. Virginia Stephen married Leonard Woolf in 1912, and in 1917 they founded the Hogarth Press. Her best novels—including Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927)—are experimental. In them she examines the human experience of time, the indefinability of character, and external circumstances as they impinge on consciousness. Orlando (1928) is a historical fantasy about a single character who experiences England from the Elizabethan era to the early 20th century, and The Waves (1931), perhaps her most radically experimental work, uses interior monologue and recurring images to trace the inner lives of six characters. Such works confirmed her place among the major figures of literary modernism. Her best critical studies are collected in The Common Reader (1925, 1932). Her long essay A Room of One’s Own (1929) addressed the status of women, and women artists in particular. Her other novels include Jacob’s Room (1922), The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941). She also wrote a biography of Roger Fry. Her health and mental stability were delicate throughout her life; and in a recurrence of mental illness, she drowned herself in 1941. Kuiper, Kathleen. Prose. Literary Terms and Concepts. Britannica, 2012.
After the publication of Mrs. Dalloway in 1925, Woolf began writing To the Lighthouse, her fifth novel, which she published in 1927. As influential modernist and feminist works, the two novels remain her most popular and successful. Woolf insisted "books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately"; contemporary writer Hisham Matar, who counts To the Lighthouse as the novel in which Woolf "mastered" her sentence, sees this connection: "With each book she became more obsessed with language and how when we speak we often fall short of or else exceed what we intended to express." Woolf's sentences, "freely progressing, long, fractured series of observations and insights, unburdened and unhurried by the need to tell a 'story,'" examine the successes and failures of the human psyche and connection.
Virginia Woolf is now acclaimed as one of the great innovative novelists of the 20th century, many of whose experimental techniques (such as the use of the stream of consciousness, or interior monologue) have been absorbed into the mainstream of fiction; her novels have been particularly highly regarded from the 1970s onwards by the new school of feminist criticism. Drabble, Margaret. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford University Press, 2000.
===The Bloomsbury Group===
‘Bloomsbury’ was never a formal grouping. Its origins lay in male friendships in late nineteenth-century Cambridge; in the early 1900s it found a focus in the Gordon Square house of the children of Leslie Stephen in unfashionable Bloomsbury; it was only with the formation of the ‘Memoir Club’ in 1920 that it loosely defined the limits of its friendships, relationships, and sympathies. The ‘Memoir Club’ originally centred on Leslie Stephen’s two daughters Virginia and Vanessa, their husbands Leonard Woolf and Clive Bell, and their friends and neighbours Desmond and Molly MacCarthy, Duncan Grant, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, and John Maynard Keynes. The group was linked by what Clive Bell later called ‘a taste for discussion in pursuit of truth and a contempt for conventional ways of thinking and feeling, contempt for conventional morals if you will’. Their discussions combined tolerant agnosticism with cultural dogmatism, progressive rationality with social snobbery, practical jokes with refined self advertisement. When in 1928 Bell (1881-1964) attempted to define ‘Civilization’ (in a book of that name) he
identified an aggrandized Bloomsbury ideal in the douceur de vivre and witty iconoclasm of the France of the Enlightenment (though, as Virginia Woolf commented, ‘in the end it turns out that civilization is a lunch party at No 50 Gordon Square’). To its friends ‘Bloomsbury’ offered a prevision of a relaxed, permissive, and elitist future; to its enemies, like the once patronized and later estranged D. H. Lawrence, it was a tight little world peopled by uppermiddle-class ‘black beetles’. Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. Clarendon Press, 1994.
==Historical & Cultural Context==
===Background===
(1890-1918) This period sees the end of the long reign of Queen Victoria (1901) and of the stability which the country had so long enjoyed. The shock administered by the Boer War (1899-1902) to the violent imperialism of the later years of the reign helped to divert attention from the cruder conceptions of imperial expansion to social problems at home. There ensued a period of sweeping social reform and unprecedented progress. The reawakening of a social conscience found its expression in the development of local government and the rapid extension of its influence upon the health, education, and happiness of the citizen. More than ever before political issues were fought on the basis of class loyalties, and this period sees the emergence and rapid growth of the Labour Party. Political passions ran high, and the years before the War saw serious labour troubles, many of them connected with the growth of Trades Unionism. Home Rule for Ireland, Free Trade or Protection, Votes for Women, the decline of agriculture and the growing urbanization of the country were major problems of the day. After the Boer War the aloofness which Britain had so long and prosperously maintained from European conflicts was abandoned in face of growing German strength, and national rivalries finally came to a head in the appalling struggle of 1914-18. Albert, Edward. History of English Literature. 1979. Oxford University Press, 2000.
