To The Lighthouse

WITH INTROUCTIONS BY EAVAN BOLAND AND MAUD ELLMAN

The serene and maternal Mrs Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr Ramsay, together with their children and assorted guests, are holidaying on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse Virginia Woolf constructs a remarkable and moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life. One of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century,To the Lighthouseis often cited as Virginia Woolf's most popular novel.

The Vintage Classics Virginia Woolf series has been curated by Jeanette Winterson, and the texts used are based on the original Hogarth Press editions published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf.

Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, first editor ofThe 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 novelThe Voyage Outwas published, followed byNight and Day(1919) andJacob'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-authoredTwo Storiesin 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, fromMrs Dalloway(1925) to the poetic and highly experimental novelThe Waves(1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography, including the playfully subversiveOrlando(1928) andA 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.

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