It is most shocking that such an extraordinary  British novelist Virginia Woolf, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen and the wife of Leonard Woolf  , committed suicide by drowning herself.  Her novels are always acclaimed due to her innovative experimental style and the stream of consciousness technique.  All artists of her Bloomsbury Group agree that she was mentally depressed during the World War II as her two houses were  bombed  while England was being attacked by Germany.

   In the province of  literature, she is immortal  due to a new technique of writing fiction. She used this in her best novel  To the Lighthouse. She herself remarked: ““My present opinion is that it is easily the best of my books”.  

To the Lighthouseis divided into three sections: “The Window,” “Time Passes,” and “The Lighthouse.” The novel describes the Ramsay family vacationing in the distant Hebrides islands. The tour to a nearby lighthouse is put off by Mr. Ramsay. After ten years, we find that  Mrs. Ramsay and two of the Ramsays’ children die. After their deaths,  the trip to the Lighthouse is successfully executed by Mr. Ramsay and his children James and Cam.

   The most amazing thing in the novel is the revelation of the inner life of  Mrs. Ramsay.  The technique ‘stream of consciousness’  or interior monologue unravels  the emotional and psychological processes  taking place in the minds of characters. “Stream of consciousness writers of the modern age viewed the character as a psychological battlefield” (Laura Barnes).

Virginia Woolf remarks about this technique:“Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel.  From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape  themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old incident scores upon the consciousness” .

Most of the events in the novel take place in  Mrs. Ramsay’s mind. The visit to the Lighthouse is almost entirely by reflections, impressions, images, memories crowding in upon the minds of the characters.

“Virginia Woolf’s genius is atonce more difficult and more original than that of any other novelist of today” (Spectator).