To the Lighthouse

This classic character study takes on new life with Juliet Stevenson's masterful narration. She lends cohesion to the stream-of-consciousness passages, making them easier to follow. As Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe explore life's questions, Stevenson applies vocal traits to each character, reflecting personality and values. Both women speak in clear, kind tones, while gruffness captures Mr. Ramsay's essence and sarcasm dominates Mr. Tansley's. Light, airy notes accompany the children's words. Young James Ramsay's lighthouse journey and Lily's painting of Mrs. Ramsay tie the book's opening to its conclusion ten years later. Longed for in the beginning, both endeavors are completed in the end, bringing resolution to the characters' inner struggles. J.J.B. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

Starred review from July 28, 2008
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
. Stevenson carefully sorts through Woolf's famously tangled modernist masterpiece about the interior lives of a well-to-do British family, and the ways in which the First World War permanently damaged European society. She reads in an amplified hush, her exaggeratedly formal British diction adding poignancy to the sense of dislocation and disorder that marks the book's transition from pre- to postwar. Her reading is quietly, carefully precise, and that precision is a solid complement to Woolf's own measured, inward-looking prose.

Starred review from March 6, 2006
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.

British actress Juliet Stevenson has enjoyed a ripple of prestige in this country ever since she appeared in the sleeper TRULY, MADLY, DEEPLY. Here she exhibits her critically acclaimed qualities--her lovely voice, perfect enunciation, earnestness and musical phrasing. She not only understands, but communicates with precision the overt and subtextual meaning of Woolf's prose. Unfortunately, she also exhibits qualities that keep this reviewer from becoming one of her admirers. She is unctuous to the point of pretentiousness, thus traducing the spirit of a book that strives so bravely for pretentionless psychological truth. Y.R. (c) AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine