Book description
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 Lighthouse is 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 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.
