To the Lighthouse

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

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.