Widely acclaimed since its first publication in 1927, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is a novel whose overt simplicity of plot veils a complex mix of autobiographical detail, tangled social questions and deep philosophical enigmas. The author's innovative use of nonlinear plot, stream-of-consciousness, and varying narrators, transforms the apparently 'normal' incidents in the life of the Ramsay family into a probing reflection on personal relationships, the passage of time, gender, morality, happiness, and death. Woolf considered To the Lighthouse to be "easily the best of my books", a judgement with which serious students of literature can only concur.