The Lighthouse was then a silvery mistylooking tower with a yellow eye that opened suddenly and softly in the eveningTo the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionistic depiction of a family holiday and a meditation on marriage on parenthood and childhood on grief tyranny and bitterness. For years now the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland and they expect these summers will go on forever but as the First World War looms the integrity of family and society will be fatally challenged. With a psychologically introspective mode the use of memory reminiscence and shifting perspectives gives the novel an intimate poetic essence and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of Victorian and Edwardian literary values.