To the Lighthouse

'I am making up "To the Lighthouse" - the sea is to be heard all through it' Inspired by the lost bliss of her childhood summers in Cornwall, Virginia Woolf produced one of the masterworks of English literature in To the Lighthouse. It concerns the Ramsay family and their summer guests on the Isle of Skye before and after the First World War. As children play and adults paint, talk, muse and explore, relationships shift and mutate. A captivating fusion of elegy, autobiography, socio-political critique and visionary thrust, it is the most accomplished of all Woolf's novels. On completing it, she thought she had exorcised the ghosts of her imposing parents, but she had also brought form to a book every bit as vivid and intense as the work of Lily Briscoe, the indomitable artist at the centre of the novel.

ISBN 0199536619   Weight (grammes) 203 ISBN13 9780199536610 (What's this?)   Published in Oxford Publisher Oxford University Press   Series title Oxford World's Classics Imprint Oxford University Press   Previous ISBN 9780192805607 Format Paperback   Height (mm) 196 Publication date 12 Jun 2008   Width (mm) 129 DEWEY 823.912   Spine width (mm) 12 DEWEY edition DC21   Academic level General Pages 272   Alternative ISBN 9789626348666

A middle-class academic family holiday on the Isle of Skye, before the First World War. This novel is a poetic elegy for their time - exquisitely written, beautiful. - Ian Harker - Blackwell, Leeds

It's the most evocative and poignant book I've ever read. The vast and insummountable truths of life are framed in the domestic setting of a family holiday. Woolf's majesty lies in the fact that she has made these truths all the more intense and potent for doing so. The test of this book was that I did my thesis on it, spent three months engrossed in it, and yet still love it. - Rachel Poulter - Blackwell Head Office, Oxford



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