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    To the Lighthouse: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
    To the Lighthouse: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
    To the Lighthouse: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
    Ebook377 pages5 hours

    To the Lighthouse: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

    By Virginia Woolf, Patricia Lockwood, Hermione Lee and Alison Bechdel

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    About this ebook

    A must-have new edition of Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece, featuring a cover illustrated by Alison Bechdel, the New York Times bestselling author of Fun Home, and a new foreword by Patricia Lockwood

    A Penguin Classics Graphic Deluxe Edition

    Every summer, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey and their eight children vacation on Scotland’s idyllic Isle of Skye, surrounded by artist friends. They expect these summers will go on forever, but with the arrival of World War I, they are forced to reckon with change, loss, and time’s unstoppable march, before making, years later, the long-awaited return to Skye and to its towering lighthouse. An intimate, impressionistic meditation on memory, grief, the brutalities of war, and the tensions of domestic life, revolutionary for its use of stream of consciousness and shifting points of view, and infused with a singular poetic essence, To the Lighthouse is both a landmark in modernist writing and one of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century.

    This edition is collated from all known proofs, manuscripts, and impressions to reflect the author’s intentions, and includes a catalog of emendations and an introduction by the distinguished biographer and critic Hermione Lee.

    For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Publishing Group
    Release dateMay 2, 2023
    ISBN9780593511688
    To the Lighthouse: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
    Author

    Virginia Woolf

    VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882–1941) was one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century. An admired literary critic, she authored many essays, letters, journals, and short stories in addition to her groundbreaking novels, including Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, and Orlando.

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    Reviews for To the Lighthouse

    4/5

    3,246 ratings120 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Subtle and elegant. Perhaps in a strange way, because we've so absorbed her lessons into the style of serious writing over the last 95 years, the effect is slightly muted in 2021. But gosh she really found her voice, didn't she?
    • 5/5
      Another favorite to add to the collection. I just finished the book, and have to say that I struggled at the beginning to get into the stream of consciousness, and short poetic imagery with run-on sentences. This is not your standard novel. Virginia Woolf obviously was experimenting with her writing, to try to find a new way of telling the story in a novel format. She does this admirably, but it will take time for the reader to get used to it. Keep reading. It will come to you, and the pleasure will be worth the effort.
      I could say much more about this book, but I will leave it to others on Goodreads who have done much better job of writing a review. Piyangie wrote a wonderful review that captured many of my thoughts. This will be a book that I return to several times in years to come.
    • 4/5
      This novel takes the reader through the thoughts and perceptions of the various characters, hopping from one perspective to another constantly, so that the entire story is from a rather muddled combined perspective of all the characters. The result feels quite muddled and vague most of the time. The story hints at darker undertones, and at the end of the first section the idyllic family holiday scene is jarred by tragedy, but off-screen. The rest of the book follows the family for 4 years and notes additional family tragedies and disappointments, before bringing the family back to finally visit the lighthouse.
    • 4/5
      Very glad to have made the acquaintance of Virginia's Mrs Ramsey. It didn't feel like Scotland to me though.
    • 5/5
      So beautiful. Amazing how she captured the realities of moment-to-moment interactions. Totally brilliant. Challenging.
    • 1/5
      I didn't finish the book, after roughly 80 pages the book just wasn't enjoyable to me in any way. I've had to re-read almost every other sentence because they were riddled with comma's, sub-sentences and could sometimes be over a page long. The thought that anyone genuinely has the type of inner dialogue that these characters have seems totally impossible to me. And because there was little else besides inner dialogue, with every line the characters became more alien to me.
      I don't doubt that this is a great piece of literature, but I could not get myself to get through it.
    • 4/5
      Hard to read, it would have been worth it if it had not been so depressing
    • 4/5
      People I cared about, described as only Woolf can.
    • 5/5
      To the Lighthouse is the quintessential modernist work: you have the multiple shifting perspectives, the search for meaning in a Godless world, and a profound skepticism towards the traditional social order.

      But you also have a deeply emotional and nostalgic story. While the casual reader might be impressed or confused by the narrative tricks that Hemingway, Joyce, Fitzgerald, Stein and Faulkner employed, we still read them because they possess at the heart a longing for meaning and human connection. While TTL comments on art and philosophy, it is in the final analysis a story of a family: the Ramseys, whose vacation home in Scotland is the setting of their minor dramas. And Woolf is wise about the limitations of family, the loss and petty tyranny and roles that the members play - the tension between the internal and external life.

      There is so much to point to and discuss - the lack of explicit religious allusion, but the little hints (like Lily Briscoe's "It is finished" when she sees the small boat of the Ramseys finally arrive at the capital L "Lighthouse" - is there a new religion being formed here out of the ashes of the old?) that Woolf drops are nothing compared to the stark and sad realizations her characters come to. James Ramsey, looking at his elderly father, compares him to a "stone in the sand" - "he looked as if he had physically what was always at the back of both of their minds - that loneliness which was for both them the truth about things."

      There are other references to dying each of us alone - the tragedy of human life that can only be fully appreciated through art.

    • 3/5
      Published in 1927, To the Lighthouse is one of Woolf’s most well-known and widely read books. I finished Mrs. Dalloway earlier this year and enjoyed it immensely once I got immersed into the writing style. I did not feel quite as immersed in this one, but she definitely has a unique voice. We basically spend lots of time in the minutia of the characters’ thoughts as they look at and evaluate people and the world around them.

