The Ramsay family and their guests visit a summer house in the Hebrides. A trip to the lighthouse is planned, postponed, finally taken years later after death has emptied half the chairs. Woolf's 1927 novel records the flow of consciousness through multiple minds, the pressure of time against beauty, the mystery of personality itself. The middle section, 'Time Passes,' compresses ten years of war and death into a few pages of prose poetry. It is Woolf's most perfect novel, the fullest realization of her experimental methods.