To the Lighthouse

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 she 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. First published in 1927, To the Lighthouse is the novel in which Virginia Woolf became, as she said, `mistress of her medium'. Woolf's fifth novel is a story of family life, told largely through the relationships of its central characters: Mr and Mrs Ramsay, their eight young children, and their guests, the prickly student Charles Tansley, the enigmatic poet Augustus Carmichael, and Lily Briscoe. The complex fusion of autobiography, biography and fiction resulted in a work which has become a classic of modern literature.
An introduction is also provided which discusses the genesis of To the Lighthouse, its autobiographical and biographical elements, and the history of its critical reception.