Virginia Woolf has 25 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 39 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.3★ across 158 ratings. The most-rated is Mrs. Dalloway.
Mrs. Dalloway
Summary
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. Luminously beautiful, Mrs. Dalloway uses the internal monologues of the characters to tell a story of inter-war England. With this, Virginia Woolf changed the novel forever. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your My Library section along with the audio.
Public Domain (P)2010 Naxos AudioBooks
A Room of One's Own
Summary
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.
©2011 CSA Word (P)2011 CSA Word
To the Lighthouse
Summary
To the Lighthouse is Virginia Woolf’s arresting analysis of domestic family life, centering on the Ramseys and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland in the early 1900s. Nicole Kidman (Moulin Rouge, Eyes Wide Shut), who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Woolf in the film adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours, brings the impressionistic prose of this classic to vibrant life. Split into three parts, the story observes Mrs. Ramsay, Mr. Ramsey, and their children at their vacation house on the Isle of Skye. While the novel follows seemingly trivial events between the family members, the plot takes a backseat to philosophical introspection, which gave the novel its fame as an icon of modernist literature. The Ramseys’ quest to recapture meaning creates a powerful allegory of man’s impermanent battle with the tangible world.
©1927 Virginia Woolf (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
A Room of One's Own
Summary
Brought to you by Penguin.
This Penguin Classic is performed by Natalie Dormer, best known for her standout role as Queen Margaery in Game of Thrones, as well as her roles in The Hunger Games, and Captain America: The First Avenger.
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 writing 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.
Public Domain (P)2019 Penguin Audio
Mrs. Dalloway
Summary
Mrs. Dalloway, perhaps Virginia Woolf’s greatest novel, follows English socialite Clarissa Dalloway as she prepares for a party in post-World War I London. Four-time Oscar nominee Annette Bening (American Beauty, The Kids Are All Right) performs Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness style of storytelling brilliantly, exploring the hidden springs of thought and action in one day of a woman’s life. When we first meet Clarissa Dalloway, she is preoccupied with the last-minute minutiae of party-planning while being flooded with memories of long ago. Clarissa then examines the realities of the present as the story travels forwards and back in time and in and out of different characters’ minds. Mrs. Dalloway is daring not only in its stream-of-consciousness form, but also in its content. Woolf’s depiction of Septimus Warren Smith brings to light the ugly and often ignored truth of how the brutality of war can drive men mad. We also get to see in depth how our main protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, suffers from her own form of psychological damage: the more subtle, everyday oppression of English society.
©1925 The Estate of Virginia Woolf (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
Orlando
Summary
Brought to you by Penguin. This Penguin Classic is performed by Audie Award winner, Pippa Nixon, known for her roles in Unforgotten, John Carter and Mother Father Son. This definitive recording of Virginia Woolf's Orlando includes an introduction by Sandra M. Gilbert. Written for Virginia Woolf's intimate friend, the charismatic writer Vita Sackville-West, Orlando, is a playful mock biography of a chameleonic historical figure, immortal and ageless, who changes sex and identity on a whim. First masculine, then feminine, Orlando begins life as a young sixteenth-century nobleman, then gallops through three centuries to end up as a woman writer in Virginia Woolf's own time. A wry commentary on gender roles and modes of history, Orlando is also, in Woolf's own words, a light-hearted 'writer's holiday' which delights in ambiguity and capriciousness.