===World War I===
By the turn of the twentieth century, a fierce rivalry had developed among Europe's great powers. The nations of Europe competed for colonies in Africa and Asia, which increased their sense of rivalry and mistrust. This led to the creation of military alliances. On the one side was the Triple Alliance: Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. On the other side was the Triple Entente: Great Britain, France, and Russia. A dispute between two rival powers could draw all the nations of Europe into war. By 1914, Europe was divided into two rival camps. Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war against Serbia set off a chain reaction within the alliance system. The countries of Europe followed through on their pledges to support one another. 
World War I was a new kind of war. It involved the use of new technologies, and it left behind a landscape of death and destruction. Both sides paid a tremendous price in terms of human life; the war also had a devastating economic impact on Europe. The enormous suffering that resulted from the Great War left a deep mark on Western society. Another significant legacy of the war lay in its peace agreement. The treaties to end World War I were forged after great debate and compromise. Beck, Roger. World History: Patterns of Interaction. McDougal Littell, 2009. 
===Women's Suffrage===
Due to industrialization many people wanted to improve conditions for workers and the poor. Many groups demanded political reforms that extended the right to vote to the middle class, workers and women. Traditionally, members of the House of Lords either inherited their seats or were appointed.  In the early 1800s the method of selecting the British government was not a true democracy. Voting was limited to land owners. Women could not vote at all. As a consequence, the upper classes run the government.
Reform Bill (1832): factory owners, bankers, and merchants demanded a greater voice in politics (they wanted to extend suffrage). Parliament passed the Reform Bill of 1832. This law eased the property requirements so that the well-to-do men in the middle class could vote. 
Chartist Movement: although the Reform Bill increased the number of British voters, only a small percentage of men were eligible to vote. A popular movement arose among the workers and other groups who still could not vote to press for more rights.
People’s Charter: it demanded a secret ballot, an end to property requirements for serving in Parliament and pay form members of Parliament. Parliament rejected the Chartists’ demands. Over the years workers continued to press for political reform, and Parliament responded. 
During the reign of Queen Victoria, the spread of democracy shifted political power almost completely to Parliament, and especially to the elected House of Commons. 
Women Get the Vote: as more men gained suffrage, more women demanded the same. British women organized reform societies and protested against unfair laws and customs.  Women did not get the right to vote in national elections in Great Britain and the United States until after the First World War.
===First Feminist Wave===
The first wave of feminism took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, emerging out of an environment of urban industrialism and liberal, socialist politics. The goal of this wave was to open up opportunities for women, with a focus on suffrage. The wave formally began at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 when three hundred men and women rallied to the cause of equality for women.Victorian America saw women acting in very "un-ladylike" ways (public speaking, demonstrating, stints in jail), which challenged the "cult of domesticity." Discussions about the vote and women's participation in politics led to an examination of the differences between men and women as they were then viewed. Some claimed that women were morally superior to men, and so their presence in the civic sphere would improve public behavior and the political process. Rampton, Martha. "Four Waves of Feminism." Pacific University Oregon, 25 October, 2015. www.pacificu.edu/magazine/four-waves-feminism 
===Modernism===
Charles Baudelaire, in the
course of his writings on modern art in the 1860s, reflected continually on the revolutionary character of modern life: its speed, confusion, and reckless, sensational moods. But modernism is normally associated with the years from about 1910 through the 1920s, and (frequently) the following few decades. Woolf, in her essays “Modern Fiction” (1925) and “Poetry, Fiction, and the Future” (1927), proclaimed that modernist novelists “attempt to come closer to life” by showing that “everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought ... no perception comes amiss.” Of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), she remarked, “If we want life itself, here surely we have it.” Woolf ’s comments demonstrate that modernism justified itself by its revolutionary ambition for truth to life: for a greater, more complete realism. Joyce had accomplished a mimesis encompassing dreams and unconscious thoughts, as well as the most minute details of waking existence. This was global grasp, not mere capricious or random exploration. Mikics, David. A New Handbook of Literary Terms. Yale University Press, 2007.
