To the Lighthouse

By: Virginia Woolf

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1981

"A classic for a reason. My mind was warped into a new shape by her prose and it will never be the same again." -- Greta Gerwig

The authorized, original edition of one of the great literary masterpieces of the twentieth century: a miraculous novel of family, love, war, and mortality, with a foreword from Eudora Welty.

From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Woolf constructs a remarkable, moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life and conflict between men and women.

To the Lighthouse is made up of three powerfully charged visions into the life of the Ramsay family living in a summer house off the rocky coast of Scotland. There's the serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, their eight children, and assorted holiday guests. With the lighthouse excursion postponed, Woolf shows the small joys and quiet tragedies of everyday life that seemingly could go on forever.

But as time winds its way through their lives, the Ramsays face, alone and together, the greatest of human challenges and its greatest triumph--the human capacity for change.

A moving portrait in miniature of family life, To the Lighthouse also has profoundly universal implications, giving language to the silent space that separates people and the space that they transgress to reach each other.