To the Lighthouse

(Paperback)

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A must-have new edition of Virginia Woolf's masterpiece, featuring a cover illustrated by Alison Bechdel, the New York Times bestselling author of Fun Home, and a new foreword by Patricia Lockwood A Penguin Classics Graphic Deluxe Edition Every summer, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey and their eight children vacation on Scotland's idyllic Isle of Skye, surrounded by artist friends. They expect these summers will go on forever, but with the arrival of World War I, they are forced to reckon with change, loss, and time's unstoppable march, before making, years later, the long-awaited return to Skye and to its towering lighthouse. An intimate, impressionistic meditation on memory, grief, the brutalities of war, and the tensions of domestic life, revolutionary for its use of stream of consciousness and shifting points of view, and infused with a singular poetic essence, To the Lighthouse is both a landmark in modernist writing and one of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century. This edition is collated from all known proofs, manuscripts, and impressions to reflect the author's intentions, and includes a catalogue of emendations, a foreword by the acclaimed novelist, memoirist, and poet Patricia Lockwood, and an introduction by the distinguished biographer and critic Hermione Lee.

Reviews

I put off To the Lighthouse for a long time, in order to live in delicious anticipation of it. . . . Yet this pleasure can be drawn out for only so long; if you are a reader, the morning comes when you must greet it along with the sun. . . . There is never the sense, opening To the Lighthouse, that it could have been anything else. It opens with the weather, just like the real day. It rises to some occasion, wakes with the lark to meet the weekendmoves with an indescribable air of expectation, because it is going to meet someone around the corner, and with the shock of encounter you sometimes feel in reading, you find that it is you. Patricia Lockwood, from the Foreword

I reread this book every once in a while, and every time I do I find it more capacious and startling. Its so revolutionary and so exquisitely wrought that it keeps evolving on its own somehow, as if its alive. Alison Bechdel

I know of no more gut-wrenching, soaring prose about shared consciousness, mortality and water. Truly a book for the cradle to the grave. Maggie Nelson

This novel is just astonishing in its depth and reach and beauty. There is really nothing else like it, and no matter how many times I read it I find myself shocked at what Woolf was able to do. Meg Wolitzer

A classic for a reason. My mind was warped into a new shape by her prose and it will never be the same again. Greta Gerwig

My admiration for this book is complete. It is as beautiful, poignant, and ruthless as anything I have ever read. Siri Hustvedt

Woolfs groundbreaking novel is still one of the best available accounts of self-mythologizing middle-class family life and its oppressive construction of male and female identity. Rachel Cusk

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

Without question one of the two or three finest novels of the twentieth century. Woolf comments on the most pressing dramas of our human predicament: war, mortality, family, love. If youre like me youll come back to this book often, always astounded, always moved, always refreshed. Rick Moody

She was doing with language something like what Jimi Hendrix does with a guitar. Michael Cunningham

Radiant . . . I think that beyond being about the very nature of reality, it is itself a vision of reality. Eudora Welty

Thrillingly introspective. The Independent

At the head of all Virginia Woolfs work.The New York Times

Author Bio

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), one of the great twentieth-century authors, was at the centre of the Bloomsbury Group and is a major figure in the history of literary feminism and modernism. She published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915, and between 1925 and 1931 produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, including Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism, and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and the passionate feminist essay A Room of One's Own (1929).