==Bibliography==
Novels:
*The Voyage Out (1915)
*Night and Day (1919)
*Jacob's Room (1922)
*Mrs Dalloway (1925)
*To the Lighthouse (1927)
*Orlando: A Biography (1928)
*The Waves (1931)
*The Years (1937)
*Between the Acts (1941)
Short fiction collections:
*Two Stories (1917)
*Monday or Tuesday (1921)
*A Haunted House and Other Short Stories (1944)
*Mrs. Dalloway's Party (1973)
*The Complete Shorter Fiction (1985)
Book lenght essays:
*A Room of One's Own (1929)
*On Being Ill (1930)
*Three Guineas (1938)
===Literary Style===
Virginia Woolf [employs] aesthetic ideas as a means of arguing for the potential freedom of the novel from commonly received understandings of plot, time, and identity. In discussing the revision of traditional modes of representation in her essay ‘Modern Fiction’, Woolf insists that each day ‘the mind receives a myriad impressions-trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel’. The novelist, attempting to work with this ‘incessant shower of innumerable atoms’, is forced to recognize that ‘if [they] could base [their] work upon [their] own feeling and not upon convention’, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe ‘in the accepted style’. The task of the future novelist, Woolf therefore suggests, is to convey an impression of the ‘luminous halo’ of life — ‘this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit’ — with as little mixture of the ‘alien and external’ as possible. What Woolf seeks to defend in her essays is not necessarily a new range of subjects for the novel, but new ways of rendering and designing the novel. She does more than present a challenge to the received idea of realism; she reaches out to a new aesthetic of realism. Essentially, she defines her own work, and that of contemporaries, such as Lawrence and Joyce, against the example of the Edwardian ‘materialists’ (and Arnold Bennett in particular) who, to her mind, laid too great a stress on ‘the fabric of things’. Not only did they weigh their fiction down with a plethora of external detail, they too readily accepted the constraints of conventional obedience to ‘plot’ and sequential development. 
As Virginia Woolf’s fictional style developed beyond the relatively conventional parameters of The Voyage Out (1915) to the experimental representations of consciousness in Mrs Dallomay (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931), specific characterization recedes and the detailed exploration of the individual identity tends to melt into a larger and freer expression. The discontinuities, fragmentations, and disintegrations which her avantgarde artistic contemporaries observed in both the external and the spiritual world become focused for Woolf in the idea, noted in her diary in 1924, of character ‘dissipated into shreds’. Her novels attempt both to ‘dissipate’ character and to reintegrate human experience within an aesthetic shape or ‘form’. She seeks to represent the nature of transient sensation, or of conscious and unconscious mental activity, and then to relate it outwards to a more universal awareness of pattern and rhythm. The momentary reaction, the impermanent emotion, the ephemeral stimulus, the random suggestion, and the dissociated thought are effectively ‘bent’ into a stylistic relationship to something coherent and structured. A ‘coherence in things’ is what Mrs Ramsay recognizes in a visionary, and quasi-religious, moment of peace in To the Lighthouse as ‘a stability ... something ... immune from change’. The supposedly random picture of the temporal in Woolf’s later fiction is also informed and ‘interpreted’ by the invocation of the permanent and the universal, much as the ‘arbitrary’ in nature was ‘interpreted’ with reference to post-Darwinian science, or the complexities of the human psyche unravelled by the application of newly fashionable Freudian theory. Although her characters may often seem to be dissolved into little more than ciphers, what they come to signify is part of a complex iconographic discourse. 
====Stream of Consciousness====
As applied to literature, stream of consciousness describes a form of representation that stations itself inside the head of a character. The writer offers an unbroken, fleeting passage of thought and emotion, including jumbled or fragmented associations and states of halfawareness. (Stream of consciousness is sometimes associated with the related term interior monologue.) 
====Characteristics====
*It makes use of associative leaps in syntax and punctuation.
*It traces a character’s fragmentary thoughts and sensory feelings.
*Traditional narrative form cannot do justice to the tumultuous randomness of life.
*Fiction should convey the brevity and disjunction of relations and experiences in life.
*Rather than an orderly sequence of events, the writer advocates a form of narrative which consists of a series of brief impressions, unfinished vignettes, unfolding in random order, unrelated to one another, and of no particular consequence in themselves.