      I normally love books with deeply drawn characters, but I must admit, even I need a tiny bit more structure than what is depicted here. I enjoyed the observations about life, death, and the passage of time. It is a lyrically written psychological study that ebbs and flows fluidly, as thoughts tend to do. While I understand the literary merit of this work, I did not find it a particularly pleasant reading experience.

      One of my favorite quotes from the book provides a sense of that special feeling when everything feels “just right,” a scene from a dinner that has had its issues, but which the guests will remember fondly years later:

      “It partook, she felt, . . . of eternity . . . there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that remains forever after.”
    • 5/5
      I have read this before, centuries ago in a college English class. Then, I was unable to rhapsodize but only struggle to turn the pages and keep my attention on the prose. I say 'prose' because there is no story, not in the classic sense. I have now read it again, and as I was ill I had nothing else pressing but to distract myself from my symptoms, I was able to immerse myself in the rhythm of Woolf's language, not sprint to the finish, but just consume the words, make pictures in my mind, go back and forth across the page.

      This is a work about the inner lives of several people and how those people intersect with and mold one another. Woolf is painting a group portrait with words, and the words inevitably fail to show all the facets she wants to show, but that failure is part of the story. It is impossible to comprehend the complexities and emotional tides of other people. Just as Lily, the spinster artist in the group, both fails and succeeds in completing her painting, Woolf has also 'had her vision' and it is enough to have had it, whether or not she is entirely successful in her endeavor.

      The impressionistic cover to my version of this book is perfect, because the narrative itself is very impressionistic, showing us brushstrokes and colors and the occasional exquisite detail, but the whole is necessarily without hard edges or even borders.

      When I rate books, I try to judge them as what they are, rather than what I want them to be. This book isn't a page turner, isn't a thriller, isn't even really a story. It's one woman's attempt to do something different, to push the boundaries of literature. And because I think she succeeded, I'm giving her five stars.
    • 1/5
      I'm sorry but of the thousands of books I've read in my lifetime (I'm 74) this book, despite it being placed on a top 100 must-read books list, is in my opinion, unreadable. It just does not flow; there's no link between characters and actions. I'm obviously missing the big picture here and if so, please tell me what it is.
    • 3/5
      In To the Lighthouse, we spend two days, spaced ten years apart, with the Ramsays and their guests at the family’s summer home on the Isle of Skye. On the first visit, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay quarrel over whether the next day will bring weather nice enough to take six-year old James, one of their eight children, on a sailboat ride to a nearby off-shore lighthouse. The family and their friends—including the young painter Lily Briscoe, the old poet Augustus Carmichael, and the sycophantic academic Charles Tansley, then suffer through an extremely tense dinner. Ten years later, following World War I, much has changed for the Ramsay clan, most notably the untimely deaths of three of its members. Nevertheless, the remaining family and many of the same friends gather once again at the island retreat and this time the long-awaited boat trip to the lighthouse is accomplished.

      If that strikes you as a story in which very little external action occurs, you would not be wrong. Of course, the fame and lasting legacy of this novel comes from what happens inside; that is, inside the heads of the main characters. Virginia Woolf, extending the tradition of other modernist writers like James Joyce, makes it clear early on that this is a novel of interior monologues and personal introspection rather one where the plot is placed front and center. The book is divided into three parts: 'The Window' tells of the family’s first pre-war day on the island, mainly through Mrs. Ramsay’s interior thoughts; 'Time Passes' tells of the deaths that happened during the ten years surrounding the war in a terse and almost clinical fashion; and 'The Lighthouse' tells of the second post-war island trip, with shifting focus on the thoughts of Lily, James, and another of the Ramsay children.

      I will happily concede that this is an Important Work in literary annals, both for its innovative, complex structure as well as the author’s deep exploration of human thought and relationships. (By the way, it is also considered an important feminist work, mainly I would guess because of Lily’s decision that she would rather remain single and working as an artist than married and unhappy.) It was not, however, a particularly interesting or enjoyable book to read. In fact, despite the occasional sublime passage, most of the prose is dense and turgid as the central characters try to work out their various emotional complaints (wives against husbands, children against parents, friends against friends) and angst-ridden issues within the space of their own heads. This made for some very long, wandering sentences that were not redeemed by whatever brooding self-discovery the protagonist in question ultimately made. So, while I am happy to have read a book that several notable lists rate a classic, it was not an altogether pleasant experience.
    • 3/5
      The Ramsays are at their summer residence with guests. Mrs. Ramsay keeps promising her youngest child they will go to the lighthouse the next day, but her husband says they won't because of bad weather. Unfortunately, tragedy happens before they can go to the lighthouse. When they do go to the lighthouse, the youngest son is now a teenager. It is a reunion of sorts from that time 10 years earlier.

      This was not my cup of tea. I found the beginning boring. Quotation marks would have helped when characters were having conversations or thoughts. I often had to re-read passages to understand what was happening as well as who it was happening to. The book is in three parts. The first part is the basic story as in the above synopsis. The second part is what happens after the tragedy. The third part is 10 years later with the return of the Ramsays to the island.

      The third part I find interesting. It is a stream of consciousness by different people. Some interesting thoughts occur. Some rebellious ones. Some on how to change others' responses to one. There are recriminations and anger in the thoughts. There is sorrow in remembrance.

