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To the Lighthouse
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 7 hrs and 38 mins
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Publisher's summary
To the Lighthouse is a landmark work of English fiction. Virginia Woolf explores perception and meaning in some of the most beautiful prose ever written, minutely detailing the characters thoughts and impressions. This unabridged version is read by Juliet Stevenson.
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It was fun…however
- By Suzie Q in Texas on 05-10-23
By: L.M. Montgomery
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Ethan Frome
- By: Edith Wharton
- Narrated by: Scott Brick
- Length: 3 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Ethan Frome, a poor, downtrodden New England farmer, is trapped in a loveless marriage to his invalid wife, Zeena.When Zeena's young cousin Mattie arrives to help care for her, Ethan is immediately taken by Mattie's warm, vivacious personality. They fall desperately in love as he realizes how much is missing from his life and marriage.
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Slow is smooth and smooth is Fast until it isn't
- By Darwin8u on 05-29-13
By: Edith Wharton
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The Young Clementina
- By: D. E. Stevenson
- Narrated by: Karen Cass
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
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Charlotte Dean enjoys nothing more than the solitude of her London flat and the monotonous days of her work at a travel bookshop. But when her younger sister unceremoniously bursts into her quiet life one afternoon, Charlotte's world turns topsy-turvy. Beloved author D. E. Stevenson captures the intricacies of post-World War I England with a light, comic touch that perfectly embodies the spirit of the time. Alternatively heartbreaking and witty, The Young Clementina is a touching tale of love, loss and redemption through friendship.
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Miss Dean's Dilemma
- By Jerri C on 05-02-18
By: D. E. Stevenson
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The Jewel of Seven Stars
- By: Bram Stoker
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 8 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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The warning was inscribed on the entrance of the hidden tomb, forgotten for millennia in the sands of mystic Egypt. Then the archaeologists and grave robbers came in search of the fabled Jewel of Seven Stars, which they found clutched in the hand of the mummy. Few heeded the ancient warning, until all who came in contact with the Jewel began to die in a mysterious and violent way, with the marks of a strangler around their neck.
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Mother of all Mummy-Stories
- By Dorothea on 03-15-08
By: Bram Stoker
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The Blue Guitar
- A Novel
- By: John Banville
- Narrated by: Gerry O'Brien
- Length: 9 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea and Ancient Light, a new novel - at once trenchant, witty, and shattering - about the intricacies of artistic creation and theft, and about the ways in which we learn to possess one another and to hold on to ourselves. Equally self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating, our narrator, Oliver Otway Orme, is a painter of some renown and a petty thief who does not steal for profit and has never before been caught.
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Masterful
- By Amazon customer on 11-25-15
By: John Banville
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The Forsyte Chronicles, Vol. 2
- A Modern Comedy
- By: John Galsworthy
- Narrated by: David Timson
- Length: 34 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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John Galsworthy's magnificent trilogy of power and passion chronicles the wealthy Forsyte family. The complete Chronicles are divided into three volumes, containing nine books and four interludes in total. Volume 2, A Modern Comedy, focuses on Soames's vivacious daughter, Fleur. Soames tries constantly to protect her but is baffled by the carefree attitudes in post-war London. Fleur and her husband Michael Mont host society gatherings, but her previous affair with Jon Forsyte leaves embers of a passion that are ready to ignite - with dreadful consequences.
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Very worthwhile
- By Jonathan Kalkstein on 09-27-22
By: John Galsworthy
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Oblomov
- By: Ivan Goncharov
- Narrated by: Leighton Pugh
- Length: 20 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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A member of the landed gentry, with a seemingly guaranteed income from his estate in the country, Oblomov lives in Petersburg, uninterested in the business that provides his living and barely aware that the revenue is diminishing. Not that he leads a dissolute life of extravagance, balls and entertainment. Instead he is a dreamer, a sybarite, content above all to spend most of the day supine, in bed. The novel opens with Oblomov thus ensconced, attended only by his dirty, grumbling, indolent servant Zahar, who has looked after him since childhood, catering to his every need.
