The Modern Times of To the Lighthouse

What does it mean to think of the time—or times—of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1925) as modern? “Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small,” Woolf famously wrote in her own “Modern Fiction” (1919). In the spirit of that injunction, this lecture will attempt to answer the question at different scales of magnitude, from the large sweep of Western literary history to the seemingly minor timing of a recipe for a dinner party. Along the way, we will also attend to the ten years of the novel’s represented time and how Woolf arranges their passage in order to write an elegy for her parents that doubles as an elegy for the Victorian world that she, like her artist-heroine, has left behind.