      These people are flawed. I just had a problem making a connection to any of them. Fortunately, I borrowed this from the library for book club. It is not a keeper for me.
    • 4/5
      Luckily I was in the mood to immerse myself in these word pictures, these impressions and suggestions of characters, because this is a very literary book, with little narrative drive. You have to be prepared to read this slowly and uninterruptedly.
      However, allowing for these demands, it is wonderful experiment with language, difficult to explain without surrendering to the hypnotic prose, elegaic. The middle section, Time Passes, is like an epiphany (or was when I was reading it).
    • 5/5
      "It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment."

      Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse is different and brilliantly so. It demands your full attention and each of your emotion. It knocks on your door, persuades you to let a room to it in your mind, set a comfortable bed, and welcome its stay then embrace its hovering presence once it decides to leave. It is a wonderfully-crafted introspection that broods and muses within different lives link — the comings and goings of the ideas, the rushing and disappearing of the waves by the shore — by a Lighthouse (Woolf wrote the word 'Lighthouse' as a proper noun), by a woman who seemingly serves the same purpose: to guide, to enlighten, to comfort.

      The wrath and peace of perception tear this novel apart and put it back together. Memories and thoughts are hives the characters protect and destruct their selves in over and over again. The ordinary is extraordinary, the extraordinary is ordinary. There is no lesson here. Death does not change anything although it changes everything. Life continues to flow, to happen and it is grief and absence that painstakingly, persistently impact these characters, these people we may find a common ground with. Nothing is left out with Woolf be it a glance, a touch, a gesture, a sigh; their weight is conspicuous; they lose, contradict, and fight themselves in this eminent passage of time.

      "She had a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of everything, as she helped the soup, as if there was an eddy — there — and one could be in it, or one could be out of it, and she was out of it." (p94)

      There is no doubt that the mind flies inside the paragraphs of To The Lighthouse, it traverses every nook and corner, sweeps its every floor of thought and opens a window to an array of interpretation. It lingers on regret, yearning, anger, and affinity. Here, nothing happens yet everything does. It is a loyal servant of mood rather than a narrative pleaser. It is a food for thought, a home for sentiments. It nudges to question and to ponder on women's societal roles, demands of marriage, a sense of career failure and dissatisfaction, and most importantly life's purpose whilst stimulating the smell of childhood and sketching the complexities of adult relationships accompanied by a bleak summer backdrop.

      After closing this book at once, I knew that it doesn't end there. It will show itself, every now and then, on empty plates, busy harbours, passing empty moments, words on random book pages, some thoughts I thread, some thoughts that insist, and some people I part with and encounter.

      "Sitting alone (for Nancy went out again) among the clean cups at the long table she felt cut off from other people, and able only to go on watching asking, wondering. The house, the place, the morning, all seemed strangers to her. She had no attachment here, she felt, no relations with it, anything might happen, and whatever did happen, a step outside, a voice calling ('It's not in the cupboard, it's on the landing,' someone cried), was a question, as if the link that usually bound things together had been cut, and they floated up here, down there, off, anyhow. How aimless it was, how chaotic, how unreal it was, she thought, looking at her empty coffee cup."
    • 2/5
      I am not sure that I finished it because everyone was talking, or I should say thinking, all at once. I got confused. I got lost. I finished it. I think.
      Kudos to those who liked it and gave 5-star reviews.
      Reading this book is a little like riding a bronco. You either manage to ride it to the end or, like me, keep falling off.
    • 5/5
      I want to read this book over and over for the rest of my life. Its insights into the (Western) psyche are tremendous.
    • 2/5
      Many of the themes and motifs were poignant, thought-provoking, and extremely relevant to my current phase in life. I enjoyed the depth of thought and meaning buried within the text, but I did not enjoy Woolf's verbose and clause-laden style (it was difficult to follow). I may have enjoyed the book more with a bit more plot or "action", but the most interesting pieces of the story are glossed over (intentionally). I "get" it. But I didn't enjoy it.
    • 3/5
      Woolf's strange use of time was effective in result albeit uninteresting. Her characters are similar, in that their psychologies are (sporadically) interesting even if they aren't. Perhaps this isn't my kind of book; I got very little out of it.
    • 4/5
      There are books I’ve had on my shelves that I have always meant to read, and that I feel I ought to have read. To The Lighthouse was one of those books, so I took it with me on holiday and read it.

      But I didn’t really know what it was about, and it’s a strange book to encounter if you have no preconceptions. The first section, with its cloyingly deep analysis of the minutia of life, hundreds of pages where nothing much happens except they go to dinner, all the Meaning trapped in ‘do you think it will be fine enough to go to the Lighthouse tomorrow?’ ‘No, I think it will not be fine’. Marriage and motherhood and thwarted career ambitions and hosting and matchmaking, and the way the smallest thing can hold so much meaning. I found it quite intractable and frustrating at first, and then found a rhythm and a sympathy and settled into it...

      ... when all at once I hit the second part and the book simultaneously broke my brain and my heart. Ten years pass in a flurry of pages. People we had known down to the grain on their fingerprints are casually dispatched in passing in the final sentence of a paragraph. The house slowly decays, the bubble that has been there so clearly is gone, as the dust and mould creep in.

