To The Lighthouse

“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 weekend―moves ‘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. It’s so revolutionary and so exquisitely wrought that it keeps evolving on its own somehow, as if it’s 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

“Woolf’s 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 you’re like me you’ll 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 Woolf’s work.” —The New York Times

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was a towering figure of twentieth-century literature, a central member of the Bloomsbury Group, and a pivotal voice in literary feminism and modernism. Her debut novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915. The period between 1925 and 1931 saw the creation of her most celebrated works, including Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931). Beyond her novels, Woolf produced a prolific body of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism, and biography. Among these are the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and the powerful feminist essay A Room of One’s Own (1929).

Foreword by Patricia Lockwood

Patricia Lockwood is the author of the novel No One Is Talking About This, a finalist for the 2021 Booker Prize and recognized as one of The New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2021. Her memoir, Priestdaddy, was also named one of The New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2017. Her poetry collections include Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals and Balloon Pop Outlaw Black. Lockwood’s writing has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and the London Review of Books, where she serves as a contributing editor.

Introduction by Hermione Lee

Hermione Lee is an Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. She has authored biographies of prominent figures such as Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Penelope Fitzgerald. Her distinguished contributions to literary scholarship were recognized with the honor of Dame.

Editor and Notes by Stella McNichol

Stella McNichol authored several critical studies focusing on the work of Virginia Woolf.

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