©2019 Virginia Woolf (P)2019 Penguin Audio
Orlando
Summary
Exclusively from Audible 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. The book opens with Orlando as a young nobleman in Elizabethan England who finds love with a Russian princess. During Charles II's reign, he is an ambassador to Constantinople and becomes a Duke. Orlando then goes on to wake as a beautiful woman, exploring the roles of women in the 18th and 19th centuries. Eventually becoming a wife and mother the tale ends in the year 1928, a year consonant with full suffrage for women. Upon plans to publish her 1588 poem 'The Oak Tree', written in the opening of the book, she reflects on her centuries of adventure. An exploration of androgyny and the creative life of a woman, it is considered a feminist work. Arguably one of Woolf's most popular stories, it marked a turning point in her career, departing from her more introspective works. Receiving both critical and financial success, it guaranteed Woolf's financial stability. There have been many adaptations made, including a 1992 film starring Tilda Swinton and an opera by composer Peter Aderhold which premiered at the Braunschweig State Theatre in in 2016. Narrator Biography Clare Higgins is an accomplished actress of screen and stage, winning three Olivier Awards for Best Actress for her roles in Sweet Bird of Youth (1995), Vincent in Brixton (2003) and Hecuba (2005). With a long and successful career in British and American theatre, she has also been a regular feature on our television screens. Her recent roles have included Miss Cackle in The Worst Witch (2017), Ohila in Doctor Who (2013 and 2015), Hazel Warren in EastEnders (2015) and Vivian in Rogue (2014). Claire Higgins is probably best known for her memorable and sinister performance as Julia in the horror films Hellraiser (1987) and Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988), with other film appearances including The Golden Compass (2007) and Small Faces (2006). With a voice and timing perfect for audio she has narrated many audiobooks, including Nick Hornby's How to Be Good and Joanna Trollope's The Best of Friends, and in 2009 portrayed Margaret Thatcher in the BBC Radio 4 drama A Family Affair.
Public Domain (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
The Virginia Woolf BBC Radio Drama Collection
Summary
The collected BBC dramatisations of the fiction of Virginia Woolf, with star casts including Kristin Scott-Thomas, Vanessa Redgrave, Juliet Stevenson, Laura Fraser, Robert Glenister and Fenella Woolgar. This collection includes: The Voyage Out A motley group of genteel adventurers board a ship bound for South America in 1913, among them Helen Ambrose and her niece Rachel Vinrace. Starring Laura Fraser, Rebecca Johnson and Bertie Carvel. Night and Day Katherine and Mary are challenged over their assumptions about love in pre-First World War London. Starring Kristen Scott-Thomas. Mrs Dalloway Set on a single day in June, Virginia Woolf's classic novel follows Clarissa Dalloway as she makes final preparations for an important party. Starring Fenella Woolgar. To the Lighthouse The story of the Ramsay family holidaying in Scotland before the First World War, and their planned expedition to a lighthouse nearby. Starring Vanessa Redgrave, Juliet Stevenson and Robert Glenister. Orlando Orlando was born in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and lived into that of George V. He entered life as a boy and she left it as a woman. Starring Jennie Stoller and David McAlister. The Waves Louis, Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan and Rhoda struggle to come to terms with life after Percival and, in the process, learn what he really meant to each of them. Starring Geraldine James and Anna Massey. Between the Acts Miss La Trobe, an eccentric local artist, conceives the ambitious idea of portraying a history of English literature and of making her audience see themselves as they really are. Starring Sarah Badel.
©2019 Virginia Woolf (P)2019 BBC Audiobooks Ltd.
The Waves
Summary
The Waves traces the lives of six friends from childhood to old age. It was written when Virginia Woolf was at the height of her experimental powers, and she allows each character to tell their own story, through powerful, poetic monologues. By listening to these voices struggling to impose order and meaning on their lives, we are drawn into a literary journey that stunningly reproduces the complex, confusing, and contradictory nature of human experience. It is read with affection and skill by Frances Jeater.
Public Domain (P)2014 Naxos AudioBooks
Night and Day
Summary
Written before she began her experiments in the writing of fiction, Virginia Woolf's second novel, 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".
Public Domain (P)2014 Naxos AudioBooks
The Voyage Out
Summary
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.
Public Domain (P)2015 Naxos AudioBooks
![Cover art for Mrs Dalloway [French Version]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41lCOYrSx-L._SL500_.jpg)
Mrs Dalloway [French Version]
Summary
Un jour de printemps, Mrs Dalloway, maîtresse de maison londonienne, s'apprête à donner une réception à Westminster. Tandis qu'au fil de la journée, Big Ben sonne les heures, les personnages s'affairent, vivant chacun à leur manière leur rapport au temps et aux autres. À travers les souvenirs et les réflexions des personnages se dévoilent apparences et faux-semblants et le temps ne devient plus qu'une succession d'événements minuscules et de bouleversements camouflés. Please note: This audiobook is in French.
