In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf draws on her childhood experiences to create an autobiographical novel with universal themes; a masterpiece in the tradition of Proust and Joyce.  

Virginia Woolf was a luminous novelist, a prolific essayist and book reviewer, and a diarist. With her husband Leonard, Woolf established and ran the Hogarth Press which published works by influential modernist writers. In their first five years, they published Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Clive Bell, Roger Fry and Sigmund Freud. Woolf's haunting writing, her succinct insights into feminist, artistic, historical, political issues, and her revolutionary experiments with points of view and stream-of-consciousness altered the course of literature.