Penguin Random House Higher Education
Elementary Secondary Higher Ed

Higher Education


Catalogs

News

Desk/Exam
(0)
Wish List
(0)
Wish List
  • Higher Education

    • Business & Economics
        • Business & Economics
        • Accounting
        • Business
        • Economics
        • Finance
        • Management
        • Management Information Services
        • Marketing

        • Browse All Disciplines & Courses in Business & Economics
    • Humanities & Social Sciences
        • Humanities & Social Sciences
        • Anthropology
        • Art
        • Communication
        • Education
        • English
        • Film Studies
        • History
        • Interdisciplinary Studies
        • Music
        •  
        • Performing Arts
        • Philosophy
        • Political Science
        • Psychology
        • Religion
        • Social Work
        • Sociology
        • Student Success and Career Development
        • World Languages

        • Browse All Disciplines & Courses in Humanities & Social Sciences
    • Professional Studies
        • Professional Studies
        • Architecture
        • Criminal Justice
        • Culinary, Hospitality, Travel , and Tourism
        • Healthcare Professions
        • Legal and Paralegal Studies
        • Military Science

        • Browse All Disciplines & Courses in Professional Studies
    • Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics
        • Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics
        • Biology
        • Chemistry
        • Computer Science
        • Computers & Information Systems
        • Engineering
        • Environmental Science
        •  
        • Geography
        • Geology
        • Health and Kinesiology
        • Mathematics
        • Nutrition
        • Physics and Astronomy

        • Browse All Disciplines & Courses in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics
    • Catalogs
    • News
    • Desk/Exam
    • Other Penguin Random House Education Sites
    • Elementary Education
    • Secondary Education
Are you still there?
If not, we’ll close this session in:
Download high-resolution image Look inside

To the Lighthouse

Part of Vintage Classics

Author Virginia Woolf
Introduction by Susan Choi
Look inside
Paperback
$10.00 US
Knopf | Vintage
On sale Jan 03, 2023 | 224 Pages | 978-0-593-46886-9
Add to cart Add to list Exam Copies
See Additional Formats
  • English > Comparative Literature > Literature by Women
  • English > Literature > British Literature – 20th Century
  • English > Literature > British Literature – Fiction
  • English > Literature > Women and Literature
  • About
  • Excerpt
  • Author
The enduring power of this iconic classic flows from the brilliance of its narrative technique and the impressionistic beauty of its prose. Though the novel turns on the death of its central figure, Mrs. Ramsay, her presence pervades every page in a poetic evocation of loss and memory that is also a celebration of domestic life and its most intimate details. Observed across the years at their vacation house on the Isle of Skye, Mrs. Ramsay and her family seek to recapture meaning from the flux of things and the passage of time. To the Lighthouse enacts a moving allegory of the creative consciousness and its momentary triumphs over fleeting material life. With a new introduction by award-winning writer Susan Choi.
 
“To the Lighthouse is one of the greatest elegies in the English language, a book which transcends time.” —Margaret Drabble

“Without question one of the two or three finest novels of the twentieth century. Woolf comments on the most pressing dramas of our human predicament: war, mortality, family, love. If you’re like me you’ll come back to this book often, always astounded, always moved, always refreshed.” —Rick Moody

“[Woolf’s] people are astoundingly real. . . . The tragic futility, the absurdity, the pathetic beauty, of life–we experience all of this in our sharing of seven hours of Mrs. Ramsay’s wasted or not wasted existence. We have seen, through her, the world.” —Conrad Aiken
from the Introduction to the Vintage Classics edition (2023), by Susan Choi

  
To the Lighthouse begins very abruptly—with nothing much going on.

“Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,” said Mrs. Ramsay.

It’s an empty moment of vacation in-betweenness, of busy­work and lazy repetition. Six-year-old James Ramsay has been given by his mother a catalogue to cut out the pictures. Mr. Ramsay and his tendentious acolyte Charles Tansley are walking back and forth as they always do, in the same track, talking as they always do about the same petty, insular topics. Mrs. Ram­say is thinking, as she always does, about the dominating qual­ities of men; and the claims of houseguests; and the prejudices of her children. Her children are feeling as usual prejudiced against Mr. Tansley, as well as reflexively compelled to curb their prejudice, as per their mother’s admonishments. The house as always is littered with paint pots and bird skulls and handfuls of sand; it’s decorated as ever with “long frilled strips of seaweed pinned to the wall” (p. TK) from which the sun pouring into the room draws “a smell of salt and weeds,” as changeless as the sun itself. Even the possible trip to the lighthouse is a tired debate (Will the weather be fine?), not a plan, and even were the lighthouse attained, it would only be to offer superfluous tribute to a changeless landmark affixed to its “rock the size of a tennis lawn” where there’s nothing to see but “the same dreary waves breaking week after week.” In other words, nothing changes—in this room, in this house, in this family, in these conditions of existence . . . where the walls are so thin that it is impossible not to hear one of the servants, a “Swiss girl sobbing for her father who was dying of cancer in a valley of the Grisons.” Should we pay attention to this sound of bereavement? Surely not. Surely we’re meant to disregard this, as the family does.
 
Nothing much going on: yet everything is here, in sparkling distillation, as we drift aimlessly on time’s stream. It’s the kind of afternoon that might well have been swept under the amnesic rug of “non-being,” Woolf ’s name for that greater part of experi­ence, the part that we live but don’t notice, which she compares to “a kind of nondescript cotton wool.” She goes on, in her auto­biographical “A Sketch of the Past,” “When it is a bad day the proportion of non-being is much larger. I had a slight tempera­ture last week; almost the whole day was non-being. The real novelist can somehow convey both sorts of being. I think Jane Austen can; and Trollope; perhaps Thackeray and Dickens and Tolstoy. I have never been able to do both” (Woolf, Moments of Being, 70). Perhaps I badly misunderstand what Woolf means by non-being, or perhaps Woolf, writing those sentences a decade and a half after To the Lighthouse and less than two years prior to the end of her life, badly underestimates her powers or is indulg­ing in false modesty. It’s precisely the power of To the Lighthouse, its soul-shaking sleight of hand, that moments of apparent non-being, such as the opening scene, are transmuted, like the lazy stream lifted clean from its bed, and shown burning with light.
 
Throughout her prolific career, Virginia Woolf wrote rel­atively little straightforward autobiography in the vein of “A Sketch of the Past.” Like many creative writers, she mostly saved the truth for fiction. Perhaps the most notable example from her work is To the Lighthouse, of which much has been written, including by Woolf herself, about its portraiture of her parents, in the form of the Ramsays, and its depiction of Talland House, the seaside home in St. Ives, Cornwall, where Woolf spent childhood summers until the death of her mother in 1895. But parsing a novel for its origins in an author’s lived experience has never been my motivation for reading, and I was entirely ignorant of the real-life analogues to the book’s elements until many decades and many readings after it had become one of the most influential and inexhaustible books in my life. Finding out what “really happened”—that the Ramsays “really were” Woolf ’s rendering of, and in many ways reckon­ing with, her parents; that the house, though transposed to the Hebrides from Cornwall for the novel, “really did” have just those sorts of gardens and just that view; that a broach “really was” lost by a houseguest and that, of course, there “really was” a lighthouse—hasn’t made that much difference to me. The book is revelatory whether you are able to discern the many stitches binding the novel’s cloth to that of Woolf ’s life or not. And yet at the same time that revelatory quality that speaks universally to anyone—the book’s embodiment of those least tangible yet most powerful entities of consciousness, time, and death—derives directly from Woolf ’s particular experience, and not merely the incidents—such as the deaths of her mother and sister and brother—but the nature of experience itself.
 
