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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.
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.
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.
Jacob’s Room is Virginia Woolf’s own modernist manifesto. Jacob Flanders is a mere point of contact between a crowd of people, appearing and disappearing in a tableau in which all is flux, without certainty and without a controlling viewpoint. But it seems that the author could not maintain this rigorous impersonality, and the radical technique breaks down, so that we finally see Jacob as a person, just as his world is blown apart.
A worldwide best seller, The Female Eunuch is a landmark book in the history of the women's movement and a ground-breaking feminist tract. Drawing from history, literature, and popular culture - past and present - Germaine Greer's searing examination of women's oppression is both an important social commentary and a passionately argued polemical masterpiece. This is one of the most famous, most widely read books on feminism ever written.
Night and Day, is a story about a group of young people trying to discover what it means to fall in love. It asks all the big questions: What does it mean to fall in love? Does marriage grant happiness? What is happiness? Night and Day is a conventional novel; however, it maps out for us the world of Virginia Woolf in its wondrous prose: for her it was the beginning, leading on to a prolonged engagement with her search for the means to express the 'inner life'.
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.
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.
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.
Jacob’s Room is Virginia Woolf’s own modernist manifesto. Jacob Flanders is a mere point of contact between a crowd of people, appearing and disappearing in a tableau in which all is flux, without certainty and without a controlling viewpoint. But it seems that the author could not maintain this rigorous impersonality, and the radical technique breaks down, so that we finally see Jacob as a person, just as his world is blown apart.
A worldwide best seller, The Female Eunuch is a landmark book in the history of the women's movement and a ground-breaking feminist tract. Drawing from history, literature, and popular culture - past and present - Germaine Greer's searing examination of women's oppression is both an important social commentary and a passionately argued polemical masterpiece. This is one of the most famous, most widely read books on feminism ever written.
Night and Day, is a story about a group of young people trying to discover what it means to fall in love. It asks all the big questions: What does it mean to fall in love? Does marriage grant happiness? What is happiness? Night and Day is a conventional novel; however, it maps out for us the world of Virginia Woolf in its wondrous prose: for her it was the beginning, leading on to a prolonged engagement with her search for the means to express the 'inner life'.
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.
Once upon a time, a teenaged Kate Winslet (The Reader, Titanic, Revolutionary Road) received a gift that would leave a lasting impression: a copy of Emile Zola’s classic Thérèse Raquin. Six Academy Award nominations and one Best Actress award later, she steps behind the microphone to perform this haunting classic of passion and disaster.
Leo Tolstoy's classic story of doomed love is one of the most admired novels in world literature. Generations of readers have been enthralled by his magnificent heroine, the unhappily married Anna Karenina, and her tragic affair with dashing Count Vronsky.
This is a story from the Classic Women's Short Stories collection.
In February 2014, Reni Eddo-Lodge posted an impassioned argument on her blog about her deep-seated frustration with the way discussions of race and racism in Britain were constantly being shut down by those who weren't affected by it. She gave the post the title 'Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race'. Her sharp, fiercely intelligent words hit a nerve, and the post went viral, spawning a huge number of comments from people desperate to speak up about their own similar experiences.
Nine-year-old Oskar Schell is an inventor, amateur entomologist, Francophile, letter writer, pacifist, natural historian, percussionist, romantic, great explorer, jeweller, detective, vegan, and collector of butterflies, Beatles memorabilia, miniature cacti and coral. When his father is killed in the September 11th attacks, his inward journey towards some kind of peace takes him on an odyssey through the five boroughs of New York, as he attempts to solve the mystery of a key he discovers in his father's closet....
The Voyage Out is Virginia Woolf's haunting tale about a naïve young woman's sea voyage from London to a small resort on the South American coast. In symbolic, lyrical, and intoxicating prose, her outward journey begins to mirror her internal voyage into adulthood as she searches for her personal identity, grapples with love, and learns how to face life intellectually and emotionally. Its wit and exquisiteness, and its profound depth and insight into humanity, will capture the imagination of the listener.