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funny and smart
- By Bennett Weiss on 07-29-20
By: Ivan Goncharov
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To the Lighthouse is Virginia Woolf’s arresting analysis of domestic family life, centering on the Ramseys and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland in the early 1900s. Nicole Kidman (Moulin Rouge, Eyes Wide Shut), who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Woolf in the film adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
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A book that will challenge you to think.
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Not an easy read but worth it
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It is a June day in London in 1923, and the lovely Clarissa Dalloway is having a party. Whom will she see? Her friend Peter, back from India, who has never really stopped loving her? What about Sally, with whom Clarissa had her life’s happiest moment? Meanwhile, the shell-shocked Septimus Smith is struggling with his life on the same London day.
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One Tough Read Perfectly Delivered
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The serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, and their children and assorted guests are on holiday on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Woolf constructs a remarkable, moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life and the conflict between men and women.
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Beautiful story
- By Boknows on 07-10-23
By: Virginia Woolf
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To the Lighthouse
- By: Virginia Woolf
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To the Lighthouse tells of one summer spent by the Ramsay family and their friends in their holiday home in Scotland. Offshore stands the lighthouse, remote, inaccessbile, an eternal presence in a changing wolrd. A projected visit to the lighthouse forms the heart of this extraordinary novel which, through the minds of the various characters, explores the nature of time, memory, transience and eternity.
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Better heard than read!
- By Norman Wendth on 06-12-04
By: Virginia Woolf
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To the Lighthouse
- By: Virginia Woolfe
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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An English saga centered around one family at their summer house, the goings on of one and all, written elegantly and insightfully with each word and phrase wonderful for the listener.
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Do not recommend this narration
- By BookGeek88 on 02-08-24
By: Virginia Woolfe
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To the Lighthouse
- By: Virginia Woolf
- Narrated by: Nicole Kidman
- Length: 6 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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To the Lighthouse is Virginia Woolf’s arresting analysis of domestic family life, centering on the Ramseys and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland in the early 1900s. Nicole Kidman (Moulin Rouge, Eyes Wide Shut), who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Woolf in the film adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
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A book that will challenge you to think.
- By Kelly on 04-23-17
By: Virginia Woolf
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The Waves
- By: Virginia Woolf
- Narrated by: Frances Jeater
- Length: 8 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Waves traces the lives of six friends from childhood to old age. It was written when Virginia Woolf was at the height of her experimental powers, and she allows each character to tell their own story, through powerful, poetic monologues. By listening to these voices struggling to impose order and meaning on their lives, we are drawn into a literary journey that stunningly reproduces the complex, confusing and contradictory nature of human experience. It is read with affection and skill by Frances Jeater.
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Not an easy read but worth it
- By Lena on 03-26-16
By: Virginia Woolf
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Mrs. Dalloway
- By: Virginia Woolf
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- Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
It is a June day in London in 1923, and the lovely Clarissa Dalloway is having a party. Whom will she see? Her friend Peter, back from India, who has never really stopped loving her? What about Sally, with whom Clarissa had her life’s happiest moment? Meanwhile, the shell-shocked Septimus Smith is struggling with his life on the same London day.
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One Tough Read Perfectly Delivered
- By Chris on 06-11-12
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The serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, and their children and assorted guests are on holiday on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Woolf constructs a remarkable, moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life and the conflict between men and women.
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Beautiful story
- By Boknows on 07-10-23
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To the Lighthouse
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To the Lighthouse tells of one summer spent by the Ramsay family and their friends in their holiday home in Scotland. Offshore stands the lighthouse, remote, inaccessbile, an eternal presence in a changing wolrd. A projected visit to the lighthouse forms the heart of this extraordinary novel which, through the minds of the various characters, explores the nature of time, memory, transience and eternity.
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Better heard than read!
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Overall
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An English saga centered around one family at their summer house, the goings on of one and all, written elegantly and insightfully with each word and phrase wonderful for the listener.
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Do not recommend this narration
- By BookGeek88 on 02-08-24
By: Virginia Woolfe
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To the Lighthouse
- By: Virginia Woolf
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Overall
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Performance
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The Ramsay family is on holiday on the Isle of Sky in Scotland. As the family and their guests decide on whether or not to visit a nearby lighthouse, Virginia Woolf spins a tale that focuses on the intricate web of family life and the conflict that occurs between genders.
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Brilliant!
