A British family summers on an island off the coast of Scotland. It is the late 19th century, and the family is Virginia Woolf's. The subject matter is mundane, but the way the story is told is transformationally. Here is a novel in which it seems all the emotions are heightened, all musings have an element of the profound, and all observations weighted with import. The central is character is Mrs. Ramsay, a woman in her sixties, married to an academic, a mother to eight children.