Virginia Woolf

A captivating fusion of elegy, autobiography, socio-political critique and visionary thrust, To the Lighthouse is the most accomplished of all Woolf's novels. This new edition includes a full contextualizing introduction and notes by David Bradshaw.

To the Lighthouse

To the Lighthouse, considered by many to be Virginia Woolf's finest novel, is a remarkably original work, showing the thoughts and actions of the members of a family and their guests on two separate occasions, ten years apart. The setting is Mr and Mrs Ramsay's house on a Scottish island, where they traditionally take their summer holidays, overlooking a bay with a lighthouse. An experimental work that pushes the limits of what we know about the world and ourselves, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is one of the most beautifully crafted of all novels written in the English language.This Macmillan Collector's Library edition features an afterword by Sam Gilpin.Designed to appeal to the booklover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.

Rediscover Virginia Woolf's greatest works in beautiful new gift editions from Vintage Classics.
Mr and Mrs Ramsay and their eight children have always holidayed at their summer house in Skye, surrounded by family friends. The novel's opening section teems with the noise, complications, bruised emotions, joys and quiet tragedies of everyday family life that might go on forever. But time passes, bringing with it war and death, and the summer home stands empty until one day, many years later, the family return to make the long-postponed visit to the lighthouse. One of the great literary achievements of the 20th century, To the Lighthouse, is at once an intensely autobiographical and universally moving masterpiece about changing relationships and attitudes amongst the early 20th-century middle class.

To the lighthouse

Stella McNichol

Romanen foregår på familien Ramsays landsted i Cornwall og stiller farens patriarkalisme opp mot moren som hjemmets engel: Hun legemliggjør den kvinnelige opplevelse av sammenheng og uforanderlighet, på bekostning av selvutfoldelse. Ti år etter morens død kombinerer malerinnen Lily kvinnelig skapertrang med mannlig kraft, skaper form midt i et verdikaos og betaler omkostningene for den utsatte identitet som kunstner og fri kvinne.

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading.This simple and haunting story captures the transcience of life and its surrounding emotions.To the Lighthouse is the most autobiographical of Virginia Woolf's novels. It is based on her own early experiences, and while it touches on childhood and children's perceptions and desires, it is at its most trenchant when exploring adult relationships, marriage and the changing class-structure in the period spanning the Great War.

When Mrs Ramsay tells her guests at her summer house on the Isle of Skye that they will be able to visit the nearby lighthouse the following day, little does she know that this trip will only be completed ten years later by her husband, and that a gulf of war, grief and loss will have opened in the meantime. As each character tries to readjust their memories and emotions with the shifts of time and reality, this long-delayed excursion will also prove to be a journey of self-discovery and fulfilment for them. Rich in symbolism, daring in style, elegiac in tone and encapsulating Virginia Woolf's ideas on life, art and human relationships, To the Lighthouse is a landmark of twentieth-century literature and one of the high points of early Modernism.

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Every summer, the Ramsays visit their summer home on the beautiful Isle of Skye, surrounded by the excitement and chatter of family and friends, mirroring Virginia Woolf's own joyful holidays of her youth. But as time passes, and in its wake the First World War, the transience of life becomes ever more apparent through the vignette of the thoughts and observations of the novel's disparate cast. A landmark of high modernism and the most autobiographical of Virginia Woolf's novels, To the Lighthouse explores themes of loss, class structure and the question of perception, in a hauntingly beautiful memorial to the lost but not forgotten. Chosen by TIME magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present.

WITH INTROUCTIONS BY EAVAN BOLAND AND MAUD ELLMAN The serene and maternal Mrs Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr Ramsay, together with their children and assorted guests, are holidaying on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse Virginia Woolf constructs a remarkable and moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life. One of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century, To the Lighthouse is often cited as Virginia Woolf's most popular novel. 
 
The Vintage Classics Virginia Woolf series has been curated by Jeanette Winterson, and the texts used are based on the original Hogarth Press editions published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf.

'The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye that opened suddenly and softly in the evening'To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionistic depiction of a family holiday, and a meditation on marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and bitterness. For years now the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever; but as the First World War looms, the integrity of family and society will be fatally challenged. With a psychologically introspective mode, the use of memory, reminiscence and shifting perspectives gives the novel an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of Victorian and Edwardian literary values. The Penguin English Library - collectable general readers' editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century to the end of the Second World War.

A pioneering work of modernist fiction, using her unique stream-of-consciousness technique to explore the inner lives of her characters, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is widely regarded as one of the greatest artistic achievements of the twentieth century. This Penguin Classics edition is edited by Stella McNichol, with an introduction and notes by Hermione Lee.To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionistic depiction of a family holiday, and a meditation on marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and bitterness. For years now the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever; but as the First World War looms, the integrity of family and society will be fatally challenged. The novel's use of memory, reminiscence and shifting perspectives gives it an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of Victorian and Edwardian literary values. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is regarded as a major 20th century author and essayist, a key figure in literary history as a feminist and modernist, and the centre of 'The Bloomsbury Group', an informal collective of artists and writers that exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture. Between 1925 and 1931 she produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and A Room of One's Own (1929) a passionate feminist essay.'Bears endless re-reading ... the sea encircles the story in a brilliant ebb and flow'Rachel Billington