This novel is an extraordinarily poignant evocation of a lost happiness that lives on in the memory. For years now the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever.

In this, her most autobiographical novel, Virginia Woolf captures the intensity of childhood longing and delight, and the shifting complexity of adult relationships. From an acute awareness of transcience, she creates an enduring work of art.

This novel is an extraordinarily poignant evocation of a lost happiness that lives on in the memory. For years now, the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever. In this, her most autobiographical novel, Virginia Woolf captures the intensity of childhood longing and delight, and the shifting complexity of adult relationships. From an acute awareness of transcience, she creates an enduring work of art.

With introductions by Eavan Boland and Maud Ellmann

Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography. After his death in 1904 Virginia and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, moved to Bloomsbury and became the centre of ?The Bloomsbury Group?. This informal collective of artists and writers which included Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture.
In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social reformer. Three years later, her first novel The Voyage Out was published, followed by Night and Day (1919) and Jacob?s Room (1922). These first novels show the development of Virginia Woolf?s distinctive and innovative narrative style. It was during this time that she and Leonard Woolf founded The Hogarth Press with the publication of the co-authored Two Stories in 1917, hand-printed in the dining room of their house in Surrey.
Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and A Room of One?s Own (1929) a passionate feminist essay. This intense creative productivity was often matched by periods of mental illness, from which she had suffered since her mother?s death in 1895. On 28 March 1941, a few months before the publication of her final novel, Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf committed suicide.

?Yes, of course, if it?s fine tomorrow,? said Mrs Ramsay. ?But you?ll have to be up with the lark,? she added.

To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled the expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night?s darkness and a day?s sail, within touch. Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallize and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator as his mother spoke with heavenly bliss. It was fringed with joy. The wheelbarrow, the lawn-mower, the sound of poplar trees, leaves whitening before rain, rooks cawing, brooms knocking, dresses rustling ? all these were so coloured and distinguished in his mind that had already his private code, his secret language, though he appeared the image of stark and uncompromising severity, with his high forehead and his fierce blue eyes, impeccably candid and pure, frowning slightly at the sight of human frailty, so that his mother, watching him guide scissors neatly round the refrigerator, imagined him all red and ermine on the Bench or directing a stern and momentous enterprise in some crisis of public affairs.

?But,? said his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window, ?it won?t be fine.?

Had there been an axe handy, or a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father?s breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it. Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr. Ramsay excited in his children?s breasts by his mere presence; standing, as now, lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one, grinning sarcastically, not only with the pleasure of disillusioning his son and casting ridicule upon his wife, who was ten thousand times better in every way than he was (James thought), but also with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgement. What he said was true. It was always true. He was incapable of untruth; never tampered with a fact; never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all his own children, who, sprung from his loins, should be aware from childhood that life is difficult; facts uncompromising; and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail barks founder in darkness (here Mr. Ramsay would straighten his back and narrow his little blue eyes upon the horizon), one that needs, above all, courage, truth, and the power to endure.

2008-05-01 An extraordinary edition of a classic

Woolf's mastery of the stream of consciousness technique certainly is something to be admired, but that being said, I still find the novel rather boring and written (deliberately, I believe) in a way not particularly easy to read. Just like this sentence, actually.

I really wanted to write this review, however, to praise this particular edition (Oxforld World's Classics) for including the most ingenious notes I have ever seen. They are obviously very painstakingly researched, incredibly detailed and astonishingly pointless. When a character looks at a picture of Vesuvius exploding, an asterisk encourages the reader to read the appropriate note which is a comprehensive list of all Vesuvius eruptions from 1850 to 1920 (pointing out the most likely one). Upon Mr Ramsey being likened to a walrus, the note helpfully identifies (by name!) a walrus Virginia Woolf could have seen in the London Zoo, complete with his dates of birth and death. Sometimes the note directs you to a relevant passage elsewhere in the book; in one case, this relevant passage (quoted in full in the note, by the way) is as far as three lines away. And the list could go on and on.

Either the notes are an elaborate joke or a clear proof that Oxford professors are rather curious people. Either way, they are hilarious. I never thought I would laugh out loud reading a Woolf novel.