©1929 Stock (P)2003 Éditions Thélème
Thalia Book Club: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, with Jennifer Egan, Siri Hustvedt, and Margot Livesey
Summary
Back by popular demand, novelists Siri Hustvedt (The Blazing World), Jennifer Egan (Pulitzer Prize-winner for A Visit from the Goon Squad), and Margot Livesey (The Flight of Gemma Hardy), the trio that has brought Middlemarch, Pride & Prejudice, Anna Karenina, and The Portrait of a Lady to life at past events in this series, revisit Virginia Woolf's classic.
©2014 Symphony Space (P)2014 Symphony Space
The Common Reader Volume 1
Summary
This is Virginia Woolf’s first collection of essays, published in 1925. In them, she attempts to see literature from the point of view of the ‘common reader’ - someone whom she, with Dr Johnson, distinguished from the critic and the scholar. She read, and wrote, as an outsider: a woman set to school in her father’s library, denied the educational privileges of her male siblings - and with no fixed view of what constitutes ‘English literature’. What she produced is an eccentric and unofficial literary and social history from the 14th to the 20th centuries, with an excursion to ancient Greece thrown in. She investigates medieval England (The Paston Letters and Chaucer), tsarist Russia (The Russian Point of View), Elizabethan Playwrights, Jane Austen, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, Modern Fiction and the Modern Essay. When she published this book Woolf’s fame as a novelist was already established: now she was hailed as a brilliant interpretative critic. Here, she addresses ‘the common reader’ in the remarkable prose and with all the imagination and gaiety that are the stamps of her genius.
©1925 Virginia Woolf Estate (P)2020 Ukemi Productions Ltd
Genius and Ink
Summary
Foreword by Ali Smith. With an introduction by Francesca Wade. Who better to serve as a guide to great books and their authors than Virginia Woolf? In the early years of its existence, the Times Literary Supplement published some of the finest writers in English: T. S. Eliot, Henry James and E. M. Forster among them. But one of the paper’s defining voices was Virginia Woolf, who produced a string of superb essays between the two World Wars. The weirdness of Elizabethan plays, the pleasure of revisiting favourite novels, the supreme examples of Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Henry James, Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad: all are here, in anonymously published pieces, in which may be glimpsed the thinking behind Woolf’s works of fiction and the enquiring, feminist spirit of A Room of One’s Own. Here is Woolf the critical essayist, offering, at one moment, a playful hypothesis and, at another, a judgement laid down with the authority of a 20th-century Dr Johnson. Here is Woolf working out precisely what’s great about Hardy and how Elizabeth Barrett Browning made books a 'substitute for living' because she was 'forbidden to scamper on the grass'. Above all, here is Virginia Woolf the reader, whose enthusiasm for great literature remains palpable and inspirational today.
©2019 Virginia Woolf (P)2019 HarperCollins Publishers Limited
Between the Acts
Summary
Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf’s last novel, was finished in November 1940 and shortly afterwards delivered to her publisher Hogarth Press. The following March she committed suicide. Between the Acts is often an overlooked work in her oeuvre because she did express her intention to revise it before publication, though in the event this never happened. So it comes as a surprise to find that, while it probably would have benefited from revision, it is something of an unpolished gem, at times sparkling and actually very engaging. The writing is subtle, varied in tone and purpose; at times serious and complex and at others lighthearted and even downright funny. And unpredictable. The scene is an English country house, the home of the Olivers, presided over by the elderly Bartholomew – Bart. The date is 1939, the time of the ‘phoney war’, and the village comes to the house and gardens for the annual play put on by the locals. There are complex relationships within the family, and with the local villagers: in true Woolf style, small dramas take place, understated but quietly seismic. And the work is shot through with the phrase, the observation, the sleight of hand, the touch that is her special magic. With Bart is his sister, the sweetly vague Lucy Swithin, his son, Giles (who works in the city) and Giles’ unsettled, unsure wife, Isa. Taking centre-stage in the story are the amateur theatricals, who undertake to perform three short scenes devised and directed by the eccentric Miss Le Trobe. These three separate scenes, one Shakespearean, one Restoration (a romp this!) and one Victorian, hold the mirror up to society. But what to make of them? The threatened rain holds off so the performances are staged outside in the garden, but the clouds of war are perceptible. Georgina Sutton’s range and sympathy makes listening to this neglected work a surprisingly engaging, very English experience.