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By: Virginia Woolf
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To the Lighthouse
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To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionist depiction of a family holiday, and a meditation on a marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny, and bitterness. Its use of stream of consciousness, reminiscence, and shifting perspectives gives the novel an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of Victorian and Edwardian literary values.
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Pretty solid all around
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To the Lighthouse (AmazonClassics Edition)
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On the glistening surface of Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking novel is the Ramsay family, a seemingly stable group of characters, but a group that is ultimately subject to the same alterations and losses that come with the passing of time. Set at the Ramsays’ summerhouse over two September days, ten years apart, Woolf’s influential landmark of twentieth-century literature explores the hopes, frustrations, and small moments of grace and change that permeate everyday life.
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A Favorite
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A Room of One's Own, based on a lecture given at Girton College Cambridge, is one of the great feminist polemics. Woolf's blazing polemic on female creativity, the role of the writer, and the silent fate of Shakespeare's imaginary sister remains a powerful reminder of a woman's need for financial independence and intellectual freedom.
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A Witty, Beautiful Plea for Androgynous Integrity
- By Jefferson on 08-20-14
By: Virginia Woolf
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Orlando
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- Unabridged
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Fantasy, love and an exuberant celebration of English life and literature, Orlando is a uniquely entertaining story. Originally conceived by Virginia Woolf as a playful tribute to the family of her friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, Orlando's central character, a fictional embodiment of Sackville-West, changes sex from a man to a woman and lives throughout the centuries, whilst meeting historical figures of English literature.
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Magical
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By: Virginia Woolf
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- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Six children - Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis - meet in a garden close to the sea, their voices sounding over the constant echo of the waves that roll back and forth from the shore. The book follows them as they develop from childhood to maturity and follow different passions and ambitions; their voices are interspersed with interludes from the timeless and unifying chorus of nature.
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Of what it’s like to be human
- By None on 03-20-19
By: Virginia Woolf
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The Spire
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- Unabridged
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Story
Dean Jocelin has a vision: that God has chosen him to erect a great spire on his cathedral. His mason anxiously advises against it, for the old cathedral was built without foundations. Nevertheless, the spire rises octagon upon octagon, pinnacle by pinnacle, until the stone pillars shriek and the ground beneath it swims. Its shadow falls ever darker on the world below, and on Dean Jocelin in particular.From the author of Lord of the Flies, The Spire is a dark and powerful portrait of one man's will, and the folly that he creates.
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Power through for a deep exam. of a man's psyche
- By Leena on 11-15-14
By: William Golding
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A Writer's Diary
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From 1918 to 1941, even as she penned masterpiece upon masterpiece, Virginia Woolf kept a diary. She poured into it her thoughts, feelings, concerns, objections, interests, and disappointments -resulting in 26 volumes that give unprecedented insight into the mind of a genius. Collected here are the passages most relevant to her work and writing.
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Unfortunate choice of narrator
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By: Virginia Woolf
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Orlando
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- Unabridged
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Published in 1928, Orlando is a fictional biography that spans several centuries and follows the protagonist, Orlando, an Elizabethan nobleman who undergoes a mysterious gender transformation. The novel explores themes of gender identity, fluidity and the constraints imposed by societal norms. It challenges traditional notions of gender roles and raises questions about the nature of identity and the passage of time.
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Why the Hype?
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By: Virginia Woolf
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Flush
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Performance
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Story
One of the most famous of all literary dogs, Flush was the golden cocker spaniel belonging to Elizabeth Barrett. In this charming and heartfelt biography, Viginia Woolf tells his story: his early days as Miss Mitford's puppy running across the fields in wild abandon and fathering another, then the years spent in his invalid mistress' bedroom in Wimpole Street.
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More of Woman's Best Friend
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By: Virginia Woolf
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The Wings of the Dove
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Story
Milly Theale is a young, beautiful, and fabulously wealthy American. When she arrives in London and meets the equally beautiful but impoverished Kate Croy, they form an intimate friendship. But nothing is as it seems: materialism, romance, self-delusion, and ultimately fatal illness insidiously contaminate the glamorous social whirl.
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Not an easy read but SO worth it!