Toward the end of “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf, paraphras­ing Hamlet (“For he was likely, had he been put on,/to have proved most royal”), imagines her brother Thoby at sixty, an age he never reached: 

"He would have been more of a character than a success, I suppose; had he been put on. The knell of these words affects my memory of a time when in fact they were not heard at all. We had no kind of foreboding that he was to die when he was twenty-six and I was twenty-four. . . . Then I never saw him as I see him now, with all his promise ended." (Moments of Being, 140)

It has been from Woolf more than from any other writer that I’ve learned about perspective in fiction—not only who’s telling the story but where they’re located in time, relative to whatever they’re trying to convey. The effect of time—and its concomitants, notably death—on perspective, on one’s receipt and transmission of experience, interested Woolf deeply. Earlier in “A Sketch of the Past”—at the moment, apparently, when it graduated to the status of sketch—she writes,
2nd May [1939] . . . I write the date, because I think that I have discovered a possible form for these notes. That is, to make them include the present—at least enough of the present to serve as a platform to stand upon. It would be interesting to make the two people, I now, I then, come out in contrast. And further, this past is much affected by the present moment. (Moments of Being, 75)

As she says of Thoby further on in the essay, “We had no kind of foreboding that he was to die. . . . Then I never saw him as I see him now, with all his promise ended.” Woolf ’s “I now” can’t unsee Thoby’s death when she gazes back into the past. She can’t unhear the knell. Yet at the same time, just a few pages earlier, Woolf has done exactly this, returning to a moment that, by 1939, already has at least a double life, as an indelible memory of her childhood and as the penultimate moment of To the Lighthouse, when James Ramsay “steered them like a born sailor.” Fourteen years later, in “A Sketch of the Past”—and of course decades earlier, in the actual past—Woolf recalls,

". . . once Thoby was allowed to steer us home. 'Show them you can bring her in, boy,' father said, with his usual trust and pride in Thoby. And Thoby took the fisherman’s place; and steered; flushed and with his blue eyes very blue, and his mouth set, he sat there, bringing us round the point, into harbour, without letting the sail flag. One day the sea was full of pale jelly fish, like lamps, with streaming hair; but they stung you if you touched them. Sometimes lines would be handed us; baited by gobbets cut from fish; and the line thrilled in one’s fin­gers as the boat tossed and shot through the water; and then—how can I convey the excitement?—there was a little leaping tug; then another; up one hauled; up through the water at length came the white twisting fish; and was slapped on the floor." (Moments of Being, 134)

By the time the jellyfish float past, Woolf has forgotten all about Thoby’s future death. The knell is inaudible. And she has conveyed the excitement—reading these sentences I felt the water and wind, and I heard the fish slap on the floor of the boat. I’d forgotten about Thoby’s death also; I’d forgotten about my own dining room table, at which I sat on a too-hot June day more than one hundred years distant from child Virginia, her brother, and the white twisting fish. However great writing accomplishes it, by whatever its magical touch on whichever remarkable part of the brain, the seamless transit is achieved, through both space and time. “I now” transforms into “I then”—yet remains, somehow not interfering, a tactful ghost freighted with knowledge. Woolf knows she has doubled herself, has reclaimed a vision of Thoby without the forebod­ing of death—not only Thoby’s death but the deaths of her mother and sister when she and Thoby are still in their teens. All this makes her hesitate to write of him further: “I do not wish to bring Thoby out of the boat into my room.” Afloat there Woolf possesses both the undiminished past and its loss, the opposite conditions at once—just as, in its opening scene, To the Lighthouse enacts both non-being and being at once. Woolf, who so often thought in dichotomies—being/non-being, I now/I then—in fact consistently achieves simultaneity of these opposite things not merely in her work, as a represen­tation the reader might appreciate from a distance, but—for this reader, at least—in our visceral experience as readers. A syn­thesis of opposites, an immersion in this seemingly impossible condition—that’s my experience of Woolf ’s work, little as I can put it in adequate words.
 
The term perspective—with its narrow origin in looking, and its too-broad application to painting, geometry, lens-based technology, the overall relation of a person to their situation and that intangible sometimes called truth, and far more—is woefully inadequate to describing what Woolf achieves with words, but then again so are most words. You have to start somewhere. It was Woolf ’s handling of perspective—or view­point, or the place from which the story is told, to use more inadequate words—that first dazzled me the first time I read To the Lighthouse. “Yes, of course,” says Mrs. Ramsay, and we’re dropped into the moment, with no explanations. We occupy an entity again best compared to a ghost—it’s no single char­acter but any that it chooses in turn (James, his mother Mrs. Ramsay) or even several at once (the older children, who vanish “stealthily as stags”). Yet this narrating entity isn’t omniscient—it’s far too intimate with its subjects to be described by that remote and godlike adjective. It more resembles those “cer­tain airs, detached from the body of the wind,” which after everyone has gone to bed steal inside “ghostlily, as if they had feather-light fingers and the light persistency of feathers,” to tease the flap of wallpaper that has surrendered its adhesion to the wall; to mount the stairs, nose around the bedroom doors, and finally “bend over the bed itself.” Despite these being only “little airs,” another side of the narration now voices a gentle protest. This aspect resembles a mother—perhaps Mrs. Ramsay, whose creation this entire household world is. The little airs are told: “Here you can neither touch nor destroy.” Score one for constancy against the eternal foe, death. Turn deaf ears on the Swiss girl’s sobbing again. The little airs withdraw downstairs and outdoors—but not before spoiling the apples, fumbling the rose petals, blowing sand across the floor. Do your worst, we might tell them alongside that motherlike voice, smiling with indulgence. But hardly a page later, in an impassive parentheti­cal, we learn that Mrs. Ramsay has “rather suddenly” died. The death doesn’t even occur in the parentheses—only the backward glance at it.
 
The soothing maternal voice, affirming that here nothing can be touched nor destroyed; its antagonist, those crafty little airs, who win the victory for death after all: both are Woolf. And, immersed as fish in the nimble and changeable stream of her narration’s perspective, both are us, as Woolf engages us in the epic battle at the heart of this superficially quiet and civi­lized story, between the losses inflicted by death and our refusal of them.

