To the Lighthouse offers a vivid, impressionistic picture of a family on vacation, while simultaneously serving as a meditation on marriage, parenthood, childhood, grief, tyranny, and bitterness. The use of stream-of-consciousness narrative, memories, and shifting perspectives gives the novel an intimate and poetic quality. Upon its publication in 1927, it represented a complete rejection of Victorian and Edwardian literary values. Virginia Woolf considered the novel an elegy to her own parents. In her diary, she wrote: "I used to think of him [father] and mother every day, but writing The Lighthouse brought peace to my thoughts about them."