      And then in the final part we are there again, and are drawn into musing around what fingerprints do we leave on the world, how are we remembered, what is success? Those complex family relationships, so much love and anger tangled up,and all inside, no ripples on the surface. But we paint. And we make it to the Lighthouse.
    • 3/5
      Lily Briscoe is a kindred spirit. She asks a pertinent question at the beginning of the final section: what does it mean then, what can it all mean? I have been asking myself that, often out loud for most of my adult life. A pair of events this weekend illuminated that disposition and likely also besmirched my reading of To The Lighthouse. My Tenth wedding anniversary was followed quickly by the funeral for my uncle Fred. The first event was grand, of course, though it does lend itself to a certain survey, of sorts. The second was simply queer. this was no great tragedy, the man was 85 years old had seven sons and had suffered through terrible health these last few years. I leaned quickly that there are no poets in that section of my family and apparently no Democrats either. It was nice to hug, slap backs and smile at one another, most of the time counting the decades since we last spoke at length. Through the depths of such I ran to the Woolf and read for an odd half hour here and there.

      To the Lighthouse is a tale of caprice and desperation. It is a kaleidoscope of resonance and impressions. Much like life it can be dusty and wind swept on an even manner. I would likely have been great affected were it not for the switchbacks of the weekend.
    • 3/5
      Impressionistic rather than descriptive.

      Divided in three parts. The first, and the longest, serves as an introduction to the setting, the characters, and their interactions. And this part was tough going, especially towards the end, simply because nothing really happens in the first part, and yet it keeps on going, without any real purpose. Characters were kept at a stand-still, just so that the author could paint a detailed picture. My 21st century attention span -- used as it is to snappy, streamlined characterization and world-building -- made me put the book down a few times

      The second and third parts, though, are very much worth the effort of struggling through that lengthy set-up. This is where [To the lighthouse] comes into its own: once you understand what’s going on, the whole thing pays off beautifully.
    • 4/5
      This book reads more like a poem than a novel. Evocative, fragile, nuanced, ephemeral moments of family life set in a gorgeous landscape. It would make a beautiful arthouse movie with long scenes filled with stark seascapes and little action.
    • 5/5
      The language is so beautifully evocative. The careful echoing of the longer first section, which allows the reader to meet and understand the Ramseys and Lily Briscoe in particular, with the concluding section where Lily (the artist) is forced to come to terms with what it all means is balanced by the much briefer middle part. That section is where we learn of the events of the painful period of Mrs. Ramsey's death, World War II and the passage of time. It functions as a sort of intercession for both the reader and Lily, allowing us to gain perspective (almost without realizing it) on how "we perish, each alone." Such a very powerful book.
    • 4/5
      a family goes to the same vacation house through the years
    • 4/5
      There are moments of great crystalline beauty here, seamless amalgam of little sharp perceptions and language their vehicle, and I won't forget this family, in particular the two parents, in whom I see so much of archetype, of my parents and my friends' parents transfigured and ennobled by, well, class, I suppose. Mrs Ramsey regal and anxious, Mr Ramsey needy and forbidding, which is almost another (male) way of saying the same thing. But a sprawling family deserved a sprawling novel that would let the modernist psychological superstructure unfold at a less compressed pace. I feel like that pressure relief would have led to fewer "But what is it all? And what does it all mean? And what are ... WE???"-type eruptions. Sure am glad James made it to the Lighthouse and had a moment with his dad though.

      (On class: the last gasps of compulsive Victorian world-building as well as Victorian formality are on display here, and it's affecting to watch that world list and capsize and the hard-won homeliness of it convert into something more twentieth-century and atomized. But I guess that made the proscribed lighthouse trip possible?)
    • 2/5
      Typical Woolf. Long sentences. Inner dialogues showing way too much overthinking. Way too much detail over little nothings. Tiring. Nothing exactly happens in the the book. Things happen between chapters, then characters start the next chapter thinking about what happened. But we never see what happens.

      But poor James spent 10 years waiting to get his visit to the lighthouse. Which we don't actually get to see or hear about, because the book ends as they begin getting out of the book.

      Glad it's done. Glad it was short.
    • 4/5
      I had close to the same feeling about these characters as I had to the ones in The Age of Innocence, which is to say, close to none. The writing here, however, was much better, as it seems to me, so there's that.
    • 4/5
      Not much of a plot in this work of dreamy prose. But still worth a read, if just to suck from the marrow of these sentences. Being a short work one, can read it over and over again.,

    Book preview

    To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

    Cover for To the Lighthouse: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition), Author, Virginia Woolf; Edited with Notes by Stella McNichol; Foreword by Patricia Lockwood; Introduction by Hermione Lee; Cover illustrated by Alison Bechdel

    TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

    Every summer, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey and their eight children vacation on Scotland’s idyllic Isle of Skye, surrounded by artist friends. They expect these summers will go on forever, but with the arrival of World War I, they are forced to reckon with change, loss, and time’s unstoppable march, before making, years later, the long-awaited return to Skye and to its towering lighthouse. An intimate, impressionistic meditation on memory, grief, the brutalities of war, and the tensions of domestic life, revolutionary for its use of stream of consciousness and shifting points of view and infused with a singular poetic essence, To the Lighthouse is both a landmark in modernist writing and one of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century.

    This edition is collated from all known proofs, manuscripts, and impressions to reflect the author’s intentions, and includes a catalog of emendations, a foreword by the acclaimed novelist, memoirist, and poet Patricia Lockwood, and an introduction by the distinguished biographer and critic Hermione Lee.