...
Copyright © 2023 by Virginia Woolf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), one of the great twentieth-century authors, was at the center of the Bloomsbury Group and is a major figure in the history of literary feminism and modernism. She published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915, and between 1925 and 1931 produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, including Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism, and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and the passionate feminist essay A Room of One's Own (1929). View titles by Virginia Woolf

About

The enduring power of this iconic classic flows from the brilliance of its narrative technique and the impressionistic beauty of its prose. Though the novel turns on the death of its central figure, Mrs. Ramsay, her presence pervades every page in a poetic evocation of loss and memory that is also a celebration of domestic life and its most intimate details. Observed across the years at their vacation house on the Isle of Skye, Mrs. Ramsay and her family seek to recapture meaning from the flux of things and the passage of time. To the Lighthouse enacts a moving allegory of the creative consciousness and its momentary triumphs over fleeting material life. With a new introduction by award-winning writer Susan Choi.
 
“To the Lighthouse is one of the greatest elegies in the English language, a book which transcends time.” —Margaret Drabble

“Without question one of the two or three finest novels of the twentieth century. Woolf comments on the most pressing dramas of our human predicament: war, mortality, family, love. If you’re like me you’ll come back to this book often, always astounded, always moved, always refreshed.” —Rick Moody

“[Woolf’s] people are astoundingly real. . . . The tragic futility, the absurdity, the pathetic beauty, of life–we experience all of this in our sharing of seven hours of Mrs. Ramsay’s wasted or not wasted existence. We have seen, through her, the world.” —Conrad Aiken

Excerpt

from the Introduction to the Vintage Classics edition (2023), by Susan Choi

  
To the Lighthouse begins very abruptly—with nothing much going on.

“Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,” said Mrs. Ramsay.

It’s an empty moment of vacation in-betweenness, of busy­work and lazy repetition. Six-year-old James Ramsay has been given by his mother a catalogue to cut out the pictures. Mr. Ramsay and his tendentious acolyte Charles Tansley are walking back and forth as they always do, in the same track, talking as they always do about the same petty, insular topics. Mrs. Ram­say is thinking, as she always does, about the dominating qual­ities of men; and the claims of houseguests; and the prejudices of her children. Her children are feeling as usual prejudiced against Mr. Tansley, as well as reflexively compelled to curb their prejudice, as per their mother’s admonishments. The house as always is littered with paint pots and bird skulls and handfuls of sand; it’s decorated as ever with “long frilled strips of seaweed pinned to the wall” (p. TK) from which the sun pouring into the room draws “a smell of salt and weeds,” as changeless as the sun itself. Even the possible trip to the lighthouse is a tired debate (Will the weather be fine?), not a plan, and even were the lighthouse attained, it would only be to offer superfluous tribute to a changeless landmark affixed to its “rock the size of a tennis lawn” where there’s nothing to see but “the same dreary waves breaking week after week.” In other words, nothing changes—in this room, in this house, in this family, in these conditions of existence . . . where the walls are so thin that it is impossible not to hear one of the servants, a “Swiss girl sobbing for her father who was dying of cancer in a valley of the Grisons.” Should we pay attention to this sound of bereavement? Surely not. Surely we’re meant to disregard this, as the family does.
 
Nothing much going on: yet everything is here, in sparkling distillation, as we drift aimlessly on time’s stream. It’s the kind of afternoon that might well have been swept under the amnesic rug of “non-being,” Woolf ’s name for that greater part of experi­ence, the part that we live but don’t notice, which she compares to “a kind of nondescript cotton wool.” She goes on, in her auto­biographical “A Sketch of the Past,” “When it is a bad day the proportion of non-being is much larger. I had a slight tempera­ture last week; almost the whole day was non-being. The real novelist can somehow convey both sorts of being. I think Jane Austen can; and Trollope; perhaps Thackeray and Dickens and Tolstoy. I have never been able to do both” (Woolf, Moments of Being, 70). Perhaps I badly misunderstand what Woolf means by non-being, or perhaps Woolf, writing those sentences a decade and a half after To the Lighthouse and less than two years prior to the end of her life, badly underestimates her powers or is indulg­ing in false modesty. It’s precisely the power of To the Lighthouse, its soul-shaking sleight of hand, that moments of apparent non-being, such as the opening scene, are transmuted, like the lazy stream lifted clean from its bed, and shown burning with light.
 
Throughout her prolific career, Virginia Woolf wrote rel­atively little straightforward autobiography in the vein of “A Sketch of the Past.” Like many creative writers, she mostly saved the truth for fiction. Perhaps the most notable example from her work is To the Lighthouse, of which much has been written, including by Woolf herself, about its portraiture of her parents, in the form of the Ramsays, and its depiction of Talland House, the seaside home in St. Ives, Cornwall, where Woolf spent childhood summers until the death of her mother in 1895. But parsing a novel for its origins in an author’s lived experience has never been my motivation for reading, and I was entirely ignorant of the real-life analogues to the book’s elements until many decades and many readings after it had become one of the most influential and inexhaustible books in my life. Finding out what “really happened”—that the Ramsays “really were” Woolf ’s rendering of, and in many ways reckon­ing with, her parents; that the house, though transposed to the Hebrides from Cornwall for the novel, “really did” have just those sorts of gardens and just that view; that a broach “really was” lost by a houseguest and that, of course, there “really was” a lighthouse—hasn’t made that much difference to me. The book is revelatory whether you are able to discern the many stitches binding the novel’s cloth to that of Woolf ’s life or not. And yet at the same time that revelatory quality that speaks universally to anyone—the book’s embodiment of those least tangible yet most powerful entities of consciousness, time, and death—derives directly from Woolf ’s particular experience, and not merely the incidents—such as the deaths of her mother and sister and brother—but the nature of experience itself.
 
Toward the end of “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf, paraphras­ing Hamlet (“For he was likely, had he been put on,/to have proved most royal”), imagines her brother Thoby at sixty, an age he never reached: 

"He would have been more of a character than a success, I suppose; had he been put on. The knell of these words affects my memory of a time when in fact they were not heard at all. We had no kind of foreboding that he was to die when he was twenty-six and I was twenty-four. . . . Then I never saw him as I see him now, with all his promise ended." (Moments of Being, 140)

It has been from Woolf more than from any other writer that I’ve learned about perspective in fiction—not only who’s telling the story but where they’re located in time, relative to whatever they’re trying to convey. The effect of time—and its concomitants, notably death—on perspective, on one’s receipt and transmission of experience, interested Woolf deeply. Earlier in “A Sketch of the Past”—at the moment, apparently, when it graduated to the status of sketch—she writes,
2nd May [1939] . . . I write the date, because I think that I have discovered a possible form for these notes. That is, to make them include the present—at least enough of the present to serve as a platform to stand upon. It would be interesting to make the two people, I now, I then, come out in contrast. And further, this past is much affected by the present moment. (Moments of Being, 75)

