The New York Times called it “a brilliantly ambitious analysis of domestic psychology”.

Woolf thought it “easily the best of my books”, and it outsold all her previous works when released in 1927 through Hogarth Press, run by Woolf and her husband, Leonard. To The Lighthouse is a modernist novel in which the Ramsay family and their eight children rent a summer home on the Isle of Skye – echoing Woolf’s own early life – with the ever-present promise of a visit to the lighthouse off the island as the narrative thread to which Woolf stitches the thoughts and observations of the mother, Mrs Ramsay. Then the town council finally got on board, and since then they’ve been brilliant,” said Humm. About four years ago, I started the campaign again. “It was 20 years ago that the founding members of the Woolf Society first made approaches about a plaque on the property, but it came to nothing. It is scheduled to be unveiled on 11 September.

Humm, who lives in London, said that after four years of pressing the town council, the local MP and heritage groups in St Ives, it was eventually agreed that a permanent marker should be placed on Talland House. It is the result of years of campaigning and fundraising by Professor Maggie Humm, vice-chair of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, who says the property, Talland House, is a “crucial part of the Woolf story”. Almost a century after Virginia Woolf wrote those words for her 1927 novel To The Lighthouse, a commemorative plaque is to be installed on the house in the Cornish town of St Ives where she spent her childhood summers and was inspired by views of Godrevy lighthouse in the bay.

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