Following and extending the tradition of modernist novelists like Marcel Proust and James Joyce, the plot of To the Lighthouse is secondary to its philosophical introspection.

Cited as a key example of the literary technique of multiple focalisation, the novel includes little dialogue and almost no direct action; most of it is written as thoughts and observations.

From Mr. Ramsay's seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Virginia Woolf examines tensions and allegiances and shows that the small joys and quiet tragedies of everyday life could go on forever.

One of these friends, Lily Briscoe, begins the novel as a young, uncertain painter attempting a portrait of Mrs Ramsay and James.

Briscoe finds herself plagued by doubts throughout the novel, largely fed by the claims of Charles Tansley, another guest, who asserts that women can neither paint nor write.

Mrs McNab worked in the Ramsays' house from the beginning and provides a view of how things have changed while the summer home has been unoccupied.

Upon finishing the painting just as the sailing party reaches the lighthouse, and seeing that it satisfies her, she realises that the execution of her vision is more important to her than the idea of leaving some sort of legacy.

Large parts of Woolf's novel do not concern themselves with the objects of vision, but rather investigate the means of perception, attempting to understand people in the act of looking.

[3] To be able to understand thought, Woolf's diaries reveal, that the author would spend considerable time listening to herself think, observing how and which words and emotions arose in her mind in response to what she saw.

Unlike James Joyce's stream of consciousness technique, however, Woolf does not tend to use abrupt fragments to represent characters' thought processes; her method is more one of lyrical paraphrases.

'[8] Major events like deaths of Mrs Ramsay, Prue, Andrew are related parenthetically, which makes the narration a kind of journal entry.

[6] Woolf began writing To the Lighthouse partly as a way of understanding and dealing with unresolved issues concerning both her parents[9] and indeed there are many similarities between the plot and her own life.

Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell wrote that reading the sections of the novel that describe Mrs. Ramsay was like seeing her mother raised from the dead.