As she says of Thoby further on in the essay, “We had no kind of foreboding that he was to die. . . . Then I never saw him as I see him now, with all his promise ended.” Woolf ’s “I now” can’t unsee Thoby’s death when she gazes back into the past. She can’t unhear the knell. Yet at the same time, just a few pages earlier, Woolf has done exactly this, returning to a moment that, by 1939, already has at least a double life, as an indelible memory of her childhood and as the penultimate moment of To the Lighthouse, when James Ramsay “steered them like a born sailor.” Fourteen years later, in “A Sketch of the Past”—and of course decades earlier, in the actual past—Woolf recalls,

". . . once Thoby was allowed to steer us home. 'Show them you can bring her in, boy,' father said, with his usual trust and pride in Thoby. And Thoby took the fisherman’s place; and steered; flushed and with his blue eyes very blue, and his mouth set, he sat there, bringing us round the point, into harbour, without letting the sail flag. One day the sea was full of pale jelly fish, like lamps, with streaming hair; but they stung you if you touched them. Sometimes lines would be handed us; baited by gobbets cut from fish; and the line thrilled in one’s fin­gers as the boat tossed and shot through the water; and then—how can I convey the excitement?—there was a little leaping tug; then another; up one hauled; up through the water at length came the white twisting fish; and was slapped on the floor." (Moments of Being, 134)

By the time the jellyfish float past, Woolf has forgotten all about Thoby’s future death. The knell is inaudible. And she has conveyed the excitement—reading these sentences I felt the water and wind, and I heard the fish slap on the floor of the boat. I’d forgotten about Thoby’s death also; I’d forgotten about my own dining room table, at which I sat on a too-hot June day more than one hundred years distant from child Virginia, her brother, and the white twisting fish. However great writing accomplishes it, by whatever its magical touch on whichever remarkable part of the brain, the seamless transit is achieved, through both space and time. “I now” transforms into “I then”—yet remains, somehow not interfering, a tactful ghost freighted with knowledge. Woolf knows she has doubled herself, has reclaimed a vision of Thoby without the forebod­ing of death—not only Thoby’s death but the deaths of her mother and sister when she and Thoby are still in their teens. All this makes her hesitate to write of him further: “I do not wish to bring Thoby out of the boat into my room.” Afloat there Woolf possesses both the undiminished past and its loss, the opposite conditions at once—just as, in its opening scene, To the Lighthouse enacts both non-being and being at once. Woolf, who so often thought in dichotomies—being/non-being, I now/I then—in fact consistently achieves simultaneity of these opposite things not merely in her work, as a represen­tation the reader might appreciate from a distance, but—for this reader, at least—in our visceral experience as readers. A syn­thesis of opposites, an immersion in this seemingly impossible condition—that’s my experience of Woolf ’s work, little as I can put it in adequate words.
 
The term perspective—with its narrow origin in looking, and its too-broad application to painting, geometry, lens-based technology, the overall relation of a person to their situation and that intangible sometimes called truth, and far more—is woefully inadequate to describing what Woolf achieves with words, but then again so are most words. You have to start somewhere. It was Woolf ’s handling of perspective—or view­point, or the place from which the story is told, to use more inadequate words—that first dazzled me the first time I read To the Lighthouse. “Yes, of course,” says Mrs. Ramsay, and we’re dropped into the moment, with no explanations. We occupy an entity again best compared to a ghost—it’s no single char­acter but any that it chooses in turn (James, his mother Mrs. Ramsay) or even several at once (the older children, who vanish “stealthily as stags”). Yet this narrating entity isn’t omniscient—it’s far too intimate with its subjects to be described by that remote and godlike adjective. It more resembles those “cer­tain airs, detached from the body of the wind,” which after everyone has gone to bed steal inside “ghostlily, as if they had feather-light fingers and the light persistency of feathers,” to tease the flap of wallpaper that has surrendered its adhesion to the wall; to mount the stairs, nose around the bedroom doors, and finally “bend over the bed itself.” Despite these being only “little airs,” another side of the narration now voices a gentle protest. This aspect resembles a mother—perhaps Mrs. Ramsay, whose creation this entire household world is. The little airs are told: “Here you can neither touch nor destroy.” Score one for constancy against the eternal foe, death. Turn deaf ears on the Swiss girl’s sobbing again. The little airs withdraw downstairs and outdoors—but not before spoiling the apples, fumbling the rose petals, blowing sand across the floor. Do your worst, we might tell them alongside that motherlike voice, smiling with indulgence. But hardly a page later, in an impassive parentheti­cal, we learn that Mrs. Ramsay has “rather suddenly” died. The death doesn’t even occur in the parentheses—only the backward glance at it.
 
The soothing maternal voice, affirming that here nothing can be touched nor destroyed; its antagonist, those crafty little airs, who win the victory for death after all: both are Woolf. And, immersed as fish in the nimble and changeable stream of her narration’s perspective, both are us, as Woolf engages us in the epic battle at the heart of this superficially quiet and civi­lized story, between the losses inflicted by death and our refusal of them.

...
Copyright © 2023 by Virginia Woolf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Author

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), one of the great twentieth-century authors, was at the center of the Bloomsbury Group and is a major figure in the history of literary feminism and modernism. She published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915, and between 1925 and 1931 produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, including Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism, and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and the passionate feminist essay A Room of One's Own (1929). View titles by Virginia Woolf

Additional formats

  • To the Lighthouse
    To the Lighthouse
    Virginia Woolf
    978-0-593-46887-6
    $8.99 US
    Ebook
    Vintage
    Jan 03, 2023
  • To the Lighthouse
    To the Lighthouse
    Introduction by Julia Briggs
    Virginia Woolf
    978-0-679-40537-5
    $24.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Nov 03, 1992
  • To the Lighthouse
    To the Lighthouse
    Virginia Woolf
    978-0-593-46887-6
    $8.99 US
    Ebook
    Vintage
    Jan 03, 2023
  • To the Lighthouse
    To the Lighthouse
    Introduction by Julia Briggs
    Virginia Woolf
    978-0-679-40537-5
    $24.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Nov 03, 1992

