To the Lighthouse - Couverture rigide

The text of this edition of To the Lighthouse is that of the English page proofs corrected by Virginia Woolf for the first American edition. This text comes closer than any previously published to presenting the novel as Woolf intended it. All the corrections she made on the page proofs are reproduced, and the punctuation of the proofs is retained. A list of variants is included in which significant passages cancelled or revised on the proofs, along with all substantive variants in the first English and American editions are recorded.

Among the many interesting passages that Woolf revised or deleted on the proofs is a long and previously unpublished account, cast as a memory of his son James, of Mr. Ramsay Lecturing in London while his children sit dutifully in the Audience. Virginia Woolf′s corrected typescript of part two, ′Time Passes′, prepared b Woolf for Charles Mauron, whose translation ′Le Temps Passe′ appeared in the French periodical Commerce in 1926, is also included.

In the introduction the editor discusses the genesis of To the Lighthouse, its autobiographical and biographical elements, and the history of its critical reception.

First published in 1927, To the Lighthouse is Virginia Woolf′s fifth novel and the one in which she became, as she said, ′mistress of her medium′. A story of family life, it is based on vivid memories of her childhood. Although she set the story on the Isle of Skye in the Hebrides, the house and landscape she was writing about were Talland House in St Ives, Cornwall, where her family spend their summers until her mother′s death in 1895, when Virginia Woolf was thirteen. Woolf′s father, Sir Leslie Stephen – philosopher, critic, and editor – served as a model for Mr Ramsay, While Mrs Ramsay was drawn from Woolf′s memories of her mother, Julia Stephen, an intelligent and beautiful woman long remembered in St Ives for her good works there. The complex fusion of autobiography, biography, and fiction resulted in a work which has become a classic of modern literature.

Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography. After his death in 1904 Virginia and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, moved to Bloomsbury and became the centre of 'The Bloomsbury Group'. This informal collective of artists and writers which included Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture.

In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social reformer. Three years later, her first novel The Voyage Out was published, followed by Night and Day (1919) and Jacob's Room (1922). These first novels show the development of Virginia Woolf's distinctive and innovative narrative style. It was during this time that she and Leonard Woolf founded The Hogarth Press with the publication of the co-authored Two Stories in 1917, hand-printed in the dining room of their house in Surrey.

Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf 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. This intense creative productivity was often matched by periods of mental illness, from which she had suffered since her mother's death in 1895. On 28 March 1941, a few months before the publication of her final novel, Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf committed suicide.