Description: "This Norton Critical Edition presents Virginia Woolf's acclaimed part-autobiographical novel To the Lighthouse. The text of Woolf's 1927 U.S. edition (fully annotated with explanatory footnotes) consists of three parts that chronicle the seemingly ordinary lives of the Ramsay family, as they host various acquaintances, most notably, an ambitious but struggling painter named Lily Briscoe, at the family's summer residence. The novel takes place over the course of many years-in the time leading up to, during, and after World War I-but is primarily concerned with the artist's world and the ontology of reality. Scholars have flocked to Woolf's To the Lighthouse because of its multifaceted and multigenre qualities, which allow the text to be analyzed within historical, gendered, political, biographical, and other contexts. The "Contexts" section introduces readers to primary background sources for these debates and includes some of Woolf's own essays, autobiographical writings, and literary influences. The "Criticism" section features contemporary reviews of the novel as well as modern research. A chronology and selected bibliography conclude this Norton Critical Edition"--
Brief description: Margaret Homans is a professor of English and women's, gender, and sexuality studies at Yale University. She is the author of Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing; Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837?1876; Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, and Emily Dickinson; The Imprint of Another Life: Adoption Narratives and Human Possibility; and Virginia Woolf: A Collection of Critical Essays.