To the Lighthouse

By: Virginia Woolf

Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson

Length: 7 hrs and 38 mins

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.

Download the accompanying reference guide.

©2008 Naxos Audiobooks (P)2008 Naxos Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"British actress Juliet Stevenson makes for a better reader of Woolf's words than Nicole Kidman's Oscar-winning turn as Woolf in The Hours...Her reading is quietly, carefully precise, and that precision is a solid complement to Woolf's own measured, inward-looking prose." (Publishers Weekly)

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.

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.

Excellent reading

Excellent reading of To the Lighthouse. The performance is perfect, and the story is timeless.

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.

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...

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.

A good read on audible

Juliet Stevenson narrates the superbly. Very much enjoyed listening to this book while traveling to and from work.

Overwhelmingly beautiful.

I would listen to Juliet Stevenson reading her shopping list… I found V. Woolf difficult to read, but listening to this beautiful reading reconciled me with her.

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.

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..."