To the Lighthouse - by Virginia Woolf

About the Book

A landmark of modern fiction, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse explores thesubjective reality of everyday life in the Hebrides for the Ramsay family.

Book Synopsis

"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

The authorized, original edition of one of the great literary masterpieces of the twentieth century: a miraculous novel of family, love, war, and mortality, with a foreword from Eudora Welty.

From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Woolf constructs a remarkable, moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life and conflict between men and women.

To the Lighthouse is made up of three powerfully charged visions into the life of the Ramsay family living in a summer house off the rocky coast of Scotland. There's the serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, their eight children, and assorted holiday guests. With the lighthouse excursion postponed, Woolf shows the small joys and quiet tragedies of everyday life that seemingly could go on forever.

But as time winds its way through their lives, the Ramsays face, alone and together, the greatest of human challenges and its greatest triumph--the human capacity for change.

A moving portrait in miniature of family life, To the Lighthouse also has profoundly universal implications, giving language to the silent space that separates people and the space that they transgress to reach each other.

Review Quotes

"Radiant as [To the Lighthouse] is in its beauty, there could never be a mistake about it: here is a novel to the last degree severe and uncompromising. I think that beyond being about the very nature of reality, it is itself a vision of reality." -- Eudora Welty

"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, director of Lady Bird and Little Women

"To the Lighthouse is one of the greatest elegies in the English language, a book which transcends time." -- Margaret Drabble, author of The Witch of Exmoor

"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, author of Fun Home

"Without question one of the two or three finest novels of the twentieth century. If you're like me you'll come back to this book often, always astounded, always moved, always refreshed." -- Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm