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(2012) Literary epiphany in the novel, 1850–1950, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.

The mirror of mental ruin in to the lighthouse

Sharon Kim

pp. 109-126

Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927) whirls with a myriad revelations, like "when all at once he realised that it was this: it was this:—she was the most beautiful person he had ever seen" (16). Sparked at random, these modern epiphanies constantly erupt into the text: Lily's intuition that Mrs. Ramsay wants her to marry, the sudden attraction of the word "flounder" (49), the exquisite scimitar shape of rooks. The breeziness of Woolf's style drives an endless firing of synapses in the brain, an energy Woolf craved since she found the Victorian epiphany both hackneyed and stale.

Publication details

DOI: 10.1057/9781137021854_6

Full citation:

Kim, S. (2012). The mirror of mental ruin in to the lighthouse, in Literary epiphany in the novel, 1850–1950, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 109-126.

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