The collected BBC dramatisations of the fiction of Virginia Woolf, with star casts including Kristen Scott-Thomas, Vanessa Redgrave, Juliet Stevenson, Laura Fraser, Robert Glenister and Fenella Woolgar. Starring Laura Fraser, Rebecca Johnson and Bertie Carvel. Starring Vanessa Redgrave, Juliet Stevenson and Robert Glenister.
The collected BBC dramatisations of the fiction of Virginia Woolf, with star casts including Kristen Scott-Thomas, Vanessa Redgrave, Juliet Stevenson, Laura Fraser, Robert Glenister and Fenella Woolgar.
This collection will include:
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.
Papildus informācija
The collected BBC radio adaptations of Virginia Woolf's pioneering modernist novels
Virginia Woolf (née Adeline Virginia Stephen) was born in South Kensington, London, on 25 January 1882. Her father, Leslie Stephens, was the founder of the National Dictionary of Biography. She was one of eight children, including four half-siblings from her parents previous marriages.
As a child, she was home-schooled, and enjoyed family holidays at the Stephens holiday home in Cornwall, Talland House. With its views across the bay to Godrevy Lighthouse, it was a place of idyllic freedom that would later inspire To the Lighthouse.
When Virginia was thirteen, her mother died. This traumatic event was followed by the death of her half-sister Stella Duckworth two years later, and her fathers death in 1904, which provoked a nervous breakdown the first of the bouts of mental illness that would plague her for the rest of her life.
After her recovery, Virginia and several of her siblings moved to Bloomsbury. There, they hosted artistic gatherings attended by like-minded bohemians including Clive Bell, EM Forster, Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes, and formed the Bloomsbury Group.
In 1912, Virginia married Leonard Woolf, and together they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, publishing works by then-unknown writers such as Katherine Mansfield, TS Eliot and Virginia Woolf herself. Her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915) had been published by her half-brothers firm, Gerald Duckworth and Company, but subsequent novels were issued by Hogarth, with dust jackets by her older sister, the painter Vanessa Bell.
Virginia Woolfs second novel, Night and Day (1919) was fairly traditional in style, but with her third, Jacobs Room (1922), she started to develop the experimental, lyrical stream of consciousness technique for which she became known. Her later novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931) encapsulate her groundbreaking modernist style, impressionistic and intensely focussed on the interior lives of her characters.
In 1922, Virginia met Vita Sackville-West, and the two women started an affair. Their relationship was the inspiration for Orlando (1928), an exploration of gender and creativity. An ardent feminist, Woolf believed that womens talents had gone unrecognised throughout history due to the patriarchy, an idea she expressed in her treatises A Room of Ones Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). The latter was also a polemic against war, expressing Woolfs pacifist ideals.
When World War II broke out, the Woolfs London home was destroyed during the Blitz, and they retreated to Sussex. There, Virginia wrote her last novel, Between the Acts (1941). On finishing it, she fell into a deep depression and, fearing that she was going mad, drowned herself in the River Ouse on 28 March 1941.
Virginia Woolf died aged just 59, but left behind an extraordinary body of work including nine novels, several short story collections and numerous works of non-fiction and literary criticism. She is widely regarded as one of the greatest modernist authors of the twentieth century.
