Showing results for "Virginia Woolf" in Children's Audiobooks

Four books...one groundbreaking author. This collection includes Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), A Room of One’s Own (1929), and The Waves (1931).

Championing the everyday, ‘common’ reader, Woolf emphasises the importance of reading for curiosity and interest, as opposed to academic analysis. In a delightfully conversational tone and with personal flair, Woolf explores the works of classical and contemporary authors alike; from Chaucer and Austen to Defoe and Montaigne. Effortlessly blending biography, criticism and philosophy, these brilliantly written essays showcase Woolf’s passion for literature, and particularly its ability to shape life as we know it.

Told almost exclusively through other characters' perceptions, conversations and memories, Woolf's groundbreaking novel centres around Jacob Flanders, a young man whose identity is difficult to grasp. Rather than presenting a conventional biography, Woolf assembles Jacob's presence from absence, evoking an air of emptiness and mystery, set against the haunting shadow of the First World War.

Virginia Woolf’s third novel lacks a conventional narrative style and some say even a plot. It follows Jacob from his childhood, through his education at Cambridge and finally to his death in World War I. The prose repeatedly shifts its point of view and the reader is challenged to find connections between the narrative fragments. Largely from the comments of others we come to know the sequence and some moments of Jacob’s life but we never fully learn who Jacob is. The literary experimentation in Jacob’s Room is used even more successfully in Woolf’s later novels. (Summary by DaveC)...

In this hauntingly poetic essay, Virginia Woolf captures the fragile beauty of life and death through the simple image of a moth struggling in the light. As she reflects on the inevitability of mortality and the quiet force of nature, Woolf’s sharp, introspective prose invites readers to confront their own fleeting existence. The Death of the Moth is a meditation on life’s transience, a masterclass in Woolf’s ability to turn ordinary moments into profound reflections on human vulnerability.

At its heart is Rachel Vinrace, a young woman embarking on a sea voyage that becomes a profound exploration of identity, love, and the fragile boundaries between freedom and convention. Through innovative prose and keen psychological insight, Woolf captures both the beauty and unease of the human experience. By turns satirical, poignant and quietly devastating, The Voyage Out is an extraordinary meditation on youth, society and purpose.

Virginia Woolf's most successful novel recounts the extraordinary biography of Orlando from his youth in the reign of Elizabeth I to her life as a successful author and mother in 1928, the year of the book's publication. Over the 350 years of his/her life, Orlando loves and is betrayed by a Russian princess, serves as British ambassador to Constantinople, changes sex, lives among gypsies, narrowly escapes marriage to the Archduchess Harriet/Archduke Harry, enjoys the society of Addison, Dryden and Pope, and finally marries Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmardine with whom she has a child. Over the same...

Published seven years after the first instalment, The Common Reader: Second Series explores the works of Thomas Hardy, Laurence Stern and George Eliot, elegantly dissecting the art of the biography and the very nature of reading itself. Again Woolf speaks from the perspective of the everyday reader, urging for an intuitive and curious approach to literature – one which allows for freedom and experimentation as opposed to academic rigour.