To the lighthouse

'I am making up "To the Lighthouse" - the sea is to be heard all throughit'Inspired by the lost bliss of her childhood summers in Cornwall, Virginia Woolfproduced one of the masterworks of English literature in To the Lighthouse. Itconcerns the Ramsay family and their summer guests on the Isle of Skye beforeand after the First World War. As children play and adults paint, talk, muse andexplore, relationships shift and mutate. A captivating fusion of elegy,autobiography, socio-political critique and visionary thrust, it is the mostaccomplished of all Woolf's novels. On completing it, she thought she hadexorcised the ghosts of her imposing parents, but she had also brought form to abook every bit as vivid and intense as the work of Lily Briscoe, the indomitableartist at the centre of the novel.