Golden Globe-winning actor Michael C. Hall (Six Feet Under) performs Truman Capote's masterstroke about a young writer's charmed fascination with his unorthodox neighbor, the "American geisha" Holly Golightly. Holly - a World War II-era society girl in her late teens - survives via socialization, attending parties and restaurants with men from the wealthy upper class who also provide her with money and expensive gifts. Over the course of the novella, the seemingly shallow Holly slowly opens up to the curious protagonist.
'I would like to ask that we begin to dream about and plan for a different world. A fairer world. A world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves. And this is how to start: we must raise our daughters differently. We must also raise our sons differently....' What does feminism mean today? In this personal, eloquently argued essay - adapted from her much-admired TEDx talk of the same name - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie offers listeners a unique definition of feminism for the 21st century, one rooted in inclusion and awareness.
Dorothea Brooke is an ardent idealist who represses her vivacity and intelligence for the cold, theological pedant Casaubon. One man understands her true nature: the artist Will Ladislaw. But how can love triumph against her sense of duty and Casaubon’s mean spirit? Meanwhile, in the little world of Middlemarch, the broader world is mirrored: the world of politics, social change, and reforms, as well as betrayal, greed, blackmail, ambition, and disappointment.
The one and only Zadie Smith, prize-winning, best-selling author of White Teeth, is back with a second unmissable collection of essays. No subject is too fringe or too mainstream for the unstoppable Zadie Smith. From social media to the environment, from Jay-Z to Karl Ove Knausgaard, she has boundless curiosity and the boundless wit to match. In Feel Free, pop culture, high culture, social change and political debate all get the Zadie Smith treatment, dissected with razor-sharp intellect.
From the best-selling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists comes a powerful new statement about feminism today - written as a letter to a friend.
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.
This has to be the most intelligent reading of A Room of Ones Own, Ms Juliet Stevensons reading has an uncanny 'Woolf ' voice, she has a delivery which is incredibly accurate, unlike some 'readers' she understands, dare I say, seems to love Virginia Woolf's words and her intonation, timing, is absolute perfection. Anything Ms Stevenson reads is done with impeccable delivery, a joy to share.
9 of 9 people found this review helpful
A timeless classic... Still resonates today. Excellent narration. Be yourself, women express your creative energy and do not give up.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful
A Room of One's Own is beautifully read by Juliet Stephenson. Virginia Woolf writes a short but thought provoking book, relevant even today. It if full of quotable quotes, including the iconic one used as the title.
The first half of the book is a slow build up to the inspiring second.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful
Can't believe I hadn't read this before, it is such a great piece. I am glad I have recently listened to Bronte, Eliot and Austen, as she often refers to works by them
3 of 3 people found this review helpful
very interesting but a bit of a struggle to listen to, I couldn't call it relaxing... but the reader is great, and the text is a classic of feminist literature, it's just that it requires quite a bit of concentration....
3 of 4 people found this review helpful
Stevenson's voice and performance make this a double treat. Woolf's insights and rich style remain seductive.
Although a little dated in places, this is, as always, beautifully read by Juliet Stevenson.
What did you love best about A Room of One's Own?
I love Virginia Woolf's ability to build a scene, or series of scenes, around a metaphor. The book opens in fictional Oxbridge, a conflation of Oxford and Cambridge, where Woolf's (or the narrator's--are they the same person?) journey from an opulent men-only college to the down-at-heel women's college of Fernham perfectly captures societal views towards women and education. The scenes aren't rigid enough to qualify as allegory; rather, they allow the reader to explore the ideas from a number of angles.
Who was your favorite character and why?
Though ostensibly a work of non-fiction, A Room of One's Own is replete with fictional characters, all metaphors or allegories to explore different facets of women and literature, women in literature, and literature by women. She posits a theoretical Judith Shakespeare, for example, sister to the famed playwright, to demonstrate why even a woman with tremendous talent and dedication often cannot succeed as a writer.
Have you listened to any of Juliet Stevenson’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
I can't recall any of Juliet Stevenson's other work, but I can say that her voice perfectly fits the tone of A Room of One's Own. She lends the material the dignity it deserved, and yet also captures Woolf's occasional whimsical flourishes perfectly.
If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?
