Lily Briscoe and her canvas: Kleinian depression in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse

To the Lighthouse, is Virginia Woolf's most autobiographical novel and one which Woolf herself ascertained as her most psychoanalytic tale both in its construction and motivations. Bearing in mind the psychological significance it held for Woolf, this paper seeks to draw attention to Lily Briscoe's canvas as the novel's psychic space as the entrance into the implicit, unthought known (Bollas, 1987) within Lily Briscoe's subjectivity as echoing that of Woolf's own. Travelling (in-)between “the transitional space” (Winnicott, 1971) as engendered by the gap between the novel's overt narrative and Lily Briscoe's canvas, it seeks to venture into the unwritten psychic space separated from the novel's oedipalized landscape. The paper provides a Kleinian reading to bring to light the undercurrents of Kleinian depression in Lily, un-narrated by Woolf but reverberating throughout the novel.