To the Lighthouse

To the Lighthouse, whose centenary falls in 2027, is widely viewed as the greatest novel by Virgina Woolf, one of greatest, and most beloved, of the great English novelists. It is a tale of youth and age, of disappointment and revelation, of life and death, whose pages are imbued with an extraordinary sensitivity to the lonely particularities of the self and to the complicated dynamics of family life, combined with a rich attention to the world of the senses and a supple style that is a form of intelligence itself.

Extraordinary, it is also a perfectly ordinary tale, about a big family messing around on vacation, about being little and crushed by not getting what you want, and being old and uncertain what it is, if anything, that you have got. The book encompasses the long summery suspension of the era World War I brought to a bloody end, the losses, personal and public, the war brought, and the struggle in its aftermath to put life back together in a way perhaps less destructive to body and heart and soul. It is a book about the passage of time, the stab of love, and the life of art. Few books have it in them to capture the unremitting wonder of what it is to be at loss and at large in the world. None does it with the precision and poignance of To the Lighthouse.

This new edition of To the Lighthouse, edited by Edward Mendelson, is the only one to include all of Virginia Woolf's corrections and revisions to the text, including one important one that she made for the first French translation. Unlike all other editions published in North America, it is based on the revised text that she prepared for the first British edition, not the earlier and less revised text in the first American edition. Part of NYRB Classics's ongoing new edition of Woolf's major works, it will be followed in 2028 by Mendelson's edition of The Waves.