Other books in this series

  • The Bridge of San Luis Rey
    The Bridge of San Luis Rey
    Thornton Wilder
    978-0-593-47094-7
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 15, 2023
  • God's Trombones
    God's Trombones
    Seven Negro Sermons in Verse
    James Weldon Johnson
    978-0-593-46881-4
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 21, 2023
  • Boris Godunov, Little Tragedies, and Others
    Boris Godunov, Little Tragedies, and Others
    The Complete Plays
    Alexander Pushkin
    978-0-593-46756-5
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 17, 2023
  • Men Without Women
    Men Without Women
    Ernest Hemingway
    978-0-593-46884-5
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 03, 2023
  • The Sun Also Rises
    The Sun Also Rises
    Ernest Hemingway
    978-0-593-46634-6
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 25, 2022
  • Enough Rope
    Enough Rope
    A Book of Light Verse
    Dorothy Parker
    978-0-593-46635-3
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 25, 2022
  • Sister Carrie
    Sister Carrie
    Theodore Dreiser
    978-0-593-31488-3
    $9.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 28, 2021
  • The Art of War
    The Art of War
    Sun Tzu
    978-0-593-31466-1
    $9.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 21, 2021
  • Wuthering Heights
    Wuthering Heights
    Emily Bronte
    978-0-593-24403-6
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Dec 07, 2021
  • A Passage to India
    A Passage to India
    E. M. Forster
    978-0-593-24156-1
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Aug 10, 2021
  • An American Tragedy
    An American Tragedy
    Theodore Dreiser
    978-0-593-31332-9
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 25, 2021
  • The Waste Land and Other Poems
    The Waste Land and Other Poems
    T. S. Eliot
    978-0-593-31334-3
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 11, 2021
  • Fifty-Two Stories
    Fifty-Two Stories
    Anton Chekhov
    978-0-525-56238-2
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 19, 2021
  • Mrs. Dalloway
    Mrs. Dalloway
    Virginia Woolf
    978-0-593-31180-6
    $9.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 05, 2021
  • In Our Time
    In Our Time
    Ernest Hemingway
    978-0-593-31182-0
    $9.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 05, 2021
  • The Great Gatsby
    The Great Gatsby
    F. Scott Fitzgerald
    978-0-593-31184-4
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 05, 2021
  • Manhattan Transfer
    Manhattan Transfer
    John Dos Passos
    978-0-593-31205-6
    $9.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 05, 2021
  • The Prince
    The Prince
    Niccolo Machiavelli
    978-0-593-31086-1
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 13, 2020
  • The Wealth of Nations
    The Wealth of Nations
    Adam Smith
    978-0-593-31087-8
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 13, 2020
  • The Count of Monte Cristo
    The Count of Monte Cristo
    Alexandre Dumas
    978-0-593-08150-1
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 16, 2020
  • Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
    Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
    Jules Verne
    978-0-593-08151-8
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 16, 2020
  • Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I
    Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I
    Arthur Conan Doyle
    978-1-9848-9953-8
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 14, 2020
  • Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume II
    Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume II
    Arthur Conan Doyle
    978-1-9848-9954-5
    $14.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 14, 2020
  • A Passage to India
    A Passage to India
    E. M. Forster
    978-1-9848-9946-0
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 07, 2020
  • Little Women
    Little Women
    Louisa May Alcott
    978-1-9848-9885-2
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 12, 2019
  • Leaves of Grass
    Leaves of Grass
    Walt Whitman
    978-1-9848-9755-8
    $13.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 28, 2019
  • Whose Body?
    Whose Body?
    The First Lord Peter Wimsey Mystery
    Dorothy L. Sayers
    978-0-525-56511-6
    $9.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 30, 2019
  • New Hampshire
    New Hampshire
    Robert Frost
    978-0-525-56534-5
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 22, 2019
  • My Antonia
    My Antonia
    Introduction by Jane Smiley
    Willa Cather
    978-0-525-56286-3
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 06, 2018
  • Novels, Tales, Journeys
    Novels, Tales, Journeys
    The Complete Prose of Alexander Pushkin
    Alexander Pushkin
    978-0-307-94988-2
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 17, 2017
  • All Passion Spent
    All Passion Spent
    Vita Sackville-West
    978-0-525-43397-2
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 11, 2017
  • The Edwardians
    The Edwardians
    Vita Sackville-West
    978-0-525-43399-6
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 11, 2017
  • The Rights of Man
    The Rights of Man
    H. G. Wells
    978-0-525-43234-0
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 21, 2017
  • The Time Machine
    The Time Machine
    H. G. Wells
    978-0-525-43235-7
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 21, 2017
  • Poems
    Poems
    William Blake
    978-1-101-97314-1
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 13, 2016
  • The Mayor of Casterbridge
    The Mayor of Casterbridge
    Thomas Hardy
    978-0-345-80401-3
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 08, 2016
  • Notes from a Dead House
    Notes from a Dead House
    Fyodor Dostoevsky
    978-0-307-94987-5
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 22, 2016
  • In the Land of Pain
    In the Land of Pain
    Alphonse Daudet
    978-1-101-97086-7
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 22, 2016
  • Tess of the D'Urbervilles
    Tess of the D'Urbervilles
    Thomas Hardy
    978-0-345-80398-6
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 03, 2015
  • The Prince and the Pauper
    The Prince and the Pauper
    Mark Twain
    978-1-101-87310-6
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 03, 2015
  • Pudd'nhead Wilson
    Pudd'nhead Wilson
    Mark Twain
    978-1-101-87311-3
    $13.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 03, 2015
  • Walden & Civil Disobedience
    Walden & Civil Disobedience
    Henry David Thoreau
    978-0-8041-7156-4
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 26, 2014
  • The Scarlet Letter
    The Scarlet Letter
    A Romance
    Nathaniel Hawthorne
    978-0-8041-7157-1
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 26, 2014
  • The Red Badge of Courage
    The Red Badge of Courage
    Stephen Crane
    978-0-8041-6884-7
    $8.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 25, 2014
  • The Call of the Wild & White Fang
    The Call of the Wild & White Fang
    Jack London
    978-0-8041-6885-4
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 25, 2014
  • The Enchanted Wanderer
    The Enchanted Wanderer
    And Other Stories
    Nikolai Leskov
    978-0-307-38887-2
    $19.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 14, 2014
  • The Divine Comedy
    The Divine Comedy
    The Unabridged Classic
    Dante Alighieri
    978-0-8041-6912-7
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 14, 2013
  • The Captain's Daughter and Other Stories
    The Captain's Daughter and Other Stories
    Alexander Pushkin
    978-0-307-83197-2
    $10.99 US
    Ebook
    Vintage
    Feb 27, 2013
  • Anna Karenina (Movie Tie-in Edition)
    Anna Karenina (Movie Tie-in Edition)
    Official Tie-in Edition Including the screenplay by Tom Stoppard
    Leo Tolstoy
    978-0-345-80393-1
    $8.99 US
    Ebook
    Vintage
    Oct 16, 2012
  • The Death of Ivan Ilyich
    The Death of Ivan Ilyich
    Leo Tolstoy
    978-0-307-95133-5
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 02, 2012
  • Hadji Murat
    Hadji Murat
    Leo Tolstoy
    978-0-307-95134-2
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 02, 2012
  • The Captain's Daughter
    The Captain's Daughter
    And Other Stories
    Alexander Pushkin
    978-0-307-94965-3
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 07, 2012
  • The Age of Innocence
    The Age of Innocence
    Edith Wharton
    978-0-307-94951-6
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 05, 2012
  • The House of Mirth
    The House of Mirth
    Edith Wharton
    978-0-307-94952-3
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 05, 2012
  • Ethan Frome
    Ethan Frome
    Edith Wharton
    978-0-307-94953-0
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 05, 2012
  • The Custom of the Country
    The Custom of the Country
    Edith Wharton
    978-0-307-94954-7
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 05, 2012
  • Decameron
    Decameron
    Giovanni Boccaccio
    978-0-307-47217-5
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 14, 2012
  • Great Expectations
    Great Expectations
    Charles Dickens
    978-0-307-94716-1
    $7.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 10, 2012
  • David Copperfield
    David Copperfield
    Charles Dickens
    978-0-307-94717-8
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 10, 2012
  • Oliver Twist
    Oliver Twist
    Charles Dickens
    978-0-307-94718-5
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 10, 2012
  • Hard Times