    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

    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

    penguin classics

    deluxe edition

    TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

    virginia woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of the editor and critic Leslie Stephen and Julia Stephen, a philanthropist and model for the Pre-Raphaelites. She suffered a traumatic adolescence after the deaths of her mother, in 1895, and her half sister Stella, in 1897, leaving her subject to breakdowns for the rest of her life. Her father died in 1904, and two years later, her favorite brother, Thoby, died suddenly of typhoid. With her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, she was drawn into the company of writers and artists such as Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, later known as the Bloomsbury Group. Among them she met Leonard Woolf, whom she married in 1912, and together they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, which was to publish the work of T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and Katherine Mansfield, as well as the earliest translations of Freud. Woolf lived an energetic life among friends and family, reviewing and writing, and dividing her time between London and the Sussex Downs. In 1941, fearing another attack of mental illness, she drowned herself in the River Ouse.

    Her first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915, and she then worked through the transitional Night and Day (1919) to the highly experimental and impressionistic Jacob’s Room (1922). From then on her fiction became a series of brilliant and extraordinarily varied experiments, each one searching for a fresh way of presenting the relationship between individual lives and the forces of society and history. She was particularly concerned with women’s experience, not only in her novels but also in her essays and her two books of feminist polemic, A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). Her major novels include Mrs. Dalloway (1925); To the Lighthouse (1927); the historical fantasy Orlando (1928), written for Vita Sackville-West; the extraordinary poetic vision of The Waves (1931); the family saga of The Years (1937); and Between the Acts (1941).

    patricia lockwood is the author of the novel No One Is Talking About This, a 2021 Booker Prize finalist and one of The New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2021, and the memoir Priestdaddy, one of The New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2017, as well as the poetry collections Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals and Balloon Pop Outlaw Black. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and the London Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor.

    hermione lee is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University and was made a Dame for services to literary scholarship. Her work includes biographies and studies of Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Roth, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Penelope Fitzgerald, and Tom Stoppard, as well as two essay collections on life-writing, Body Parts and Virginia Woolf’s Nose.

    STELLA McNICHOL

    was the author of Virginia Woolf and the Art of Fiction and the editor of numerous Woolf editions, including Woolf’s group of stories, Mrs. Dalloway’s Party.

    Book Title, To the Lighthouse: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition), Author, Virginia Woolf; Edited with Notes by Stella McNichol; Foreword by Patricia Lockwood; Introduction by Hermione Lee; Cover illustrated by Alison Bechdel, Imprint, Penguin Classics

    PENGUIN BOOKS

    An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

    penguinrandomhouse.com

    First published in Great Britain by The Hogarth Press 1927

    Annotated edition published in Penguin Books (UK) 1992

    This edition with a foreword by Patricia Lockwood published in Penguin Books 2023

    Introduction copyright © 1992 by Hermione Lee

    Notes and other editorial matter copyright © 1992 by Stella McNichol

    Foreword copyright © 2023 by Patricia Lockwood

    Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

    library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

    Names: Woolf, Virginia, 1882–1941, author. | McNichol, Stella, editor. | Lockwood, Patricia, writer of foreword. | Lee, Hermione, writer of introduction.

    Title: To the lighthouse / Virginia Woolf ; foreword by Patricia Lockwood ; introduction by Hermione Lee ; edited with notes by Stella McNichol.

    Description: [New York] : Penguin Books, 2023. | Series: Penguin vitae | First published in Great Britain by The Hogarth Press, 1927. | Includes bibliographical references.

    Identifiers: LCCN 2022053799 (print) | LCCN 2022053800 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143137573 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780143137580 (paperback) | ISBN 9780593511688 (ebook)

    Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.

    Classification: LCC PR6045.O72 T6 2023 (print) | LCC PR6045.O72 (ebook) | DDC 823/.912—dc23/eng/20221117

    LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022053799

    LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022053800

    Cover art by Alison Bechdel

    Adapted for ebook by Kelly Brennan

    pid_prh_6.0a_148347072_c0_r1

    Contents

    Bibliographical Note

    Foreword by patricia lockwood

    Introduction by hermione lee

    Suggestions for Further Reading

    A Note on the Text by

    STELLA McNICHOL

    TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

    I. The Window

    II. Time Passes

    III. The Lighthouse

    Notes

    Appendix I

    Appendix II

    _148347072_

    Bibliographical Note

    The following is a list of abbreviated titles used in this edition.

    MS: To the Lighthouse: The Original Holograph Draft, transcribed and edited by Susan Dick (University of Toronto Press, 1982; Hogarth Press, 1983). Square brackets are used to indicate words deleted in the original draft.

    TL: To the Lighthouse, first British edition (Hogarth Press, 5 May 1927).

    Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (Chatto & Windus, 1976).

    Diary: The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5 vols., ed. Anne Olivier Bell (Hogarth Press, 1977; Penguin Books, 1979).

    Letters: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols., ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (Hogarth Press, 1975–80).

    Essays: The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 3 vols. (to be 6 vols.), ed. Andrew McNeillie (Hogarth Press, 1986).

    CE: Collected Essays, 4 vols., ed. Leonard Woolf (Chatto & Windus, 1966, 1967).

    Mausoleum: Sir Leslie Stephen’s Mausoleum Book (1895), introduced by Alan Bell (Oxford University Press, 1977).