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By: Henry James
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As I Lay Dying
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One of William Faulkner’s finest novels, As I Lay Dying, originally published in 1930, remains a captivating and stylistically innovative work. The story revolves around a grim yet darkly humorous pilgrimage, as Addie Bundren’s family sets out to fulfill her last wish: to be buried in her native Jefferson, Mississippi, far from the miserable backwater surroundings of her married life.
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Faulkner's As I Lay Dying review
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What listeners say about To the Lighthouse
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- T. Griffith
- 06-25-12
Excellent but difficult book
What did you like best about this story?
There is little plot to this story but Woolf's detailed description of the thoughts of the characters is amazing.and insightful.
What about Juliet Stevenson’s performance did you like?
To the Lighthouse is a brilliant but difficult book. It is often told in a "stream of consciousness" style. There is no narrator and little plot. Juliet Stevenson's energetic performance makes the novel is much easier to understand.
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19 people found this helpful
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- arthur owen
- 09-08-21
poetry not prose
as we moved from personage to personage directed by the author to dig deeply down into èach psyche, thereby hung a tale characters and egos waging wars of deliverace.
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- Shanon Maple
- 10-06-20
Excellent reading
Excellent reading of To the Lighthouse. The performance is perfect, and the story is timeless.
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- Maggie
- 01-03-24
Poetic
Glad I finally listened/read this author. As a hero to my heroes, I’ve wanted to read Woolf but never could get past the first chapter of Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf’s insight into the psyche of people, their fictitious narratives of friends/acquaintances and their personal internal battles hung together by the observances (or rebellion) of societal & familial structures rings heartbreakingly true. The writing is breathtaking and Stevenson’s narration beautiful. Highly recommend.
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- m
- 04-28-24
Fabulous reading of a must-read book
Brilliant reading by a world class actor who really gets the beauty, poignancy, and clarity of Woolf’s poetic vision.
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- Jefferson
- 03-17-13
A Stark Tower on a Bare Rock, or a Hanging Garden?
On the surface not much happens in Virginia Woolf's semi-autobiographical modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse (1929). In Part I: The Window, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay (based on Woolf's own parents), their eight children, and several guests are vacationing at the Ramsays' summer house on the Isle of Skye in the early 20th century. Mrs. Ramsay, a meddling and kind fifty-year-old Greek-goddess, goes to town on errands, reads a fairy tale to her youngest child James, knits a stocking, presides over a dinner, communes without words with her husband, and holds the different people in the house together with the gravity of her charisma. Mr. Ramsay, an eccentric philosopher-academic, carries on with egotism, insecurity, and emotional tyranny. James' desire to visit the local lighthouse is thwarted by his father and the weather. Mr. Charles Tansley, an uptight disciple of Mr. Ramsay, asserts himself charmlessly. The somnolent and cat-eyed poet Mr. Carmichael reclines on the lawn. And independent, Chinese-eyed and pucker-faced Lily Briscoe works on a painting of Mrs. Ramsay and James and critically contemplates the family. In Part II: Time Passes, the forces of entropy besiege the house as it stands empty of people for ten years. And in Part III: The Lighthouse, Mr. Ramsay coerces his two youngest children--now moody teenagers—to accompany him to the lighthouse while Lily Briscoe--who partly represents Woolf herself as a writer--comes to terms with her feelings for Mrs. Ramsay as she tries to capture her vision in the painting she'd attempted ten years earlier.
Woolf is so good at sympathetically and honestly exposing people's minds and so good at revealing the beautiful and awful world we live in, and her writing is so beautiful, flowing, controlled, and poetic, that spending only a couple days with her characters is an indelibly rich experience. She employs a modernist stream of consciousness narration, and fluidly moves from one character to another. Her technique in the novel has been likened to that of the lighthouse beam moving across the benighted island world, briefly illuminating one mind and then another as it goes round, but Woolf's narration feels more organic than that. I relish her long, elegant sentences comprised of multiple clauses attached by semi-colons, her original and vivid metaphors, and her insights into human nature in a variety of vessels (male, female, old, young, educated, simple, etc.). I expected To the Lighthouse to be beautiful, philosophical, and sad, and it was, but I was surprised by its constant humor. At least as often as a poignant pang, I felt a flush of pleasure, similar to what Cam feels while sailing towards the lighthouse:
"From her hand, ice cold, held deep in the sea, there spurted up a fountain of joy at the change, at the escape, at the adventure (that she should be alive, that she should be there). And the drops falling from this sudden and unthinking fountain of joy fell here and there on the dark, the slumbrous shapes in her mind; shapes of a world not realised but turning in their darkness, catching here and there, a spark of light; Greece, Rome, Constantinople."