I'm not even going to attempt to answer this question. For one thing, the audience for such a film would be so tiny that even the most intrepid indie filmmaker would pass it over without a second thought. And while there might be certain scenes or vignettes that would translate beautifully to film, the highly theoretical nature of the book would not work well on screen.
Any additional comments?
I recently attempted reading Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, her stream-of-consciousness effort in the vein of James Joyce's Ulysses, and found it unpalatable. Modernist literature simply isn't to my taste. Yet I recognized her power as a writer.
A Room of One's Own is one of the finest pieces of non-fiction I've read. I happen to be an aspiring literary critic and also, dare I say this as a man?, a feminist. Yet even forgoing all that, Woolf's powerful prose, and also her ability to temper her words with restraint, is beautiful to read.
26 of 26 people found this review helpful
I can not express how much I loved this book , there are no words that do not pale in comparison to the strength,integrity and humor of this delight.
I fell I'm tarnishing the alphabet by writing this review but I need to say that one Juliet Stevenson should read every book she is amazing ,her voice gives such gravity to Virginia wisdom and two the fact that a woman was fighting for her sex's rights back in her day and age makes me proud to be a woman and a feminist . In my time where the word feminism has become something to hide or be ashamed take strength form this book , it will make you scream your a feminist from the roof tops ..
12 of 12 people found this review helpful
What did you love best about A Room of One's Own?
Woolf's stream of consciousness. The narrator was supreme.
Who was your favorite character and why?
The narrator, for obvious reasons.
What about Juliet Stevenson???s performance did you like?
Excellent intonation. Crisp accent. Emotional at the right times, analytical tone at other times...perfect.
What???s the most interesting tidbit you???ve picked up from this book?
The freudian elements of the narrator's observations.
Any additional comments?
Be patient with Woolf's stream of consciousness. All comments are relevant...think about them!! Ex.:
12 of 12 people found this review helpful
Would you listen to A Room of One's Own again? Why?
Yes, I will listen again whenever I need inspiration and instruction to move beyond the patriarchy of academia.
If you were to make a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?
'a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write'
11 of 11 people found this review helpful
When I began Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929), a fictional essay based on lectures about "women and fiction" that Woolf presented at two Cambridge University women's colleges, I expected to find a well-written proto-feminist tract (if not a "blazing polemic" as the book description on Audible calls it). I did not expect to find a beautiful, funny, stimulating, and readable pleasure. While expressing Woolf's plea that women be accorded the same things that most men have always taken for granted--enough money, privacy, space, and freedom to live and write how they will--her book presents a concise history of (mostly) British literature and a modest account of aesthetic creation, both informed by an accurate and respectful view of the sexes. Although she twice humorously confirms with her audience that no men are hiding in the room, Woolf wrote her book for both men and women. And though much of it is most applicable to the early 20th century, much of it is still relevant to the early 21st.
After introducing her core "opinion," that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction," in the first chapter Woolf talks about visiting "Oxbridge," a fictional hybrid of Oxford and Cambridge Universities. There a Beadle gesticulates her off the grass, protecting the turf of the male Fellows and scholars. There a man tells her that ladies are only admitted to the library in the company of a Fellow or a letter of introduction. There she decides not to attempt to enter the chapel for a service. With sweet-tempered sour grapes, she figures that "the outside of these magnificent buildings is often as beautiful as the inside." She ponders all the gold and silver on which the university was built and is maintained and attends a sumptuous luncheon at a male college and a poor dinner at a woman's college.
Woolf's Oxbridge experience sends her in the second chapter to the British Museum to search its library for answers to questions like, "Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor?" She discovers that all of the many books on women were written by men, many of whom, despite living in patriarchal England, must be angry at women because they suspect that women want to seize their power.
In the third chapter Woolf cites a dead bishop as opining "that it was impossible for any woman, past, present, or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare." This inspires her to speculate on the lives of historically invisible middle-class Elizabethan women and to imagine Shakespeare's sister Judith, whose era prevented her from becoming a playwright and drove her to suicide.