    Foreword

    To the Lighthouse, from the first word of its title, is a novel that moves. Here it comes striding across the lawn, with its hair in long curving crimps and a deer-stalker’s hat on its head, with a bag in one hand and a child trailing from the other. It is coming to find you, its face lights up, there is something in this world for you to do.

    I had met Virginia Woolf before I ever opened her books. I knew what she looked like and what had happened to her. I knew her pictures seemed to glow under a fine white powder. I knew her books took place inside the human mind and I had my whole life to enter them. My premonitory sense of what her novels were about—Mrs. Dalloway is about some lady, The Waves is about . . . waves, Orlando is about a woman being a guy throughout History, and To the Lighthouse is about going to the lighthouse—turned out to be basically accurate. Yet I put off To the Lighthouse for a long time, in order to live in delicious anticipation of it. There is a pleasure to be had in putting off the classics; as soon as you open Bleak House, you close off all other possibilities of what it could be, and there sits Mr. Krook in his unchanging grease-spot, always to look the same, never to raise a hand differently. As long as it remains unread, it can be anything, and the story free, immortal, drowsing between white sheets. 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.

    I have beliefs about Mrs. Dalloway—that Clarissa Dalloway should have been the one to kill herself. I have sometimes, picturing all the characters in black leotards, found myself laughing at the first ten pages of The Waves. But 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.

    This is going to be fairly short, Woolf wrote in 1925, to have father’s character done complete in it; & mother’s; & St. Ives; & childhood; & all the usual things I try to put in—life, death, &c.[1] A maniac’s claim, life, death, et cetera, but she actually did it. Virginia Woolf, being one of those who can turn the earth with one finger, picked up her own childhood summers in Cornwall and set them down intact here in the Hebrides, on the Isle of Skye. When I first read this book I had not seen this place; now I have been over every inch of it, eating its butter and eggs in the morning, blinking like a light at its lakes at night, backed up the road by the dense yellow sponge of its sheep in the afternoon. A drive we took at dawn now escorts me around the whole perimeter of the novel, over the heather that keeps a footprint, down by the rock pools where something might be lost—where I tiptoed over black mud for half an hour, looking for something, not realizing until later that it might be Minta’s grandmother’s brooch, a weeping willow set in pearls. I seemed to ride in the car that To the Lighthouse bought Woolf as she drove me past all points, on the wrong side of the road and under threat of rain, so that the scenes were transposed into my own life and were no longer hers at all. She saw the Godrevy Lighthouse when she closed her eyes, though Skye, too, has a famous one. She saw St. Ives, and her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, writer and mountain climber, and her mother, Julia Stephen, the tallest thing on the island, painted here in the black-and-white stripes of someone called just Mrs. Ramsay.

    It is Mrs. Ramsay herself we are going to meet; it is she who could not have been different. She is the human holiday, the maypole in every month. The dinner table, laid with everything in season, and herself rotating in the center of it—her own face in season, a fruit. She has little time for books, not even books like these (and there is only one of those). She has no foreknowledge—no afternoon does—but she has intuitions: an impulse of terror when her family ceases to wash her with the sound of its talk; the line Stormed at with shot and shell carried for a moment into her ear by her husband the thunderer; the volcano; the great war. Her six-year-old, James, wants to go to the Lighthouse tomorrow, but it seems there will be weather. ‘Yes, of course, if it’s fine to-morrow,’ says Mrs. Ramsay. . . . ‘But,’ said his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window, ‘it won’t be fine.’ . . . ‘But it may be fine—I expect it will be fine,’ said Mrs. Ramsay, making some little twist of the reddish-brown stocking she was knitting, impatiently. Along with James, you may wish to kill Mr. Ramsay in this moment. And along with James, looking into the possibility and plenitude of his mother’s face, you may feel that Paradise is a refrigerator.

    Is it ridiculous that what I remember most about Skye is wandering the aisles of the grocery store with my mother, through the cold breath of the dairy aisle? My mother is no Mrs. Ramsay—she looks at you not with tenderness, but as if a volcano is exploding behind you—but she has the gift of putting newspaper headlines on the day, of setting Tomorrow before you as if it were something to eat. We walked up and down and we chose, as if we were choosing each other. Things on an island seem set apart, ringed by water, too. They have the halos that things wear in still-life paintings. Everything familiar was a little bit different there: fruit, flowers, ourselves. Randomly we bought a huge personal melon; maybe this was the place where we would finally be the people who would crack open a melon for breakfast. Rain began to spatter as we emerged into the parking lot, which should have worried us but didn’t—driving on the wrong side of the road through rough weather was an opportunity my mother had waited for her whole life. We pulled squealing out of the parking lot and we talked of what we would do, as the personal melon rolled thunderously from one side of the car to the other. It was raining steadily now, the forecast said it would continue, but my mother drove us between drops, as if nothing that came from the sky could matter to us. Maybe she has some Mrs. Ramsay in her, after all.

