Taking as her alter-ego Lily Briscoe-the painter in Virginia Woolf€s To the Lighthouse-Mary Meigs paints a portrait of herself, her family and her friends in Lily Briscoe: A Self-Portrait, a book that is both autobiography and memoir. In it, she describes the three major decisions of her life: “not to marry, to be an artist€ and to listen to her “own voices.€ She speaks of her parents who belonged to “a generation before their own€ and how they instilled in her a sense of guilt, locking her in the prison of her self, a prison constructed “with the material of doubt and failure; of shattered dreams and unhappy loves, jealousy, hate, envy and the deadly sins of lovelessness and indifference,€ but she also tells how she escapes from this prison with the knowledge that her inner sun takes its energy “from love, from creativity.€
Lily Briscoe: A Self-Portrait is a book about the exercise of the will, the art of dreaming and the transcendent power of friendship. It is a very wise book written by a woman who waited-and lived-some sixty years before beginning to write.