====Moments of Being====
These are moments in which an individual experiences a sense of reality in contrast to the states of non-being that dominate most of an individual’s conscious life, separated from reality. They could be instances of shock, discovery or revelation.
In "A Sketch of the Past," Woolf reports that until she wrote To the Lighthouse, “…the presence of my mother obsessed me. I could hear her voice, see her, imagine what she would do or say as I went about my day's doings…Then one day walking round Tavistock Square I made up, as I sometimes make up my books, To the Lighthouse; in a great, apparently involuntary rush. One thing burst into another…I wrote the book very quickly and when it was written, I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her. I suppose that I did for myself what psycho-analysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it laid it to rest."
Example in To the Lighthouse:
"The jacmanna was bright violet; the wall staring white. She would not have considered it honest to tamper with the bright violet and the staring white, since she saw them like that, fashionable though it was, since Mr Paunceforte's visit, to see everything pale, elegant, semitransparent. Then beneath the colour there was the shape. She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment's flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. Such she often felt herself--struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: “But this is what I see; this is what I see," and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her. And it was then too, in that chill and windy way, as she began to paint, that there forced themselves upon her other things, her own inadequacy, her insignificance, keeping house for her father off the Brompton Road, and had much ado to control her impulse to fling herself (thank Heaven she had always resisted so far) at Mrs Ramsay's knee and say to her--but what could one say to her? "I'm in love with you?" No, that was not true. "I'm in love with this all," waving her hand at the hedge, at the house, at the children. It was absurd, it was impossible. (Woolf 8)
==To the Lighthouse==
===Literary Overview===
*Time setting: A span of 10 years between 1910 and 1920
*Place setting: A summer house overlooking a lighthouse in the Isle of Skye, off the western coast of Scotland
*Narrator: Third person, omniscient (Although there’s a constant shifting of points of view of the characters)
*Tone: Nostalgic, Reflective, Elegiac
*Themes: Love and Loss; Subjectivity of reality; Transcience of life/work; Death; Preserving moments through art; Search for meaning in life
===Time Management===
The novel is divided into three parts:
*Part I: “The Window” - It tells the events of one day in the summer house of the Ramsays. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay’s son, James, wants to sail to a lighthouse, but the weather is unfavorable. At night, Mrs. Ramsay hosts a dinner party for her family and close friends.
*Part II: “Time Passes” - In a span of ten years, the house is left abandonded, with the exception of the housekeeper who periodically does the cleaning. Mrs. Ramsay and two of her children (Andrew and Prue) die.
*Part III: “The Lighthouse” - Ten years have passed and the Ramsays come back to the house. They decide to go visit the Lighthouse.
===Plot===
====The Window====
The story begins in early 1900s Scotland, just before World War I, as the Ramsays and company travel to their vacation home in the Hebrides. "The Window" covers about seven hours during an afternoon and evening but spans nearly half the novel. Mrs. Ramsay tells her six-year-old son, James, he can go to the lighthouse if the weather permits. Her husband, a metaphysician who made a significant contribution to the field early in his career, and his brash "admirer" Charles Tansley extinguish James's hopes by saying the weather will make it impossible. Later in the afternoon the Ramsays argue over the weather.
Family friend Lily Briscoe is attempting to paint a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay and James. William Bankes, another friend, living in the village, has agreed to stay for dinner. Mrs. Ramsay dedicates much of the day to protecting James's "fleeting" innocence and arranging a dinner party. Mr. Ramsay behaves boorishly, demanding female praise and reassurance. Throughout the day Mrs. Ramsay worries over the whereabouts of her daughter Nancy (who she thinks may be out walking with Minta Doyle, Paul Rayley, and Andrew Ramsay) and thinks about matchmaking and domestic issues like the greenhouse repair bill. Intermittently posing for Lily Briscoe's painting, Mrs. Ramsay devotes most of her time to ensuring the comfort of others, particularly her husband, within the house and in the community (the lighthouse keeper's ill son and poor Elsie in town).
The day culminates in the bœuf en daube supper for a group of 15 that includes newly engaged Minta Doyle and Paul Rayley. Mrs. Ramsay dedicates great effort to create a peaceful meal and thinks the event memorable, with Mr. Ramsay, despite his earlier ill temper, reciting a poem for her. This first part of the novel ends with Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay reading and talking quietly. She tells him he was right about the weather, her way of affirming her love.
