Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain member Kirsty Warrick has written and recorded a song titled "The Shape that Remains," drawing inspiration from Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse.

Warrick describes her creative process as shaped by a “long-standing love affair with the life and work of Virginia Woolf.” The song’s lyrics were built around the recurring refrain “life stand still here,” a phrase that crystallises Woolf’s attempt to resist the passage of time by capturing moments of permanence within the flux of life. Warrick reflects:

“I have a long-standing love affair with the life and work of Virginia Woolf. I wrote the lyrics around a recurring refrain in Woolf's To the Lighthouse – 'life stand still here' ... When writing the song I took inspiration from Woolf's life and art, notably her preoccupation with the inexorable passage of time and her desire to immortalise 'the moment'. Arguably, this is the ambition of any artist, a goal that Woolf herself undoubtedly achieved."

One of the novel’s most evocative passages provided a key source of inspiration, where Woolf’s narrator meditates on fleeting revelation, the miracle of the everyday, and Mrs. Ramsay’s power to transform the ephemeral into permanence:

“'Like a work of art,' she repeated, looking from her canvas to the drawing-room steps and back again. She must rest for a moment. And, resting, looking from one to the other vaguely, the old question which traversed the sky of the soul perpetually, the vast, the general question which was apt to particularise itself at such moments as these, when she released faculties that had been on the strain, stood over her, paused over her, darkened over her. What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. This, that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs. Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs. Ramsay saying, 'Life stand still here'; Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment something permanent [...] this was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing [...] was struck into stability. Life stand still here, Mrs. Ramsay said.”