To the Lighthouse: Collins Classics

VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941) was born in London. A pioneer in the narrative use of stream of consciousness, she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915. This was followed by literary criticism and essays, most notably A Room of One’s Own, and other acclaimed novels, including Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando.

ABOUT THE INTRODUCER: SUSAN CHOI is the author of five novels, including Trust Exercise, which received the 2019 National Book Award for fiction.  She has also been recipient of the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award, a Lamba Literary award, the 2021 Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.  She serves as a trustee of PEN America and teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She lives in Brooklyn.

“Radiant as [To the Lighthouse] is in its beauty, there could never be a mistake about it: here is a novel to the last degree severe and uncompromising. I think that beyond being about the very nature of reality, it is itself a vision of reality.” — Eudora Welty
“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, director of Lady Bird and Little Women
“To the Lighthouse is one of the greatest elegies in the English language, a book which transcends time.”  — Margaret Drabble, author of The Witch of Exmoor
“I reread this book every once in a while, and every time I do I find it more capacious and startling. It’s so revolutionary and so exquisitely wrought that it keeps evolving on its own somehow, as if it’s alive.”  — Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home
“Without question one of the two or three finest novels of the twentieth century. If you’re like me you’ll come back to this book often, always astounded, always moved, always refreshed.” — Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm

Though its fame as an icon of twentieth-century literature rests primarily on the brilliance of its narrative technique and the impressionistic beauty of its prose, 'To The Lighthouse' is above all the story of a quest, and as such it possesses a brave and magical universality.