    I remember it a little less beautifully, my husband said tactfully, as those who were not Virginia Woolf may have remembered those summers. We walked into the grocery store fifteen minutes before it closed. We had never been so hungry in our lives, so time was of the essence, but your mother started to malfunction, trying to find Midwestern treats and bags of ice, so that she could formulate the liquid that kept her alive and that no one in this part of the world would acknowledge—iced tea. You were walking through ‘the cold breath of the dairy aisle’ so that your mother could yell at the unpasteurized milk, which she considered dangerous. Both of you became deranged in the produce section and started grabbing fruits at random. That was a personal melon and it had meaning to me, I interrupt, but he goes on. Everyone knew she was your mother, and everyone knew you were American. Well. I have often called him my Leonard, but I feel he is a little bit harder on me.

    You could write about Mrs. Ramsay for a long time, anyone could. That is how the world gets a Virginia Woolf, maybe. Woolf lays her out not like a figure but like a spectrum, with one long, continuous, revolving stroke. Mrs. Ramsay feels waves, winds, pulses of suspicion about her own nature: and pausing there she looked out to meet that stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke, for watching them in this mood always at this hour one could not help attaching oneself to one thing especially of the things one saw; and this thing, the long steady stroke, was her stroke. Often she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking, with her work in her hands until she became the thing she looked at—that light, for example. And her work was the shape of a leg, and hospitals, and ensuring that the milk came to your doorstep still white and not dangerous. And saying tomorrow may be fine, we may yet go to the Lighthouse.

    You could write about Mr. Ramsay, too. The most generous woman of the age, as Woolf saw it, might be married to the most bottomless hole, who must be assured, like Mr. Ramsay, that he, too, lived in the heart of life; was needed; not here only, but all over the world. His light, too, strokes over something, but it is not the pageant of people that surrounds him, it is the alphabet of his own mind, which he fears goes up only to Q, while someone else’s might reach all the way to Z. Indeed, he might have made it to Z had he not married, he thinks. Well, a fool might count fruits in Paradise. He is absorbed in himself, he is tyrannical, he is unjust, thinks Lily Briscoe with her eyes down, for it is only when her eyes are down that she can see the Ramsays clearly. Directly one looked up and saw them, what she called ‘being in love’ flooded them. They became part of that unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is the world seen through the eyes of love. The sky stuck to them; the birds sang through them. Paradise, and a fool pacing through it with the sky stuck to him and the birds singing through him, thinking he would have written better books if he had not married.

    The Ramsays come here every summer with their eight children: Prue, Nancy, Rose, Cam, Andrew, Jasper, Roger, and that engine of desire, young James. They are surrounded as much by visitors as they are by the landscape, for Mrs. Ramsay requires attendants of varying colors and dispositions; she is a past master in the flower-arranging of people, which likes a stem or two of something wild. And so we have the handful gathered here almost by chance: Lily Briscoe and William Bankes; Charles Tansley; Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle; Augustus Carmichael, the almost-afterthought. We have the knowledge that they could have been anyone. Even we, in the right time and place, could have been here.

    We are perhaps a little like the artist Lily Briscoe, striving and unformed, a tamer flower than she wants to be, who tomorrow may be able to make the paint move, who feels the agony of having her painting looked at, who sees shapes rise up behind people and sections of potatoes when she thinks of science. She is required by both Mrs. Ramsay and the novel to stand in one place in front of her easel so she can register the passing of the horizontal through the vertical, the kitchen table through the pear tree, the march of the family through the Lighthouse—the year through Mrs. Ramsay, the upright afternoon. Tomorrow, she tells herself, thinking of her canvas, she must move the tree more toward the middle.

    We are perhaps more like the little atheist Charles Tansley, student and groveling admirer of Mr. Ramsay, who quite swiftly finds himself in uncomfortable thrall to Mrs. Ramsay. Under the influence of that extraordinary emotion which had been growing all the walk, had begun in the garden when he had wanted to take her bag, had increased in the town when he had wanted to tell her everything about himself, he was coming to see himself and everything he had ever known gone crooked a little. It was awfully strange. He is a man who cannot cry out, Let us go to the Circus! with any spontaneity, which causes Mrs. Ramsay considerable wonder. It is not difficult at all to go to the circus, it is not difficult to go to the Lighthouse; if other people would only stop saying it were not possible, she would carry them there.

    Mrs. Ramsay’s work is to make people magnificent—to make them believe in themselves, make them think they can do anything, which is also how you get a Virginia Woolf. Her work is to make people fall in love with her, so that they can marry other people. William must marry Lily, she thinks, and such is the force of green sap in the thought that it almost comes to flower. (Not really, but there is a moment when we think, Maybe?) Mr. Bankes looks upon Lily’s painting; Lily is standing with two legs apart like an easel and she is painting what we see, all of it. Mr. Bankes asks her what she wishes to make of the scene. Lily turns her eye to Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, and the hour and the place and the unity of the whole, and closes the catch of her paint-box on the realization that one could walk away down that long gallery not alone any more but arm in arm with somebody—the strangest feeling in the world, and the most exhilarating.

    Woolf’s mother, Julia Stephen, was an extraordinary woman, with eyes like cups and a mouth that turned down and a chin you have seen in a dozen paintings. In all of her pictures she presides, as if you are looking down at her from the child end of a very long table. Her hair streams and a light glow sometimes comes from the top of her head; Eudora Welty invokes a Blake angel at the end of her 1981 introduction to the novel, and it is hard to envision this angel without Julia Stephen’s own face. If you have seen her, staring with compassion and without mercy in black and white, perhaps you imagine Mrs. Ramsay this way. If not, perhaps you picture your own mother, knitting, with a rhythm in her mind and a green shawl around her shoulders.

