Other editions of book To the Lighthouse

This volume is part of a series of novels, plays and stories intended for use at A Level. The complete, original text is accompanied by an introduction, activities for before, during and after study, as well as notes. An ordinary day in the life of the Ramsay family and their friends on holiday in the Isle of Skye. There is talk of a visit to the lighthouse and as the day unfolds, each character is caught up in a myriad of thoughts, impressions and feelings. In this novel, Virginia Woolf shows how this day will live on in the minds of the characters, and how it will profoundly affect them in years to come.

To the Lighthouse is a 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf. A landmark of high modernism, the novel centers on the Ramsays and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920. Following and extending the tradition of modernist novelists like Marcel Proust and James Joyce, the plot of To the Lighthouse is secondary to its philosophical introspection. The novel includes little dialogue and almost no action; most of it is written as thoughts and observations. The novel recalls childhood emotions and highlights adult relationships. Among the book's many tropes and themes are those of loss, subjectivity, and the problem of perception. In 1998, the Modern Library named To the Lighthouse No. 15 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 2005, the novel was chosen by TIME magazine as one of the one hundred best English-language novels from 1923 to present.

Just before the First World War, the Ramsay family go to their holiday home in the Hebrides, bringing several guests with them. While they are there, one of the children wants to visit a lighthouse. After a ten year gap, during which the war wreaks its havoc on Europe, one of the guests returns to the house; and another trip to the lighthouse is proposed. Told from multiple viewpoints, in language that is precise, delicate and allusive, To The Lighthouse is a landmark work of English fiction. Virginia Woolf explores perception and meaning in some of the most beautiful prose ever written, minutely detailing the characters thoughts and impressions. An English novelist and essayist born in 1882, Virginia Woolf is regarded as one of the most prominent modernists of her day. She was a member of the Bloomsbury Group, and a well-known literary figure in London. She died in 1941, in East Sussex. Juliet Stevenson has worked extensively for the RSC and the Royal National Theatre. She received an Olivier Award for her role in Death and the Maiden at the Royal Court, and a number of other awards for her work in the film Truly, Madly, Deeply. Other film credits include The Trial, Drowning by Numbers, and Emma.

To the Lighthouse (1927) is set on two days ten years apart. The plot centres on the Ramsay family's anticipation of and reflection upon a visit to a lighthouse and the connected familial tensions. One of the primary themes of the novel is the struggle in the creative process that beset painter Lily Briscoe while she struggles to paint in the midst of the family drama. The novel is also a meditation upon the lives of a nation's inhabitants in the midst of war, and of the people left behind. It also explores the passage of time, and how women are forced by society to allow men to take emotional strength from them.

[Read by Phyllida Law]To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionist depiction of a family holiday, and a meditation on a marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny, and bitterness. Its use of stream of consciousness, reminiscence, and shifting perspectives gives the novel an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of Victorian and Edwardian literary values.