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Reprint of 1927 Edition. Following and extending the tradition of modernist novelists like Marcel Proust and James Joyce, the plot of To the Lighthouse is secondary to its philosophical introspection. Cited as a key example of the literary technique of multiple focalization, the novel includes little dialogue and almost no action; most of it is written as thoughts and observations. The novel recalls childhood emotions and highlights adult relationships. Among the book's many tropes and themes are those of loss, subjectivity, the nature of art and the problem of perception. In 1998, the Modern Library named To the Lighthouse No. 15 on its list 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.
About the author
Virginia Woolf was a luminous novelist, a prolific essayist and book reviewer, and a diarist. With her husband Leonard, Woolf established and ran the Hogarth Press which published works by influential modernist writers. In their first five years, they published Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Clive Bell, Roger Fry and Sigmund Freud. Woolf's haunting writing, her succinct insights into feminist, artistic, historical, political issues, and her revolutionary experiments with points of view and stream-of-consciousness altered the course of literature.