Public Domain (P)2020 Ukemi Productions Ltd
Orlando
Summary
"Quando il ragazzo, poiché, ahimè, era certo un ragazzo - nessuna donna sui pattini sarebbe mai stata così veloce e potente - gli sfrecciò accanto quasi sulle punte, a momenti Orlando si strappò i capelli per la rabbia che quella persona fosse del suo stesso sesso e quindi ogni abbraccio fosse fuori discussione". Orlando è la biografia scherzosa di un giovane nobile dai lineamenti androgini, che si reincarna rocambolescamente in varie forme attraverso quattro secoli della storia inglese, dall'epoca Elisabettiana fino al '900. Ispirata e dedicata a Vita Sackville West, l'eccentrica aristocratica dalle bellissime gambe con cui la Woolf ebbe una appassionata relazione amorosa, la biografia è un divertissement letterario in cui la Woolf gioca con vari stili e generi letterari (biografia, saggio critico, romanzo vittoriano, lirica romantica, intermittences proustiane, stream of consciousness joyciano). L'esito è un denso tessuto narrativo fatto di copiosi rimandi linguistici e tematici, assonanze, ripetizioni, ritornelli, variazioni sul tema, citazioni, digressioni, simboli. Un romanzo epocale, avvolgente e ambiguo come il suo protagonista. Traduzione di Alberto Rossatti
©2019 il Narratore Audiolibri (P)2019 il Narratore Audiolibri
Orlando
Summary
Pubblicato per la prima volta nel 1928, "Orlando" ("Orlando: A Biography") è la straordinaria cronaca della vita del protagonista che si sviluppa nel corso di quattro secoli. L'elemento centrale del romanzo è quindi Orlando, personaggio androgino dal sesso certo ma in evoluzione. La sua esistenza fantastica, spesso assolutamente libera da qualsiasi schema, anche sessuale, attraversa il XVII, il XVIII, e il XIX secolo, e riporta un lucido e interessante resoconto della società inglese dell'epoca. Suggestiva e affascinante questa versione audiobook; conduce nel mondo incredibile di Orlando e ripercorre la sua vita straordinaria e avventurosa attraverso le voci degli attori e delle ambientazioni che via via si susseguono.
©Pubblico dominio (P)2015 GOODmood
Bloodcurdling Ghost Stories
Summary
A selection of ghost stories which make your blood run cold. "An Account Of Some Disturbances In Aungier Street" - Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu "The Spectre Of Tappington" - Richard Harris Barham "The Man Of Science" - Jerome K. Jerome "The Romance Of Certain Old Clothes" - Henry James "The Spectre Bride" - William Harrison Ainsworth "A Haunted House" - Virginia Woolf "To Be Taken With A Grain Of Salt" - Charles Dickens
©2011 Red Door Audiobooks (P)2011 Red Door Audiobooks
Night and Day
Summary
Virginia Woolf's second novel is both a love story and a subversive comedy which questions the role of women in society. Contemplating their futures, five single people in their late 20s and early 30s are immobilized by indecision. Questions like who, when, and whether to marry, the changing roles of men and women in a rapidly changing world, and matters of independence versus family obligations come to the fore. The protagonists include the wealthy Katharine Hilbery, torn between the poet William Rodney and the passionate Ralph Denham; Katharine's mother, Margaret; and the women's rights activist Mary Datch.
Public Domain (P)2020 Museum Audiobooks