ABSTRACT
As early as 1923, as we have seen, Virginia Woolf’s sense of the mystery of the universe and the complexity of human existence is bound up with her feelings /for the sea. Her growing awareness of the ‘poetry of existence’ leads her increasingly to experiment with the poetic as a fictional mode. Her affinity with the sea stems from her childhood association with the sea at St Ives. The world of Talland House with the sea at the end of the garden and the lighthouse in the distance, the ramshackle house itself and the garden where the children played cricket and their parents walked in the summer evenings, remained always a golden world for her. A return to it through memory seemed always to bring her psychological and emotional reassurance, a kind of stability. It is as if, in looking back to that past, she touched something that was real and permanent at the base of her life. She could go back and back to ‘significant moments’ at St Ives for inspiration and revelation. To the Lighthouse embodies that past.
