To the Lighthouse

First edition. Crown 8vo. 320pp. Publisher's blue cloth, lettered in gilt to spine; top edge (faintly) stained yellow. 1/3,000 copies printed. Published on 3 May 1927 at 7s. 6d. A second impression of 1,000 copies followed in June 1927 and a third of 1,500 in May 1928.

Hinges starting in a couple of places, cloth rubbed and a little stained, extremities slightly frayed, spine somewhat darkened, darkish spot to fore-edge seeping in to margins in some pages, bookplate of Frances A. Hand on front pastedown. Contents overall clean and tight, sans inscriptions, lacking the scarce Vanessa Bell designed dustwrapper.

Author's fifth novel. No. 15 on the Modern Library's 1998 list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Chosen by TIME magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present. A mosaic of thoughts, contemplation and perception and a landmark of high modernism, loosely modelled on Woolf's own parents and her memories of their family holidays at St. Ives, Cornwall. On completing it, Woolf thought she had exorcised the ghosts of her illustrious progenitors, Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Stephen, and described To the Lighthouse as 'easily the best of my books,' while her husband Leonard fancied it a "'masterpiece'...entirely new 'a psychological poem'". The book outsold all her previous novels, the royalties enabling the couple to splurge on a new car. Connolly, The Modern Movement #54: "[T]he sunniest of her books...written at the height of her luminous Impressionist vision."

[The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. III: 1925–1930; Kirkpatrick A10a; Woolmer 154]