Part I of To the Lighthouse, "The Window," takes place on a September evening at a holiday home in the Hebrides, and describes the various activities and preoccupations of the Ramsays, their eight children and six guests. The main focus is on the family as an institution whose stability is at once creative and constricting. Families guarantee personal immortality through lineage and affiliation. But the centrality of this institution in society's self-furtherance has led it to arrogate powers and values which do not necessarily belong to it. Established as the primary medium of symbolic exchange, it expands or reduces all anxieties and aspirations to its own size, converting any stray ambition into itself. Woolf's point seems to be that while everything in the family is reproduction (of powers, of values), not all reproduction is in the family. To the personal immortality made more likely by lineage, though not guaranteed, since children sometimes die young, Woolf opposed the personal immortality made more likely by art, though not guaranteed, since paintings sometimes get stuffed in attics. Levenson, Michael. The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. 1999. Cambridge University Press, 2005. 
====Time Passes====
The second part covers about 10 years in the span of a mere 10 to 20 pages or so. William Bankes, Lily Briscoe, Augustus Carmichael, and Andrew and Prue Ramsay arrive somberly at the summer house, as war begins across Europe. During one night Mrs. Ramsay dies unexpectedly. Prue Ramsay marries and dies from childbirth complications. At war, Andrew Ramsay is killed instantly by a shell.
The house sits abandoned. Mrs. McNab cleans and tends to the house but during World War I closes it. After a decade the Ramsays write Mrs. McNab asking her to ready the house. She, along with Mrs. Bast, her son, and contractors, restore the summer home in time for the guests' arrival.
The pivotal part II, "Time Passes," boldly reduces the crisis novel's crisis to parentheses embedded in a description of the house's abandonment and decay during a period of ten years. The parentheses flatly inform us of the deaths of Mrs. Ramsay, her daughter Prue (in childbirth), and her son Andrew (in battle): the predictability of the last two making the first even harder to explain and endure. Events no longer obtrude, to be enshrined in metaphor. "There was the silent apparition of an ashen-colored ship for instance, come, gone; there was a purplish stain upon the bland surface of the sea as if something had boiled and bled, invisibly, beneath." These apparitions do not flower into meaning. Indeed, they block meaning, disrupt, for the stroller on the beach, "a scene calculated to stir the most sublime reflections" (182). The narrative is now a counterelegy, to the extent that it can recall the past ("how once the looking-glass had held a face"), but not the future in the past. Seventy-year-old Mrs. McNab, creature of experience rather than aspiration, fingers the gray cloak which had once provoked sublime reflections about Mrs. Ramsay's beauty.
====The Lighthouse====
"The Lighthouse" covers only a few hours in one morning, focusing on the home's current state after a tumultuous decade. Lily Briscoe is unable to process all that has happened. Mr. Ramsay has planned a trip to the lighthouse and is angry his children have made them late for the trip. Lily recalls the painting of Mrs. Ramsay and James and decides to paint the scene again. When she sets up her easel outside, Mr. Ramsay interrupts her, seeking sympathy. Unable to comfort him, she remains silent until she notices his shoes. James and Cam Ramsay arrive, and the family leaves, while Lily feels remorse.
In the boat James and Cam are forced to confront their anger with Mr. Ramsay. On the lawn Lily is forced to confront her repressed emotions over the loss of her friend. After intense introspection, and Cam's change of heart, Cam and James reach the lighthouse together with their father; Lily finishes her painting.
Part II hollows out the world constructed in part I: an empty house, an empty style. It is this emptiness which makes possible the redemptions of part III. Mrs. Ramsay is still loved, and greatly missed, but it is only in her absence that Mr. Ramsay can reach the lighthouse (he would surely not have gone except as reparation) and Lily Briscoe complete her painting. Only when Mrs. Ramsay has receded, only when her beauty has ceased to still and freeze life, only when she has been supplanted by the life which goes on without her, can she become the object of Lily's painting, of Lily's love. The steps where Mrs. Ramsay had once sat fill elegiacally and then empty again. Only when she convinces herself that they really are empty and will remain empty for ever can Lily complete her painting. "She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished" (281). By emptying the steps, Woolf emptied her own will-to-literature. Not completely, though. For, just as the shape of the person who once occupied the steps remains in Lily's memory, so the conclusion of the novel's other story, with Mr. Ramsay's arrival at the lighthouse, validates the hint of sacred ritual in its overarching title.