    Hard Times
    Charles Dickens
    978-0-307-94720-8
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 10, 2012
  • Parade's End
    Parade's End
    Ford Madox Ford
    978-0-307-74420-3
    $21.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 03, 2012
  • Bleak House
    Bleak House
    Charles Dickens
    978-0-307-94719-2
    $13.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 03, 2012
  • A Christmas Carol
    A Christmas Carol
    And Other Christmas Books
    Charles Dickens
    978-0-307-94721-5
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 29, 2011
  • The Physiology of Taste
    The Physiology of Taste
    Or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy
    Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
    978-0-307-39037-0
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 04, 2011
  • The Fifth Queen
    The Fifth Queen
    Ford Madox Ford
    978-0-307-74491-3
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 04, 2011
  • The Picture of Dorian Gray
    The Picture of Dorian Gray
    Oscar Wilde
    978-0-307-74352-7
    $8.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 26, 2011
  • The Canterbury Tales
    The Canterbury Tales
    A Prose Version in Modern English
    Geoffrey Chaucer
    978-0-307-74353-4
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 12, 2011
  • Dracula
    Dracula
    Bram Stoker
    978-0-307-74330-5
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 14, 2011
  • Hawthorne's Short Stories
    Hawthorne's Short Stories
    Nathaniel Hawthorne
    978-0-307-74121-9
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 11, 2011
  • Sapphira and the Slave Girl
    Sapphira and the Slave Girl
    Willa Cather
    978-0-307-73965-0
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 07, 2010
  • Alexander's Bridge
    Alexander's Bridge
    Willa Cather
    978-0-307-73966-7
    $13.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 07, 2010
  • The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
    The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
    Leo Tolstoy
    978-0-307-38886-5
    $17.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 05, 2010
  • Bel Ami
    Bel Ami
    Guy De Maupassant
    978-0-307-74088-5
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 05, 2010
  • The Beautiful and Damned
    The Beautiful and Damned
    F. Scott Fitzgerald
    978-0-307-47635-7
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 10, 2010
  • Tales of the Jazz Age
    Tales of the Jazz Age
    Stories
    F. Scott Fitzgerald
    978-0-307-47637-1
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 10, 2010
  • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
    The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
    A Novel
    Mark Twain
    978-0-307-47555-8
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 06, 2010
  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    Mark Twain
    978-0-307-47556-5
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 06, 2010
  • The Original Frankenstein
    The Original Frankenstein
    Mary Shelley
    978-0-307-47442-1
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 08, 2009
  • This Side of Paradise
    This Side of Paradise
    F. Scott Fitzgerald
    978-0-307-47451-3
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 08, 2009
  • Flappers and Philosophers
    Flappers and Philosophers
    Stories
    F. Scott Fitzgerald
    978-0-307-47452-0
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 08, 2009
  • Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
    Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
    Edgar Allan Poe
    978-0-307-47477-3
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 01, 2009
  • Jane Eyre
    Jane Eyre
    Charlotte Bronte
    978-0-307-45519-2
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 07, 2009
  • Villette
    Villette
    Charlotte Bronte
    978-0-307-45556-7
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 07, 2009
  • War and Peace
    War and Peace
    Leo Tolstoy
    978-1-4000-7998-8
    $21.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 02, 2008
  • The Shadow-Line
    The Shadow-Line
    A Confession
    Joseph Conrad
    978-0-307-38653-3
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 09, 2007
  • Northanger Abbey
    Northanger Abbey
    Jane Austen
    978-0-307-38683-0
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 04, 2007
  • Emma
    Emma
    Jane Austen
    978-0-307-38684-7
    $9.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 04, 2007
  • Persuasion
    Persuasion
    Jane Austen
    978-0-307-38685-4
    $7.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 04, 2007
  • Pride and Prejudice
    Pride and Prejudice
    Jane Austen
    978-0-307-38686-1
    $7.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 04, 2007
  • The Bridge of San Luis Rey
    The Bridge of San Luis Rey
    Thornton Wilder
    978-0-593-47094-7
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 15, 2023
  • God's Trombones
    God's Trombones
    Seven Negro Sermons in Verse
    James Weldon Johnson
    978-0-593-46881-4
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 21, 2023
  • Boris Godunov, Little Tragedies, and Others
    Boris Godunov, Little Tragedies, and Others
    The Complete Plays
    Alexander Pushkin
    978-0-593-46756-5
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 17, 2023
  • Men Without Women
    Men Without Women
    Ernest Hemingway
    978-0-593-46884-5
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 03, 2023
  • The Sun Also Rises
    The Sun Also Rises
    Ernest Hemingway
    978-0-593-46634-6
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 25, 2022
  • Enough Rope
    Enough Rope
    A Book of Light Verse
    Dorothy Parker
    978-0-593-46635-3
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 25, 2022
  • Sister Carrie
    Sister Carrie
    Theodore Dreiser
    978-0-593-31488-3
    $9.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 28, 2021
  • The Art of War
    The Art of War
    Sun Tzu
    978-0-593-31466-1
    $9.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 21, 2021
  • Wuthering Heights
    Wuthering Heights
    Emily Bronte
    978-0-593-24403-6
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Dec 07, 2021
  • A Passage to India
    A Passage to India
    E. M. Forster
    978-0-593-24156-1
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Aug 10, 2021
  • An American Tragedy
    An American Tragedy
    Theodore Dreiser
    978-0-593-31332-9
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 25, 2021
  • The Waste Land and Other Poems
    The Waste Land and Other Poems
    T. S. Eliot
    978-0-593-31334-3
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 11, 2021
  • Fifty-Two Stories
    Fifty-Two Stories
    Anton Chekhov
    978-0-525-56238-2
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 19, 2021
  • Mrs. Dalloway
    Mrs. Dalloway
    Virginia Woolf
    978-0-593-31180-6
    $9.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 05, 2021
  • In Our Time
    In Our Time
    Ernest Hemingway
    978-0-593-31182-0
    $9.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 05, 2021
  • The Great Gatsby
    The Great Gatsby
    F. Scott Fitzgerald
    978-0-593-31184-4
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 05, 2021
  • Manhattan Transfer
    Manhattan Transfer
    John Dos Passos
    978-0-593-31205-6
    $9.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 05, 2021
  • The Prince
    The Prince
    Niccolo Machiavelli
    978-0-593-31086-1
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 13, 2020
  • The Wealth of Nations
    The Wealth of Nations
    Adam Smith
    978-0-593-31087-8
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 13, 2020
  • The Count of Monte Cristo
    The Count of Monte Cristo
    Alexandre Dumas
    978-0-593-08150-1
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 16, 2020
  • Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
    Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
    Jules Verne
    978-0-593-08151-8
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 16, 2020
  • Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I
    Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I
    Arthur Conan Doyle
    978-1-9848-9953-8
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 14, 2020
  • Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume II
    Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume II
    Arthur Conan Doyle
    978-1-9848-9954-5
    $14.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 14, 2020
  • A Passage to India
    A Passage to India
    E. M. Forster
    978-1-9848-9946-0
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 07, 2020
  • Little Women
    Little Women
    Louisa May Alcott
    978-1-9848-9885-2
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 12, 2019
  • Leaves of Grass
    Leaves of Grass
    Walt Whitman
    978-1-9848-9755-8
    $13.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 28, 2019
  • Whose Body?
    Whose Body?
    The First Lord Peter Wimsey Mystery
    Dorothy L. Sayers
    978-0-525-56511-6
    $9.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 30, 2019
  • New Hampshire
    New Hampshire
    Robert Frost
    978-0-525-56534-5
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 22, 2019
  • My Antonia
    My Antonia
    Introduction by Jane Smiley
    Willa Cather
    978-0-525-56286-3
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 06, 2018
  • Novels, Tales, Journeys
    Novels, Tales, Journeys
    The Complete Prose of Alexander Pushkin
    Alexander Pushkin
