To the Lighthouse

This novel is an extraordinarily poignant evocation of a lost happiness that lives on in the memory. For years now the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever. In this, her most autobiographical novel, Virginia Woolf captures the intensity of childhood longing and delight, and the shifting complexity of adult relationships. From an acute awareness of transcience, she creates an enduring work of art.This edition is based on the original British edition published by Hogarth Press in 1927, and is edited by Stella McNichol with an introduction and notes by Hermione Lee. Contains explanatory footnotes, suggestions for further reading of acclaimed criticisms and references, as well as a discussion of the substantive emendations and variant readings in the appendix.

'One of the greatest elegies in the English language, a book which transcends time' Margaret Drabble

To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionistic depiction of a family, the Ramseys, whose annual summer holiday in Scotland falls under the shadow of war, and a meditation on marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and bitterness. The novel's use of stream of consciousness, reminiscence and shifting perspectives gives it an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of all that had gone before.

Edited by Stella McNichol with an Introduction and Notes by Hermione Lee

Autorentext

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is now recognised as a major 20th century author, a great novelist and essayist, and a key figure in literary history as a feminist and modernist.