Lady Ottoline Morrell, Virginia Woolf, June 1926, 107 mm x 69 mm, vintage snapshot print
National Portrait Gallery, London
For the sixth episode of Women House, Julie Wolkenstein has chosen excerpts of To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.
“To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionistic depiction of a family, the Ramseys, whose annual summer holiday in Scotland falls under the shadow of war, and a meditation on marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and bitterness. The novel’s use of stream of consciousness, reminiscence and shifting perspectives gives it an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of all that had gone before.”
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, Penguin Books, 2019
Summary available on the publisher’s website.
Comparative Literature professor in Caen, France, Julie Wolkenstein has published 8 books with the publishing house P.O.L. and has translated works by Edith Wharton and Francis Scott Fitzgerald. She received the Deux Magots Prize in 2018 for her book Les Vacances. She co-founded AWARE in 2014.
The english version of this episode is read by Muriel Zagha. Muriel Zagha is a French writer and broadcaster who lives in London. A film specialist, Muriel contributes to the Times Literary Supplement and to cultural programmes on BBC Radio 4. She is also the author of three novels.
AWARE’s podcast Women House is made possible by the support of Belinda de Gaudemar. Produced by Elodie Royer. Sound by Andrew Nelson. English reader: Muriel Zagha.