English · Advanced
Read To the Lighthouse in Englishwith every sentence explained
Virginia Woolf · 1927
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About the book
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf was first published in 1927. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction. It runs to about 69,300 words.
A summer house by the sea. A little boy's wish. A trip that keeps not happening.
On the Isle of Skye, the Ramsay family and their guests spend a long summer in a shabby, crowded holiday house. Six-year-old James wants just one thing: to sail out to the lighthouse tomorrow. His mother promises they will go if the weather is fine. His father, a brilliant and difficult philosopher, announces flatly that it won't be.
Around that tiny disappointment, a whole world opens up. Mrs Ramsay knits and matchmakes and holds everyone together. Lily Briscoe, a young painter, struggles to finish a picture no one takes seriously. And the lighthouse waits across the bay, its beam sweeping the dark.
A landmark of modernist fiction and a fixture on TIME's 100 best novels, To the Lighthouse turns ordinary family life into something luminous, about time, memory and the people we love.
- Author
- Virginia Woolf
- First published
- 1927
- Language
- English
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction
- Length
- About 69,300 words
How it opens
“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.
Reading To the Lighthouse in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate English book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