    978-0-307-94988-2
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 17, 2017
  • All Passion Spent
    All Passion Spent
    Vita Sackville-West
    978-0-525-43397-2
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 11, 2017
  • The Edwardians
    The Edwardians
    Vita Sackville-West
    978-0-525-43399-6
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 11, 2017
  • The Rights of Man
    The Rights of Man
    H. G. Wells
    978-0-525-43234-0
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 21, 2017
  • The Time Machine
    The Time Machine
    H. G. Wells
    978-0-525-43235-7
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 21, 2017
  • Poems
    Poems
    William Blake
    978-1-101-97314-1
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 13, 2016
  • The Mayor of Casterbridge
    The Mayor of Casterbridge
    Thomas Hardy
    978-0-345-80401-3
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 08, 2016
  • Notes from a Dead House
    Notes from a Dead House
    Fyodor Dostoevsky
    978-0-307-94987-5
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 22, 2016
  • In the Land of Pain
    In the Land of Pain
    Alphonse Daudet
    978-1-101-97086-7
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 22, 2016
  • Tess of the D'Urbervilles
    Tess of the D'Urbervilles
    Thomas Hardy
    978-0-345-80398-6
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 03, 2015
  • The Prince and the Pauper
    The Prince and the Pauper
    Mark Twain
    978-1-101-87310-6
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 03, 2015
  • Pudd'nhead Wilson
    Pudd'nhead Wilson
    Mark Twain
    978-1-101-87311-3
    $13.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 03, 2015
  • Walden & Civil Disobedience
    Walden & Civil Disobedience
    Henry David Thoreau
    978-0-8041-7156-4
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 26, 2014
  • The Scarlet Letter
    The Scarlet Letter
    A Romance
    Nathaniel Hawthorne
    978-0-8041-7157-1
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 26, 2014
  • The Red Badge of Courage
    The Red Badge of Courage
    Stephen Crane
    978-0-8041-6884-7
    $8.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 25, 2014
  • The Call of the Wild & White Fang
    The Call of the Wild & White Fang
    Jack London
    978-0-8041-6885-4
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 25, 2014
  • The Enchanted Wanderer
    The Enchanted Wanderer
    And Other Stories
    Nikolai Leskov
    978-0-307-38887-2
    $19.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 14, 2014
  • The Divine Comedy
    The Divine Comedy
    The Unabridged Classic
    Dante Alighieri
    978-0-8041-6912-7
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 14, 2013
  • The Captain's Daughter and Other Stories
    The Captain's Daughter and Other Stories
    Alexander Pushkin
    978-0-307-83197-2
    $10.99 US
    Ebook
    Vintage
    Feb 27, 2013
  • Anna Karenina (Movie Tie-in Edition)
    Anna Karenina (Movie Tie-in Edition)
    Official Tie-in Edition Including the screenplay by Tom Stoppard
    Leo Tolstoy
    978-0-345-80393-1
    $8.99 US
    Ebook
    Vintage
    Oct 16, 2012
  • The Death of Ivan Ilyich
    The Death of Ivan Ilyich
    Leo Tolstoy
    978-0-307-95133-5
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 02, 2012
  • Hadji Murat
    Hadji Murat
    Leo Tolstoy
    978-0-307-95134-2
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 02, 2012
  • The Captain's Daughter
    The Captain's Daughter
    And Other Stories
    Alexander Pushkin
    978-0-307-94965-3
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 07, 2012
  • The Age of Innocence
    The Age of Innocence
    Edith Wharton
    978-0-307-94951-6
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 05, 2012
  • The House of Mirth
    The House of Mirth
    Edith Wharton
    978-0-307-94952-3
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 05, 2012
  • Ethan Frome
    Ethan Frome
    Edith Wharton
    978-0-307-94953-0
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 05, 2012
  • The Custom of the Country
    The Custom of the Country
    Edith Wharton
    978-0-307-94954-7
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 05, 2012
  • Decameron
    Decameron
    Giovanni Boccaccio
    978-0-307-47217-5
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 14, 2012
  • Great Expectations
    Great Expectations
    Charles Dickens
    978-0-307-94716-1
    $7.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 10, 2012
  • David Copperfield
    David Copperfield
    Charles Dickens
    978-0-307-94717-8
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 10, 2012
  • Oliver Twist
    Oliver Twist
    Charles Dickens
    978-0-307-94718-5
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 10, 2012
  • Hard Times
    Hard Times
    Charles Dickens
    978-0-307-94720-8
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 10, 2012
  • Parade's End
    Parade's End
    Ford Madox Ford
    978-0-307-74420-3
    $21.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 03, 2012
  • Bleak House
    Bleak House
    Charles Dickens
    978-0-307-94719-2
    $13.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 03, 2012
  • A Christmas Carol
    A Christmas Carol
    And Other Christmas Books
    Charles Dickens
    978-0-307-94721-5
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 29, 2011
  • The Physiology of Taste
    The Physiology of Taste
    Or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy
    Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
    978-0-307-39037-0
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 04, 2011
  • The Fifth Queen
    The Fifth Queen
    Ford Madox Ford
    978-0-307-74491-3
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 04, 2011
  • The Picture of Dorian Gray
    The Picture of Dorian Gray
    Oscar Wilde
    978-0-307-74352-7
    $8.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 26, 2011
  • The Canterbury Tales
    The Canterbury Tales
    A Prose Version in Modern English
    Geoffrey Chaucer
    978-0-307-74353-4
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 12, 2011
  • Dracula
    Dracula
    Bram Stoker
    978-0-307-74330-5
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 14, 2011
  • Hawthorne's Short Stories
    Hawthorne's Short Stories
    Nathaniel Hawthorne
    978-0-307-74121-9
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 11, 2011
  • Sapphira and the Slave Girl
    Sapphira and the Slave Girl
    Willa Cather
    978-0-307-73965-0
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 07, 2010
  • Alexander's Bridge
    Alexander's Bridge
    Willa Cather
    978-0-307-73966-7
    $13.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 07, 2010
  • The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
    The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
    Leo Tolstoy
    978-0-307-38886-5
    $17.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 05, 2010
  • Bel Ami
    Bel Ami
    Guy De Maupassant
    978-0-307-74088-5
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 05, 2010
  • The Beautiful and Damned
    The Beautiful and Damned
    F. Scott Fitzgerald
    978-0-307-47635-7
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 10, 2010
  • Tales of the Jazz Age
    Tales of the Jazz Age
    Stories
    F. Scott Fitzgerald
    978-0-307-47637-1
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 10, 2010
  • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
    The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
    A Novel
    Mark Twain
    978-0-307-47555-8
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 06, 2010
  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    Mark Twain
    978-0-307-47556-5
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 06, 2010
  • The Original Frankenstein
    The Original Frankenstein
    Mary Shelley
    978-0-307-47442-1
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 08, 2009
  • This Side of Paradise
    This Side of Paradise
    F. Scott Fitzgerald
    978-0-307-47451-3
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 08, 2009
  • Flappers and Philosophers
    Flappers and Philosophers
    Stories
    F. Scott Fitzgerald
    978-0-307-47452-0
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 08, 2009
  • Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
    Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
    Edgar Allan Poe
    978-0-307-47477-3
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 01, 2009
  • Jane Eyre
    Jane Eyre
    Charlotte Bronte
    978-0-307-45519-2
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 07, 2009
  • Villette
    Villette
    Charlotte Bronte
    978-0-307-45556-7
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 07, 2009
  • War and Peace
    War and Peace
    Leo Tolstoy
    978-1-4000-7998-8
    $21.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 02, 2008
  • The Shadow-Line
    The Shadow-Line
    A Confession
    Joseph Conrad
    978-0-307-38653-3
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 09, 2007
  • Northanger Abbey
    Northanger Abbey
    Jane Austen
    978-0-307-38683-0
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 04, 2007
  • Emma
    Emma
    Jane Austen
    978-0-307-38684-7
    $9.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 04, 2007
  • Persuasion
    Persuasion
    Jane Austen
    978-0-307-38685-4
    $7.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 04, 2007
  • Pride and Prejudice
    Pride and Prejudice
    Jane Austen
    978-0-307-38686-1
    $7.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 04, 2007

