To the Lighthouse [Paperback]

On a Hebridean island, overlooked by a distant lighthouse, the Ramsay family and guests are enjoying the long, hot summer. The focus of the group is the beautiful and gracious Mrs Ramsay, who exercises a gentle but irresistible power. All of them – her self-pitying, self-centred philosopher husband, her flock of children, the infatuated Charles Tansley, the elderly poet and the painter, Lily Briscoe – are drawn into her sphere of influence. Mrs Ramsay builds friendships, flatters vanities, inspires love. Her husband's passion is for abstract truth; hers is for the reality of married life and the family, a constancy which 'shines out in the face of the flowing, the spectral, like a ruby'.

But the summer ends. War and death challenge the stability that Mrs Ramsay holds so dear. The next journey to the lighthouse is a very different one…

Virginia Woolf's fifth novel, 'To the Lighthouse' was the first book to win her a large public and has remained the most popular of all her works. It drew its inspiration from the author's recollections of her childhood family holidays, and mirrors her own search for what is permanent within the constant flux of life.

This Definitive Edition is the original 1929 Hogarth Press Uniform Edition text.

'Night and Day, Mrs Dalloway, The Waves' and 'A Room of One's Own' are also available in Flamingo

“'To the Lighthouse' is a lamentation of loss and grief for powerful, loved, dead parents. It is, less apparently, about the English class structure and its radical break with Victorianism after the First World War.”
HERMIONE LEE

To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled the expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night’s darkness and a day’s sail, within touch. Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallize and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator as his mother spoke with heavenly bliss. It was fringed with joy. The wheelbarrow, the lawn-mower, the sound of poplar trees, leaves whitening before rain, rooks cawing, brooms knocking, dresses rustling – all these were so coloured and distinguished in his mind that had already his private code, his secret language, though he appeared the image of stark and uncompromising severity, with his high forehead and his fierce blue eyes, impeccably candid and pure, frowning slightly at the sight of human frailty, so that his mother, watching him guide scissors neatly round the refrigerator, imagined him all red and ermine on the Bench or directing a stern and momentous enterprise in some crisis of public affairs.

‘But,’ said his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window, ‘it won’t be fine.’

Had there been an axe handy, or a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it. Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr. Ramsay excited in his children’s breasts by his mere presence; standing, as now, lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one, grinning sarcastically, not only with the pleasure of disillusioning his son and casting ridicule upon his wife, who was ten thousand times better in every way than he was (James thought), but also with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgement. What he said was true. It was always true. He was incapable of untruth; never tampered with a fact; never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all his own children, who, sprung from his loins, should be aware from childhood that life is difficult; facts uncompromising; and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail barks founder in darkness (here Mr. Ramsay would straighten his back and narrow his little blue eyes upon the horizon), one that needs, above all, courage, truth, and the power to endure. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.