In the final part of To the Lighthouse the ‘weight’ of Lily Briscoe’s painting seems to be poised as she explores the elusive nature of mass and form: ‘Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly’s wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron.’ 
===Characters===
====Major Characters====
*Mrs. Ramsay
**Supportive mother, wife, hostess
**Portrait of Victorian ideals and traditional gender roles
*Lily Briscoe
**Artist
**Challenges the traditional role of women
*Mr. Ramsay
**Philosopher, father, husband
**Demanding, authoritative
====Minor Characters====
*The Ramsays’ eight children: Andrew, Cam, James, Jasper, Nancy, Prue, Roger, Rose.
*Augustus Charmichael
*William Bankes
*Charles Tansley
*Minta Doyle
*Paul Rayley
===Analysis===
====Part I: The Window====
*Symbols:
**The Lighthouse: Light and darkness, what the characters can't achieve/attain
**Lily’s painting: The struggle to challenge traiditional female norms (Women can't write, women can't Paint)
**The sea and the waves: Unstoppable passage of time and its effects (the sea eats away the ground we stand on)
**Boar’s skull: Permanent presence/possibility of death
====Part II: Time Passes====
*Symbols:
**The house: It represents the passage of time and the destruction caused by the war in Britain.
*The use of brackets: Each set of sentences in brackets in this section contains violence, death, and the destruction of potential; the short, stabbing accounts accentuate the brutality of these events.
====Part III: The Lighthouse====
*Symbols:
**The Lighthouse Journey to the light, achieving that what once was unattainable
**Lily’s painting Legacy. That which remains regardless of the passage of time (nothing stays; all changes; but not words, not paint)
==Intro Paragraph==
In the aftermath of the First World War at the beginning of the twentieth century, the rapid changes taking place in Europe sparked a movement in literature and the arts: Modernism. This movement was characterized by a rejection of 19th century traditions, which had authors and artists seeking new, distinct means to express their ideas. In literature, modernists challenged conventional aspects of writing in favor of experimental elements, thus creating complex works that sought to depict their views on the subjectivity of reality, and the absurdity of contemporary life. A major figure of this period, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) encompassed these ideals in her 1927 novel To the Lighthouse. Regarded an autobiographical work, the novel recounts the life of the Ramseys through the experiences of their matriarch, Mrs. Ramsey, by means of the stream of consciousness techinque. 
===MLA citation===
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. 1927. Project Gutenberg of Australia, 2001.
Woolf, Virginia. to the Lighthouse. 1927. Everyman's Library, 1991.
==Sources==
Overview 	Overview 	Overview
Literature 	Literature II 	Wilfred Owen · John M. Synge · T.S. Eliot · Joseph Conrad · Virginia Woolf · Stevie Smith · Dylan Thomas · Philip Larkin · Seamus Heaney · Benjamin Zephaniah · Nadine Gordimer · Leanne Shapton
Literature 	Literature III	Pre-colonial & Puritan · St. John de Crevecoeur · Edgar Allan Poe · Ralph Waldo Emerson · Walt Whitman · Emily Dickinson · Kate Chopin · Mark Twain · Ezra Pound · Ernest Hemingway · Langston Hughes · Robert Frost · William Faulkner · Arthur Miller · Allen Ginsberg · Maya Angelou · Sandra Cisneros · Paul Auster · Jonathan Foer
Perspectives	Unit 1 	Rise of Democratic Ideas · Global Interdependence · Unresolved Problems · World Religions · Eastern and Western worlds
Perspectives	Unit 2 	An age of democracy and progress · U.S. Westward expansion and Civil War · The New Imperialism
Perspectives	Unit 3 	China and Japan · U.S. economic imperialism · World War I · The Golden Door
Perspectives	Unit 4 	Revolutions in Russia · Totalitarianism · Postwar uncertainty · The Roaring Twenties · A worldwide depression · Fascism rises in Europe · World War II
Perspectives	Unit 5 	The Cold War · Civil Rights Movement