To the Lighthouse.

WOOLF, Virginia.

Item Number: 59015

New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1927.

First American edition, published simultaneously with the British edition of Woolf’s classic novel. Octavo, original green cloth, letters in blue to the front board with a vignette illustration of a lighthouse. Near fine in the rare original dust jacket with light rubbing and wear. Jacket design by Vanessa Bell. Rare and desirable, especially in this condition.

Published two years after Mrs. Dalloway and three years before The Waves, To the Lighthouse “displays Woolf’s technique of narrating through stream of consciousness and imagery at its most assured, rich, and suggestive” (Drabble, 990). “In its portrayal of life… it gives us an interlude of vision that must stand at the head of all Virginia Woolf’s work” (New York Times). To the Lighthouse was “written at the height of her luminous Impressionist vision… It is the sunniest of her books and shows the obsession with rendering the passage of time which dominated her later work. With her prosperous upper middle class academic background of the late Victorian establishment, Virginia Woolf is always walking a tight-rope in her desire to get away from it and portray ordinary people as a novelist should, hence the mixture of respect and irony with which she surveys its security and solid values” (Connolly). It was named by Modern Library as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 2005, the novel was chosen by TIME magazine as one of the one hundred best English-language novels since 1923. It was adapted to film in 1983 by Hugh Stoddart, directed by Colin Gregg, and produced by Alan Shallcross.