To the Lighthouse (Annotated)

The Complete 1927 Modernist Masterpiece — With Critical Essay and Author Biography

De: Virginia Woolf

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century — the modernist masterpiece that redefined what fiction could do.

In 1927, Virginia Woolf published the novel she had been moving toward her entire career. To the Lighthouse takes the simplest of materials — a family's summer house on the Isle of Skye, a planned trip to a lighthouse, the passage of a decade — and from them builds one of the most profound meditations ever written on time, memory, grief, art, and the mystery of other minds.

There is almost no plot. There is everything else.

The novel.

Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, their eight children, and an assortment of guests gather at their seaside house before the First World War. A small boy wants to sail to the lighthouse; his father says the weather will not allow it. Around this almost invisible center, Woolf builds a world of consciousness — every character's interior life rendered in the revolutionary technique that made her famous, thought flowing into thought, perception into memory, the ordinary into the transcendent.

The novel's central section, Time Passes, is one of the boldest experiments in all of English literature: ten years compressed into a few pages, the house emptying, the war arriving offstage, deaths announced in brackets, time itself becoming the protagonist. Then the survivors return, the journey to the lighthouse is finally made, and the painter Lily Briscoe completes the vision she has carried for a decade.

Why this edition?

This Erato Press edition presents the complete 1927 text of To the Lighthouse — the modernist novel that, alongside Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves, secured Woolf's place as one of the supreme writers of the twentieth century.

This edition includes:

• The complete, unabridged 1927 text in its three movements — The Window, Time Passes, The Lighthouse
• An extensive critical essay by Henry Bugalho on Woolf's method, the architecture of the novel, and its place in literary modernism
• A biographical portrait of Virginia Woolf — Bloomsbury, the Hogarth Press, her illness, her achievement
• Editorial annotations illuminating the novel's allusions and structure
• Designed for serious readers, students, and the classroom alike

Part of The Women's Classic Library — Erato Press.

About Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)

Born Adeline Virginia Stephen, daughter of the eminent Victorian critic Leslie Stephen, she became the central figure of the Bloomsbury Group and, with her husband Leonard, founder of the Hogarth Press. Across novels including Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and The Waves (1931), and essays including the landmark feminist work A Room of One's Own (1929), she transformed English prose. She struggled all her life with the illness that finally took her: in March 1941, she filled her pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse.

She is, by common consent, one of the handful of writers who made the modern novel modern. To the Lighthouse is, by common consent, her masterpiece.

"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."