Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse is at once a fictionalized family memoir, a war book lamenting the catastrophic losses of the Great War, and a meditation on female creativity, not to mention “all the things I usually put in life, death, etc.” Woolf herself proposed that the book constituted a kind of elegy, a fit term to describe a work that memorializes the past in order to make way for a new order—and liberatory vision—of life.

NOTE: Please read through the first section “The Window” for our first meeting.