Reviews
It's wondrous to listen to a fine reading of a long-loved novel. Leishman makes masterly use of volume, timbre and resonance to distinguish between characters and draw us into the emotional swings and vibrations of the internal musings of each. She creates not a new but a more nuanced reading, following the interwoven streams of consciousness in a British English that lends authenticity to each voice. Leishman swims smoothly through Woolf's sentences that ebb and flow with numerous parenthetical thoughts and fresh images. These passages are interspersed with quick, sharp, simple sentences that gain strength in contrast. Leishman also draws our attention to Woolf's poetic prose: her rhythms and images, her use of hard consonants in monosyllabic words in counterpoint to long, soft, dreamy words and phrases. To The Lighthouse plays back and forth between telescopic and microscopic views of nature and human nature. Mrs. Ramsey is both trapped in and pleased in her roles as wife, mother and hostess. The introspective Mr. Ramsey is consumed with his legacy of long-since-published abstract philosophy. This is a book that cannot be read-or heard-too often.
CLASSIFICATION_METADATA
{"IsNonfiction":["No"],"IsOther":["No"],"IsAdult":["No"],"MuzeFormatDesc":["Trade Paperback"],"IsChildren":["No"],"Genre":["FICTION"],"Topic":["Literary","Classics","Family Life"],"IsTextBook":["Yes"],"IsFiction":["Yes"]}
Synopsis
A landmark of modern fiction and Virginia Woolf's most popular novel, first published in 1927. To the Lighthouse explores the subjective reality of the everyday life of the Ramsay family of the British Hebrides islands. A 'feminine' book, filled with irony, sadness, and doubts about life., "Radiant as To the Lighthouse ] is in its beauty, there could never be a mistake about it: here is a novel to the last degree severe and uncompromising. I think that beyond being about the very nature of reality, it is itself a vision of reality."--Eudora Welty, from the Introduction 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., The novel that established Virginia Woolf as a leading writer of the twentieth century, To the Lighthouse is made up of three powerfully charged visions into the life of one family living in a summer house off the rocky coast of Scotland. As time winds its way through their lives, the Ramseys face, alone and simultaneously, the greatest of human challenges and its greatest triumph-the human capacity for change. A moving portrait in miniature of family life, it also has profoundly universal implications, giving language to the silent space that separates people and the space that they transgress to reach each other., "A classic for a reason. My mind was warped into a new shape by her prose and it will never be the same again." -- Greta Gerwig The authorized, original edition of one of the great literary masterpieces of the twentieth century: a miraculous novel of family, love, war, and mortality, with a foreword from Eudora Welty. 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 conflict between men and women. To the Lighthouse is made up of three powerfully charged visions into the life of the Ramsay family living in a summer house off the rocky coast of Scotland. There's the serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, their eight children, and assorted holiday guests. With the lighthouse excursion postponed, Woolf shows the small joys and quiet tragedies of everyday life that seemingly could go on forever. But as time winds its way through their lives, the Ramsays face, alone and together, the greatest of human challenges and its greatest triumph--the human capacity for change. A moving portrait in miniature of family life, To the Lighthouse also has profoundly universal implications, giving language to the silent space that separates people and the space that they transgress to reach each other.