Woolf gives a history of women authors in chapter four, beginning with a couple of "eccentric" 17th-century aristocrats derided for writing poetry, moving to the first middle-class woman to earn a living by her writing, and then comparing the four great 19th-century women novelists, Jane Austen, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, and George Elliot, explaining how difficult it was for them to write in a world in which women had no private rooms and could not own anything.
In Chapter Five, Woolf examines the state of contemporary women's fiction, riffs on the scarcity in past literature of women who are close friends with women, and advises the female author of today to "be truthful" and to write "as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman, so that her pages were full of that curious sexual quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself."
In the sixth chapter Woolf ties together threads from earlier chapters and promotes androgyny ("one must be woman-manly or man-womanly"), for any purely masculine or feminine mind will be sterile and barren. Interestingly, she also thinks that the sexes are too similar and that their differences should be increased. The conclusion to her book is that if women could have 500 pounds per year (enough to live on) and a room of their own (a private space) they may be themselves, write what they wish, and in time bring Shakespeare's sister to life.
Throughout her book Woolf explains interesting observations about literature: WWI replaced the "illusion" of romance with "reality," Charlotte Bronte's situation deformed her genius, "masterpieces are not single and solitary births," some writers (like Shakespeare) are more "incandescent" and "androgynous" than others, and fiction written with integrity (truth) intensifies the reader's experience of the world. And everywhere she writes supernally, whether describing prunes ("stringy as a miser's heart") or sunlight on windows ("The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder"). Placing Woolf's great novels, To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, and Orlando in the context of A Room of One's Own shows that she did write poetic, incandescent, and androgynous fiction illuminated by integrity and experience.
This audiobook version of A Room of One's Own, read to perfection by Juliet Stephenson, whose clear, intelligent, and sympathetic voice enhances Woolf's wry sense of humor, keen insights, beautiful imagery, original metaphors, and flowing sentences, is followed by four short stories by Woolf also read by Stephenson:
--"Monday or Tuesday," in which, "Lazy, indifferent, shaking space easily from his wings, knowing his way," a heron flies above a series of vivid images.
--"The Haunted House," in which a ghostly couple searches a house for buried treasure, "The light in the heart."
--"Kew Gardens," in which an intrepid snail tries to reach its goal as several imperfectly communicating couples walk by beautiful flowers.
--"The New Dress," in which Mabel Waring wretchedly regrets wearing the wrong dress to Mrs. Dalloway's party.
43 of 46 people found this review helpful
I cannot deny my fascination with Virginia Woolf ... this book i consider to be one of the best books i have ever read ... a highly recommended one especially for women ... moreover i love the narrator "Juliet Stevenson' i think she is the best ...
18 of 19 people found this review helpful
An important piece on women and literature. But more than that. ARoO'sO is a piece on education and literature, money and literature, space and literature. Woolf explores how money and space are essential to a person being able to have the things needed for art.
It isn't a complicated book, but it is revolutionary in its way. I loved it. It was, like almost everything Woolf writes, a river filled with diamonds. It carries you and occasionally drops luxury into your lap.
33 of 36 people found this review helpful
So easy and lax to listen to.
Great Narration
I've read Room of One's Own, here and there but listening to this was fantabulous!
In addition, I decided to contrast this audiobook with Alice Walkers, "In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens" narrated by Elizabeth Klett. Listening to both is Wow. A kapow-wow!
14 of 15 people found this review helpful
Any additional comments?
I have finished with you Virginia Woolf, and yet I am undone! What am I to do without your voice narrating to me the plight of an infinitesimal snail sashaying his way across a summer's garden…or the ostentatious way you breathe life into women post the suffrage movement? How am I to dream without you painting, with your words, brushstrokes here and there, here and there…then here! Such vivid colors when the truth, we all know, is rather stark. Yet in these incandescent rainbows lie hidden truths. The deep rooted authenticates that are bound for lack of proper appropriation, or wit, or humor, or intellect, or experience, or example…and yet here you admonish me, a true example. My sister, my brother, my androgynous muse…neither male nor female…just matter, a mind unlocked.
10 of 11 people found this review helpful
How have I not read this over and over already? Excellent writing philosophy for women. If you have a brain in your head, listen. Now.
9 of 10 people found this review helpful