The text of this edition of To the Lighthouse is that of the English page proofs corrected by Virginia Woolf for the first American edition. This text comes closer than any previously published to presenting the novel as Woolf intended it. All the corrections she made on the page proofs are reproduced, and the punctuation of the proofs is retained. A list of variants is included in which significant passages cancelled or revised on the proofs, along with all substantive variants in the first English and American editions are recorded.

Among the many interesting passages that Woolf revised or deleted on the proofs is a long and previously unpublished account, cast as a memory of his son James, of Mr. Ramsay Lecturing in London while his children sit dutifully in the Audience. Virginia Woolf's corrected typescript of part two, 'Time Passes', prepared b Woolf for Charles Mauron, whose translation 'Le Temps Passe' appeared in the French periodical Commerce in 1926, is also included.

In the introduction the editor discusses the genesis of To the Lighthouse, its autobiographical and biographical elements, and the history of its critical reception.

First published in 1927, To the Lighthouse is Virginia Woolf's fifth novel and the one in which she became, as she said, 'mistress of her medium'. A story of family life, it is based on vivid memories of her childhood. Although she set the story on the Isle of Skye in the Hebrides, the house and landscape she was writing about were Talland House in St Ives, Cornwall, where her family spend their summers until her mother's death in 1895, when Virginia Woolf was thirteen. Woolf's father, Sir Leslie Stephen - philosopher, critic, and editor - served as a model for Mr Ramsay, While Mrs Ramsay was drawn from Woolf's memories of her mother, Julia Stephen, an intelligent and beautiful woman long remembered in St Ives for her good works there. The complex fusion of autobiography, biography, and fiction resulted in a work which has become a classic of modern literature.