Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse (Annotated)

PENGUIN BOOKS

To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf is now recognized as a major twentieth-century author, a great novelist and essayist and a key figure in literary history as a feminist and a modernist. Born in 1882, she was the daughter of the editor and critic Leslie Stephen, and suffered a traumatic adolescence after the deaths of her mother, in 1895, and her step-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 favourite 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.

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 Jacobs 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 womens experience, not only in her novels but also in her essays and her two books of feminist polemic, A Room of Ones 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). All these are published by Penguin, as are her Diaries, Volumes I-V, selections from her essays and short stories, and Flush (1933), a reconstruction of the life of Elizabeth Barrett Brownings spaniel.

Stella McNichol is the author of a critical study of To the Lighthouse (1971) and of Virginia Woolf and the Poetry of Fiction (1990), and the editor of a group of Virginia Woolfs stories, Mrs Dalloways Party (1973).

Hermione Lee is the Goldsmiths Professor of English Literature and Fellow of New College, Oxford. She reviews for the Observer, The Times Literary Supplement, the Financial Times, the New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. Her books include The Novels of Virginia Woolf (1977), Elizabeth Bowen (1981, 1999), Philip Roth (1982), Stevie Smith: A Selection (1983), The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen (1986), Willa Cather A Life Saved Up (1989), an edition of Willa Cathers stories (1989), two selections of stories by women writers, TheSecret Self(1985, reissued 1991), and Virginia Woolf (1996).

Julia Briggs is General Editor for the works of Virginia Woolf in Penguin.