Virginia Woolf 's To the Lighthouse published 50 years ago today

First posted 7/3/2020; last updated 7/5/2020.

To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf

First Publication: May 5, 1927 Category: modernism novel Sales: ?

Accolades (click on badges to see full lists):

About the Book: “Radiant as [To the Lighthouse] is in its beauty, there could never be a mistake about it: here is a novel to the last degree severe and uncompromising. I think that beyond being about the very nature of reality, it is itself a vision of reality.” – Eudora Welty, from the Introduction AZ “The serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, and their children and assorted guests are on holiday on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Woolf constructs a remarkable, moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life and the conflict between men and women.” AZ “Following and extending the tradition of modernist novelists like Marcel Proust and James Joyce, the plot of To the Lighthouse is secondary to its philosophical introspection. Cited as a key example of the literary technique of multiple focalization, the novel includes little dialogue and almost no action; most of it is written as thoughts and observations. The novel recalls childhood emotions and highlights adult relationships. Among the book's many tropes and themes are those of loss, subjectivity, the nature of art and the problem of perception.” WK Resources and Related Links: AZ Amazon WK Wikipedia

Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway published 50 years ago today

First posted ?.

Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf

First Publication: May 14, 1925 Category: novel Sales: ?

Accolades (click on badges to see full lists):

About the Book: “In Mrs. Dalloway, the novel on which the movie The Hours was based, Virginia Woolf” AZ “details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional high-society woman in post–First World War England.” WK Clarissa is preparing “for a party of which she is to be hostess, exploring the hidden springs of thought and action in one day of a woman’s life.” AZ Her conflicts about marriage are stirred up when she is visited by “the enigmatic and demanding Peter Walsh,” WK whom she passed over in favor of the “reliable Richard Dalloway.” WK At her party that evening, she hears about the suicide of a World War I veteran. She “gradually comes to admire this stranger’s act, which she considers an effort to preserve the purity of his happiness.” WK “Created from two short stories, ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’ and the unfinished ‘The Prime Minister,’” WK “the novel contains some of the most beautiful, complex, incisive and idiosyncratic sentences ever written in English.” AZ “With an interior perspective, the story travels forwards and back in time and in and out of the characters’ minds to construct an image of Clarissa’s life and of the inter-war social structure.” WK “It is one of the most moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century.” AZ Resources and Related Links: AZ Amazon WK Wikipedia