To the Lighthouse (1927) is Virginia Woolf’s fifth novel. It is set in a large house, the holiday home of the Ramsey family, on the Hebridean island of Skye. Although the book’s setting could be described as a displaced ‘nesting’ – Talland House of Woolf’s childhood placed within an imagined Scottish setting – To the Lighthouse falls into Spatial Type 1. This is because, despite this creative relocation, the book’s places purport to correspond to the ‘real’. Nevertheless, traditional literary mapping approaches would be of little critical use in reading and analysing the spaces of this novel since so much of the book is concerned with moving between various small-scale locations in one house and its grounds.

The house, as the syuzhet map neatly demonstrates, provides the grounding for the plot, connecting the novel’s three distinct sections together. Our method not only allows such scaled-up mapping (seeing an area in greater detail) but also circumnavigates the critical minefield of setting (of why Cornwall is superimposed onto Scotland). This is because it takes the text on its own terms. It also allows for the book’s spatial structure and preoccupation with the internal. Our method both allows for and distinguishes between inward and outward spaces. Our graphs, that display spaces and chronotopes relatively, also correspond to the book’s narrative method of depicting the ‘merging and flowing and creating’ of consciousness.