    It is the eyes from which Woolf proceeds, and the nose like an arrow. People really do come from other people, strange as it might seem. And yet she had said to all these children, You shall go through with it. To eight people she had said relentlessly that (and the bill for the greenhouse would be fifty pounds). Julia and Leslie had four children. The Woolfs had none, yet to a hundred people Virginia said the same thing, and relentlessly that: You shall go through with it all.

    If you have not read the book yet, stop here, and come back later, for it is during the dinner party that you start thinking, Maybe this is the book I bring to the island—not a desert one, but one with red moss and rock pools and a Lighthouse. No summary shall ever stand in place of the experience. When I was rereading, and I had to pause a whole day before that scene, I was in an agony of anticipation, as if it were an actual party. I had to choose my jewels! Would I be able to converse? Would the Bœuf en Daube be overdone, or properly timed? Would the moment when the right words come to your lips go missing? Then tomorrow came and the worst happened: I was reading it badly, all in scraps and fragments, nothing coming together. I was failing—along with the little atheist, I wanted to get back to my work. I had forgotten that this was how it was written. It was written so that when the candles were lit, some change at once went through them all, as if this had really happened, and they were all conscious of making a party together in a hollow, on an island; had their common cause against that fluidity out there. The dish of fruit, of people, is so intact, the party is so all of a kind, until Rose reaches out a hand to take a pear. And I was sad, I had not said what I wanted to say.

    You cannot ever replicate your first reading of this scene. But once you have read it, you have it, and it goes on forever in a room inside of you: the low lights, the faces sparkling in their sugar, the carrying of the Bœuf en Daube to the table. It is where the movement of the title finally sweeps you up and makes you a part of it. You, too, were invited, despite your imperfections and your pretentious dress, your bad ideas about Art and your inability to paint the world as you see it; your choice of husband or wife; the fact that you will never marry; that you will die in the war; that your mind cannot make it all the way up to Z. You were asked to come and you are there. Woolf notes, in rereading To the Lighthouse after she finished, that hardly a word goes wrong in this scene, and it is true—everything coordinates like one revolution of the wheel.[2] She juggles her comparisons so that they, too, seem all of a kind: like a hawk, like a flag, like a fume, like a ruby. The things of the earth float in orbit around her, they proceed one from the other in a montage of transformation, the magician’s assistant now flying high in the air, now tunneling under the ground, now plunged in the circle of the castle moat: It could not last she knew but at the moment her eyes were so clear that they seemed to go round the table unveiling each of these people, and their thoughts and their feelings, without effort like a light stealing under water, so that its ripples and the reeds in it and the minnows balancing themselves, and the sudden silent trout are all lit up hanging, trembling. She is not like her mother, not like Mrs. Ramsay. But she has the center that holds, and you feel with full force what she declared in 1925, when she first saw To the Lighthouse in her mind, circling like a fin far out at sea, that she was the only woman in England free to write what I like.[3]

    The churn of paint that will take over The Waves entirely begins here. It asserts the abstract painting as figural: here are the mother and child, among curves and arabesques. Here are a man and woman, naked, walking arm in arm down a long green gallery. It is Lily Briscoe’s shapes, a glittering dome rising up over Mrs. Ramsay. It is her problem of space, which she is so happy to find—forty-four years old and taking up her brush again—the problem that remains. What Lily wishes for is what Virginia Woolf must have wished for, what every artist must wish for before they begin: that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been made anything.

    It is characteristic of Woolf that you could use nearly any elemental metaphor to describe her effects. Shall I speak of paint and canvas, or the tick of minutes in an empty room, or the wind in a hollow shell? Anything is possible. You have only to choose, as she chose from among her people. Shall I look now through the painter, the critic, the child? It is she who likes a stem of something wild, she who has invited one of every kind to come to table, in case she needs their eyes, their ears, the clear water running through their mind. Always she was attempting to transcribe color, shape, pattern, but also that music that plays on the nerves: the sudden crash, the major or minor chord, the sound of the sea. "But while I try to write, I am making up To the Lighthouse—the sea is to be heard all through it. I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant ‘novel.’ A new —— by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?"[4]

    Mrs. Ramsay dies in brackets, Mr. Ramsay’s arms reaching out for her. Prue is given in marriage and dies in brackets; Andrew is blown sky-high in them. The brackets are the arms where we are not. The Waverley novels—which Mr. Ramsay reads after that dinner, repeating to himself that they must last, as he himself must last—in the end are rescued. A Mrs. McNab and a Mrs. Bast gossip and swab their way through the house, where the skull of an old black boar hangs on the wall and the green shawl that Mrs. Ramsay wrapped around it that night swings to and fro like Time. The war has happened, and Mr. Carmichael has written his poem. The house is held in a constant scansion: first the life of the Ramsays, and then that life’s erosion, and we see that they are the same. We, too, are held in the scansion, a few more grains of us are gone, after we have finished reading.

    •   •   •

    By the time we had unloaded our armfuls of insane groceries at the Wee Croft House—we were actually staying at a place called the Wee Croft House, on a picturesque finger of land known as Sleat—it was too late to cook, so we found ourselves driving back into town, back again toward the sea. When we got to the restaurant, it had stopped raining, and light and shadow moved in great mammal-ish shapes outside. The personal melon was still intact, as it would remain for the rest of the trip, never touched or tasted; we do

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