Other Books by this Author

  • To the Lighthouse
    To the Lighthouse
    Virginia Woolf
    978-0-14-313757-3
    $28.00 US
    Hardcover
    Penguin Classics
    May 02, 2023
  • The Voyage Out
    The Voyage Out
    Virginia Woolf
    978-0-593-24262-9
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Jul 06, 2021
  • Mrs. Dalloway
    Mrs. Dalloway
    (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
    Virginia Woolf
    978-0-14-313613-2
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Classics
    Jan 05, 2021
  • A Truth Universally Acknowledged
    A Truth Universally Acknowledged
    33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen
    Anna Quindlen, Virginia Woolf, C. S. Lewis
    978-0-8129-8001-1
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Random House Trade Paperbacks
    Nov 09, 2010
  • Jacob's Room
    Jacob's Room
    Virginia Woolf
    978-1-101-16076-3
    $4.99 US
    Ebook
    Signet
    Feb 07, 2006
  • Jacob's Room
    Jacob's Room
    Virginia Woolf
    978-0-14-018570-6
    $13.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Classics
    Feb 01, 1998
  • Night and Day
    Night and Day
    Virginia Woolf
    978-0-14-018568-3
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Classics
    Jan 01, 1996
  • Mrs. Dalloway
    Mrs. Dalloway
    Introduction by Nadia Fusini
    Virginia Woolf
    978-0-679-42042-2
    $25.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Feb 23, 1993
  • The Voyage Out
    The Voyage Out
    Virginia Woolf
    978-0-14-018563-8
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Classics
    Aug 04, 1992
  • To the Lighthouse
    To the Lighthouse
    Virginia Woolf
    978-0-14-313757-3
    $28.00 US
    Hardcover
    Penguin Classics
    May 02, 2023
  • The Voyage Out
    The Voyage Out
    Virginia Woolf
    978-0-593-24262-9
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Jul 06, 2021
  • Mrs. Dalloway
    Mrs. Dalloway
    (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
    Virginia Woolf
    978-0-14-313613-2
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Classics
    Jan 05, 2021
  • A Truth Universally Acknowledged
    A Truth Universally Acknowledged
    33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen
    Anna Quindlen, Virginia Woolf, C. S. Lewis
    978-0-8129-8001-1
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Random House Trade Paperbacks
    Nov 09, 2010
  • Jacob's Room
    Jacob's Room
    Virginia Woolf
    978-1-101-16076-3
    $4.99 US
    Ebook
    Signet
    Feb 07, 2006
  • Jacob's Room
    Jacob's Room
    Virginia Woolf
    978-0-14-018570-6
    $13.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Classics
    Feb 01, 1998
  • Night and Day
    Night and Day
    Virginia Woolf
    978-0-14-018568-3
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Classics
    Jan 01, 1996
  • Mrs. Dalloway
    Mrs. Dalloway
    Introduction by Nadia Fusini
    Virginia Woolf
    978-0-679-42042-2
    $25.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Feb 23, 1993
  • The Voyage Out
    The Voyage Out
    Virginia Woolf
    978-0-14-018563-8
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Classics
    Aug 04, 1992
 Keep in touch!
Sign up for news from Penguin Random House Higher Education.
Subscribe
Connect with Us!

Get the latest news on all things Higher Education. Learn about our books, authors, teacher events, and more!

Friend us on Facebook!

Follow us on Twitter!

Subscribe on YouTube!

Our mission is to foster a universal passion for reading by partnering with authors to help create stories and communicate ideas that inform, entertain, and inspire.

Privacy Policy   |   Terms of Use

© 2023 Penguin Random House

About Higher Education

  • About Us
  • Digital Solutions
  • FAQs
  • Conferences
  • Submit a desk/exam request
  • Contact your Higher Education Account Manager
  • Browse & subscribe to our newsletters

Penguin Random House Education

  • Elementary
  • Secondary
  • Higher Ed
  • Common Reads

Penguin Random House

  • penguinrandomhouse.com
  • global.penguinrandomhouse.com
  • Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau

About Higher Education

  • About Us
  • Digital Solutions
  • FAQs
  • Conferences

Penguin Random House Education

  • Elementary
  • Secondary
  • Higher Ed
  • Common Reads
  • Submit a desk/exam request
  • Contact your Higher Education Account Manager
  • Browse & subscribe to our newsletters

Penguin Random House

  • penguinrandomhouse.com
  • global.penguinrandomhouse.com
  • Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau

Privacy Policy   |   Terms of Use

© 2023 Penguin Random House
Back to Top

/