The dense novel explores the miraculous fragility and meaning (or lack thereof) of life; the varied and complex nature of love; the losses and gains involved in making families or living alone; the fraught relationships between children and parents; the confining roles of men and women; the surprising vividness and poignancy of memory; the complex nature of perception; the doomed but necessary attempt to understand other people; and the doomed but noble attempt through art to capture truth and to avoid entropy.
Juliet Stevenson was born to read Virginia Woolf! Her voice is lovely to listen to and full of understanding, irony, and sympathy, a perfect accompaniment to the text. With skillful subtlety, she modifies her voice for the thoughts of men and women and children and adults (and for the local Scottish workers who help the Ramsays). She carried me off To the Lighthouse. The only thing, perhaps, that is lost in the audiobook is Woolf's use of parentheses and brackets and semi-colons, which visually shape the reading of the text.
To the Lighthouse, like Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando, should be read by anyone interested in gender, art, love, life, modernism, beautiful prose, and early 20th century British culture.
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86 people found this helpful
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- Bette
- 06-09-12
Like a leaf in water
Juliet Stevenson's reading of this rich novel is perfection. Her "cello-mellow voice" (a phrase borrowed from another stream-of-consciosness novel, Patrick White's Eye of the Storm), creates a range of voices which enhance understanding and draws the listener in "truly, madly, deeply" (to borrow from my favorite Juiet Stevenson movie).
The richness lies in Woolf's stimulating observations of the world through the interior dialogue of several individuals. She captures the continuum of conflicts within individual minds, the conflicts of enlightenment and romanticism world views, the conflicts between men and women, conflicts between parents and children, conflicts of artists of words and oils with artists of daily practical life, conflicts of reason and emotion, and, of course, conflicts of British classes.
The events are simple: a family and their guests plan and cancel a trip to the lighthouse in the first half. A death of a major character takes place "off stage" and the changed family returns and completes the trip. An artist struggles in both halves to capture the fleeting life before her. "One wants 50 pairs of eyes," she thinks as she grasps at the rapid changes.
For those who love words, ideas and art, here is an audio book that can be enjoyed numerous times for, as one character comments on her surroundings: "One could let whatever one thought expand here like a leaf in water..."
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27 people found this helpful
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- Viewer
- 01-05-19
Between the lines
If you grasp the layers of symbolism and careful patterning of contradictions, this consciously Freudian (and anti-Freudian) masterpiece is one of the top ten English novels of the 20th century.
Juliet Stevenson is one of the few readers with sufficient talent to merit the designation of author, as I'm sure even Virginia Woolf didn't grasp the subtle turns of meaning lurking in her text that an immortal like Stevenson can educe from it with a strategic pause, accent or staccato. Stevenson is the Rothschild wine of audio.
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- Marcela
- 04-27-12
Great book... slightly complicated, but great
Any additional comments?
It's a great book, nothing to say about that... but if you're looking for action, look elsewhere. Here it's all about insight, the same scene narrated from more than one point of view - of course, the main character is Mrs. Ramsey (the one who keeps the others together), but the author shows the thoughts of the others, as well - especially how they see Mrs. Ramsey and each other...
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8 people found this helpful
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- Shakespeare
- 01-15-18
The narrator saved me!
Is there anything you would change about this book?
Had to read this book for my English class in college. I found Woolf's story intensely boring. Had it not been for such a superb narration, I don't think I could have managed to get through the novel.
What do you think your next listen will be?
I will probably listen to some other classic novel or play.
Which character – as performed by Juliet Stevenson – was your favorite?
n/a
Did To the Lighthouse inspire you to do anything?
It inspired me to avoid Woolf.
Any additional comments?
I have just discovered that I am not a fan of Virginia Woolf. I prefer novels that move at a faster pace rather than filled with useless description after description.
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