SOURCE: “Lily Brisco's Painting: A Key to Personal Relationships in ‘To the Lighthouse,’” in Criticism, Vol. XIII, No. 1, Winter, 1971, pp. 26–38.

In the following essay, Proudfit contends that the meaning of To the Lighthouse, and particularly the figure of Mrs. Ramsay, is largely contained in the post-Impressionistic quality of Lily Briscoe's painting and in Lily's ambiguous relationship to Mrs. Ramsay.

It has become almost commonplace among critics of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse to regard Mrs. Ramsay, unquestionably one of the most perfect statements of feminine sensibility, intuition, and maternal comfort in literature, as a magnetic life force, entering and irradiating the lives of those around her, which must somehow be fulfilled and immortalized through the Ramsay family's final pilgrimage to the lighthouse. Even Jean Guiguet, author of the most recent and certainly the best full-scale work on Mrs. Woolf's writings to date, Virginia Woolf and Her Works, sees...