To The Lighthouse has it all: life, death, fantasies of suicide, homoerotic desire, lesbianism, and the evanescence of time. Love, fear, solitude, death—the subjects float by like parasols in the rain.

To The Lighthouse can be found on countless lists of the finest novels of the 20th century, and is one of Virginia Woolf's major achievements. It is considered her greatest work after Mrs. Dalloway.

“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

VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941), one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century, transformed the art of fiction. The author of numerous novels and short stories, she was also an acknowledged master of the essay form, and an admired literary critic.