SOURCE: “Art in ‘To the Lighthouse,’” in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. VIII, No. 2, Summer, 1962, pp. 127–36.

In the following essay, Cohn describes Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe as “magnetic poles,” representing, respectively, the forces of life and art.

When Mr. Ramsay lands on the lighthouse rock, Lily Briscoe finishes her painting. All critics agree on the intimate and essential relation between these final events of Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse.¹ Several critics have commented, too, on how Lily Briscoe's painting structures the book.² But there has not been adequate appreciation of the way in which the theme of art functions in To The Lighthouse. Neither Leonard Woolf's term “psychological poem” nor Virginia Woolf's own hesitant suggestion of “elegy” succeeds in classifying the book, for, in part at least, it is a work of art about art—as are Hamlet and Don Quixote; as is much of the creation of...