To the Lighthouse

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To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf
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As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, I
want no country. As a woman, my country is the
whole world. Virginia Woolf
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1882 - Adeline Virginia Stephen 1895 - She has
six siblings, George, Julia, Gerald Duckworth and
Thoby, Vanessa and Adrian 1895 - Julia Stephen,
Virginias mother, dies at the age of 49 1904 -
Leslie Stephen dies of cancer 1905 - Thoby
starts Thursday Evenings for his friends who
come to be known as the Bloomsbury Group
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Bloomsbury Group

• Dedicated to a rejection of the strictures and
  taboos of Victorianism Religious, Artistic,
  Social, Sexual
• Known for intellectual snobbery
• Term Bloomsbury has now become synonymous with
  snob

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More VW

• 1912 - Virginia marries Leonard Woolf
• 1914-1917 - WWI
• 1922 - Virginia meets Vita Sackville-West
• 1925 - Publishes Mrs. Dalloway
• 1926 - Publishes To the Lighthouse

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A statement about time and death and the
permanence of art. Virginia Woolf
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More VW
1941 - Becomes ill in March with anxiety and
depression. -Drowns herself in the River Ouse
-Body found three weeks later Against you I
will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O
Death! - The Waves
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• Once conform, once do what other people do
  because they do it, and lethargy steals over all
  the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She
  becomes all outer show and inward emptiness
  dull, callous, and indifferent.
• Virginia Woolf

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Modernism

• As a concept modernism is easier to employ than
  to define. At its broadest it refers not just to
  innovation in literature but to the radical
  remaking of all the arts that went on in Europe
  and America in the year 1914.
• (From an Outline of English Literature by Pat
  Rogers )

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To the Lighthouse

• TTL shows how, in major modernist fiction, the
  novel not only approaches poetry, but in a
  certain sense becomes it.
• TTL is set in a holiday house party in the
  vanished pre-1914 world. It has its basis in the
  personal experiences of Virginia Woolf and her
  family and friends
• Like other modernist texts, TTL is much concerned
  with the nature of art and artistic creation,
  exemplified in the novel by the painter Lily
  Briscoe, whose art is clearly meant to be a
  metaphor for Virginia Woolfs own
• (From an Outline of English Literature by Pat
  Rogers 389)

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Stream of Consciousness

• Coined in 1890 and became popular in the early
  twentieth century Flow of conscious
  experience
• Creates the impression that the reader is
  eavesdropping on the flow of conscious
  experience, gaining intimate access to a
  characters private thoughts
• Involves presenting in written text something
  that is neither entirely verbal nor textual
• Lays open the imagined inner lives of characters
• (http//www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rectrue
  UID1062)

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The best prose is that which is most full of
poetry. Virginia Woolf