In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf describes the novel as ‘leaving a shape on the mind's eye, built now in squares, now pagoda shaped, now throwing out wings and arcades, now solidly compact and domed like the Cathedral of Santa Sofia at Constantinople’ (ROO, 64). She had learned from Roger Fry and her brother-in-law Clive Bell to think of her own art, as well as the plastic arts, in terms of ‘significant form’. Indeed, in his account of the subject, Bell had posed the question,

Was Woolf thinking, as she wrote these words, of Orlando, her most recent novel, in which the third chapter is actually set in Constantinople, or was it To the Lighthouse that seemed to her so ‘solidly compact and domed’? Yet for Woolf, Santa Sofia was not merely ‘very solid’, it was also ‘very shifting’ (Diary iii, 218):

That was how the great mosque (or cathedral) had appeared to her when she first visited it with Vanessa and Violet Dickinson in October 1906. And as Lyndall Gordon has shown, it became for her a metaphor for ‘delicacy of treatment with strength of form’. That paradox of weight and weightlessness, of granite and rainbow, dominates Woolf’s sense of To the Lighthouse, just as it dominates Lily Briscoe’s artistic aims, so that her portrait of Mrs Ramsay parallels the novel itself.