To the Lighthouse

Celebrate a captivating novel with this special edition featuring the original cover created by Virginia Woolf's sister, Vanessa Bell, and the original text first published by The Hogarth Press.

There were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.

The Ramseys have always spent their holidays at their summer house on Skye – holidays filled with noise, joy and the stuff of family life that might go on forever. But as time passes, bringing with it war and death, the summer home stands empty until one day the family return to make the long-postponed visit to the lighthouse.

To the Lighthouse was published in 1927 and was more commercially successful than any of Woolf’s previous novels. Woolf herself thought it ‘easily the best of my books’. The book printed three times in its first year and went on to become one of Woolf’s best-loved works.

The text of this edition of To the Lighthouse is based on the original Hogarth Press edition, published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf on 5 May 1927. The dust jacket features the original cover created by Virginia Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell, for the Hogarth Press. Beneath the cover ‘bright blue’ boards printed in gilt take inspiration from the finish of the first trade edition.

'My mind was warped into a new shape by her prose and it will never be the same again' Greta Gerwig

‘Woolf’s groundbreaking novel is still one of the best available accounts of self-mythologising middle-class family life’ Rachel Cusk

‘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