The Ramsays spend summers in their holiday home off the coast of Scotland, welcoming a motley assortment of guests into their warm family fold. But the First World War looms, and when it has passed, everything will be changed. Writer Arnold Bennett criticized the novel’s slight narrative: “A group of people plan to sail in a small boat to a lighthouse. At the end some of them reach the lighthouse in a small boat. That is the externality of the plot.” But if the plot is superficially small, Woolf’s prose is infinitely expansive, capturing gorgeous, ephemeral moments of family joy and heartbreak.
