To the Lighthouse

To the Lighthouse was published in 1927 by Hogarth Press two years after Mrs Dalloway and a year before Orlando. The plot – not the most important aspect at all – concerns a family’s decision to visit a lighthouse on two separate occasions, the first, unsuccessfully, when the children are young and the second, successfully, when the children are ten years older but the mother has died. The essential parts of the plot, the death of the mother and the demise of a son, are merely referred to (the first in brackets!), but are central to the tone and feel of the second part in which the initially maligned father proves his worth in the eyes of his children.